Yesterday Jason and I had the wonderful pleasure of going to see BB King perform in Montgomery. It was such a fabulous show and it was nice to see a true musician put on such a classy performance (I love that the entire band wears tuxedos!). After the show Jason and I got lured into Krispy Kreme by the Hot Doughnuts Now sign. Auburn- why no Krispy Kreme? Anyway, that is not the point of this post. The point is, I took my own President's Day holiday because I knew I would be worthless today because we got home so late. SO, I had all day to hang out with my little girl (oh yeah, and do massive loads of laundry). I have been reading a book recently World Enough and Time (have I already blogged about that? If so, then I am still in the process of reading it because of..well, that pesky little Time.). In the book there is a section devoted to what the author calls "Child Time". Child time is the time that children have free of demands and chores and outside influences, "time to muse and dream and do a blissful kind of nothing". Most examples of child time are out of doors. We as adults rarely understand child time, we try to do everything on our crazy warp speed adult time. At the end of every chapter in the book she gives you assignments. The one at the end of this chapter was to take a walk in child time. I decided today I would let Harper take me on a walk at her speed. Which we have never done. I always put her in the stroller and we go at my speed (which is usually a slow run). Oh, she always seems to have a good time but I thought this would be a good exercise for both of us just to go at her pace. It was HARD for me. I kept wanting to direct her saying "no, let's go this way" or "Don't walk in those leaves, you'll get dirty" but I just bit my tongue for the most part and let her go. As long as she held my hand while we were in the road. It was such fun! We picked flowers (weeds) and found that they had little purple spots on them in the shape of hearts. She was fascinated by the water trickling down the gutter. We watched the ants try to cross the water. We listened to birds. "bird! bird!" she says. We walked over to my neighbor's car several times so she could see the Aubie tail hanging on the back "hi Aubie!". As we went for a rather meandering walk that took a long time but we didn't go very far (I never considered going back to a place you had already investigated) we just got to enjoy creation. After a gloomy, rainy weekend it was nice to just be outside in the sun and see things in child time and from Harper's perspective. While walking my neighbor's son and his friend were out playing basketball. I heard the friend ask "Do you have a basketball game for your X-Box? Can we play it?" Really? You are outside on the gorgeous day playing real basketball and you want to go inside and play pretend basketball? It made me sad. I want Harper to enjoy Child Time as long as she can. I hope that she prefers REAL to X-Box (not that we will ever own one). If you have time I would a) recommend reading World Enough and Time, by Christian McEwen and b) take a walk on Child Time. "Go for a walk at the pace of a small child. Saunter, wander, loiter, look around; allow yourself to pause and to digress". No agendas.
