“I want to do exciting things, for ever and ever and ever,” Seb said one summer’s eve, as we were preparing to complete his nightly check list. This proclamation followed, “But I don’t want to do boring things” like the items on his check list, which include taking a bath, brushing teeth, story time, and sleep. “Taking a bath is boring,” Seb said.
“Then either you take a boring bath, where you sit in a tub of lukewarm water up to your elbows, or you can take an exciting bath,” I said, as I turned on the shower head and hot water rained down into the empty tub. “An exciting bath is like a rainstorm, where you are taking a bath in the midst of a jungle, a rain forest. Seb, step into your own, personal rainstorm!”
Home is our platform for concocting and carrying out exciting activities. Once we organized the house, we were able to focus on weeding out the boring things from our everyday lives.
Now that Seb is differentiating between boring activities and exciting ones, to help us make the best use of available time, Seb and I are compiling lists of exciting things and boring things. We limit boring things to a simple necessity, and we create a schedule rock chalk full of exciting things.
A few boring things:
- Watching grown-up channels on TV,
- Brushing teeth,
- School,
- Playing inside,
- Time outs,
- Sleep.
Several exciting things:
- Going to the YMCA Kidzone,
- Playing Outside,
- Watching Cartoons on PBSKids.Org,
- Free Play at My Gym,
- Belmont Park, and
- Rainstorm Bath.
Across the street from our house, a park, a frequent destination of our many excursions.
The most exciting thing for us is exploring the canyon wilderness, home to bird, rabbit, lizard, snake and coyote. We have seen them all. Because our house is situated on the canyon ridge, trekking through it has proven to be very accessible. To reach the canyon, we walk out our front door, down the steps, across the street and around the park to the canyon trailhead. The way into the canyon can be a very invigorating gallop down a steep trail to a ravine, where a fork in the road leads us to our first important decision: shall we venture through the tunnel of trees or into the fur ball forest?
Seb directs my attention into the canyon, as we preview today’s pathway. Today’s trip logged a duration of about an hour and a half.
The canyon is like a beginner’s training course for future large scale hikes. We can complete a trek in less than 30 minutes in an evening, or we can hike for a couple of hours on a weekend. In the canyon, we walk along rolling foot paths or jog up short, steep foot hills. One trail leads across a stream and demands its followers to bound over rocks and across precarious concrete balance beams. Another path dead ends in a scramble of bramble thorns and thistle. And another bounds over a puddle environment for scattering pollywogs. Along the way are places to stop and catch our breaths while snacking on food items, like apples and granola bars.
Seb stands at the canyon trailhead at the edge of the park. Though we know many ways into the canyon, we established this as our favored starting point.
On one afternoon hike, Seb told me to wait down at the bottom of the ravine, that he was going to climb up one of the hills by himself. I stood down there and watched, as Seb climbed up the hill. He made it up the hill pretty well, but near the top, I noticed he was struggling. He would climb straight up the hill a short way and then slide down again. He did this several times and started yelling to me for help. His yells transformed into cries. He cried for five minutes before I climbed up to reach him and then directed him to the side of the hill for an easier way up, and he reached the top on his own. Once he made the adjustment, it was an easy trial. Since that day, during every trip through the canyon, Seb commands a moment for a similar hill-climbing exercise.
While we are shuffling down steep dirt trails and across rocky paths, I am envisioning a time when we will be together on the other side of the world. In Nepal, home of the highest peaks on earth. There we will hike through and over the Himalayas with our friends from Dang and Deukari Valleys and into the welcoming gardens surrounding the Village of Shakuma. Traveling together through Nepal would be the pinnacle of our achievement, but we know that to get into real shape, we will need to tackle depths more than a hundred times those of our neighborhood canyon. I mean, seriously, where we will go, girls Seb’s age run down and up ten canyons every morning just to fetch a couple buckets of water.
Seb walks up ahead adjacent to the Home Depot Canyon. This canyon was named for Home Depot, which was built on an adjacent ridge.
The Meandering Sidewalk 