We spent the morning inside, me making soup and attempting a vegan cake for a visiting guest. By the time we'd had lunch, the rain had almost stopped and I had some rather bouncy children who needed to run.
The smallest didn't want to go out, he is very much a live-for-the-now kind of boy, which means he struggles with the thought of doing any thing except what he is engaged with at that very moment, which happened to be building a tower.
By the time Lb was in his waterproofs, the big three were already half way up streaky stream, and were calling excitedly that they had found a secret gate. We had never seen this gate before because the Summer green had kept it covered up. Lb wasn't keen to go all the way upstream, so we set about making a dam just where we were, which meant that my job was to sit in the hedge and pass suitable sticks into his chubby three year old hands.
He did a great job. Once he'd got the big sticks in place, he asked for smaller ones, and then he started to take some moss off of a fallen tree to fill the gaps.
As he talked us through what he was doing, it occurred to me that this must have been exactly what early man did. There was no one to show him how, he just wanted to block off the water for a particular reason, and so he tried to do it.
There was something empowering and thrilling for this three year old boy, to see that with a bit of work and thought he could bend the very force of nature to his will.
OK, so there were some leaks here and there, and at one stage the whole thing overflowed, but he learnt some really valuable lessons.
And tomorrow he wants to go back and do it all over again.
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