Geo

The children are ... where are the children?... upstairs, maybe getting dressed, maybe something else... it's Sunday morning, Paul Simon is crooning about a train in the distance, and I feel I should be waxing lyrical. Maybe it's the fault of the music, maybe it's the day, I don't know. The husband is out running, checking out part of the route for his marathon in a couple of weeks' time.

I can't write to music, though; at least not music with words, and I don't really see the point of the other sort. I mean, it's nice, but if I'm just going to try to shut it out so I can concentrate, then I may as well not turn it on. I've never been one of those people who studies with music in the background. Maybe it's because my house was always quiet, so I didn't need to drown out other people to get my homework done. Another of those unnoticed advantages of onlychildhood.

If you gaze out the window for about ten minutes, concentrating hard, you might just catch a snowflake surruptitiously sneaking out of the sky. It's too warm for snow, but for some reason that's what the atmosphere wants to give us, so beyond the bare branches is the colour of nothing and now and then something escapes in the form of a six-sided crystal. I don't know why.

It was doing this yesterday too, when we pulled ourselves out of our Saturday-morning decline/recline and stopped putting on the kettle for another cup of tea and remembered that we have a national park five minutes down the road so there's no need to drive for half an hour and pay a king's ransom to get into a zoo or something. We went geocaching instead.

The kids know about geocaching. They know that sometimes we find little plastic boxes in the woods and sometimes they have toys in them. You're supposed to take a little thing and leave a little thing. We hadn't brought any little things to leave. So we took a pterodactyl from the first box, with B promising to run by and put in something else in return the next day. Then we exchanged the pterodactyl for an orange not-T-Rex in the next one, and finally went home with a green lambeosaurus from the last one. Mabel is particularly pleased because she has a tiny blue lambeosaurus already, who must have been missing her mommy.

Finding the first one went like this:

B: Look, I think this is it.
Mabel: Toys, toys!
B: Not toys. A cache.
Mabel: It's not cash, it's toys.

We had to admit that it was. Anyway, we were outdoors and the children were walking on their own feet and nobody complained and we found nature-y things like rotten logs and deer droppings and a hollow tree trunk and a lot of sticks and it was really quite nice and we should do it again.