A Really Good Day

The stars aligned today, and I had the opportunity to spend a lot of the day with Thing One.  It's unusual for me to have an extended period of one-on-one time with any of my kids, so I'm always grateful when it works out.

Logistics dictated that I was going to be the parent who drove him to his late-morning soccer clinic, and while we were out, we also needed to run a couple of errands.  Nothing too exciting.  But we stopped off at his favorite pizza place for lunch after soccer, and on a whim, I asked if he wanted to see the cool geocache I found yesterday (the light at the end of the tunnel.)  He's my caching buddy--he has his own account and everything, which he diligently updates from his iPod--and eagerly agreed.  That quick stop somehow spontaneously segued into two hours of walking and scrambling and climbing and laughing together at a county park not far from the tunnel cache on a beautiful, crisp, sunny fall afternoon.  He picked up seven new caches, and I logged five (I took him to two I'd already found so that he could log them as well.)

Here, he's gingerly traversing a water obstacle on his favorite cache of the day.  It's hard to tell because of all the leaves, but he's balancing on logs that somebody strategically placed in the middle of a very wide creek--at each end of the logs there was about 15 feet of hopping from rock to rock to be done.  This was a ten year-old boy's dream...left to his own devices, he would have crossed and recrossed the creek for the fun of it until he eventually and inevitably face-planted into the water!  
 
Caching and errands accomplished, we headed home.  In our absence, Petunia had fun at a friend's birthday party, and Himself had some good bonding time with Thing Two involving a lot of basketball on the driveway.  I made a quick dinner, cleaned up the kitchen, and settled down with the family to watch my beloved Irish play football.  They beat Air Force handily, but what made me proudest was seeing my team lined up right behind the Air Force players in respect and support while the Air Force alma mater played after the game.  The ND players do this every time they play a service academy...Air Force, Navy, or Army.   After all, football is just a game, but these servicemen are also playing another game entirely, one in which the stakes are a lot higher for themselves and for all of us.

Hoping that your Saturday was a good one too.