There are ideas that I have in my head about how a child’s day should go and then there is reality. I really want to be able to say that I do A and B on a consistent basis with Mountain Child, but sometimes it is actually X and Y although I hate to admit it.
DELUSION: Mountain Child has a lunch with all the food groups that is low in sugar and, of course, organic.
REALITY: Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets and fries. Yes, I know that you can sub the fries with mandarin oranges, but you can’t dip those nearly as well into a Frosty.
DELUSION: Playtime with learning-based toys, preferably with some fine arts and multicultural exposure thrown in.
REALITY: Dora the Explorer’s Puppy Power on repeat. Hey, Dora speaks Spanish, right?
DELUSION: Lots of outdoor time to develop mind and muscle along with an appreciation for the environment.
REALITY: I ask Mountain Child if she wants to go outside. She says no. I make her go with me anyway. We walk in the grass and she trips and falls. Mountain Child then has a meltdown over a blade of grass sticking to her hand.
Of course, I have my days when Mommy Power is in full effect. But I have equal doses of Mommy Slakerdom Days where I just can’t get it together. And reading Parents magazine just highlights all the more the sad fact that I am woefully mediocre.
But lately my husband and I have been taking Mountain Child with us to go hiking in the Kanawha State Forest, which simply epitomizes my idea of the We-Are-Having-An-ldeal-Granolaized-My-Kids-Is-Having-A-Really-Amazing-Experience-Rockin sort of day. For anyone that isn’t familiar with the Kanawha State Forest, it is located just outside of the Charleston, West Virginia limits and is a most wonderful place. Especially since it is fall right now, and the mountains are truly at their most impressive, with the trees waving all of their flamboyantly dressed branches and the forest floor crunching deliciously under our feet.
Anyway, this weekend we were driving around the grounds, looking for a trailhead. That’s when we spied a rather interesting rite of passage being recorded. A man, presumably a professional photographer, was standing on a ladder taking a picture of a boy in an open field. But this wasn’t just any fall photo session. The boy, who at a glance couldn’t have been more than eight, was posing with his bow with his freshly killed deer in front of him. Then the father, with a smile huge enough for us to see it from the road, posed beside him. I can imagine many life experiences where you would hire a photographer to capture the moment; I just never knew a child, his weapon, and a deer carcass being one of them. Later my husband tells me that there are sections of the forest-thankfully away from our trails-that people can hunt. I resist the urge to give in to my paranoia of an errant bullet or arrow hitting Mountain Child while we are trying to have Fun Family Memories.
But back to us and our own first moments. Out here, Mountain Child suddenly doesn’t care about getting dirty so much. She even climbed up on a huge log and tried to balance on it, a feat that our grumpy/cautious little one would never have considered otherwise. And for the first time in a veryvery long time, Mountain Child didn’t cry or whine for at least three hours. We scramble up mountainsides over rocks, logs, and moss in air as crisp as a Granny Smith apple. Now that we have gone the past three weekends, I am actually starting to get sad at the mere thought of when it is too cold for us to do this any more. But for now, we will go as long as the weather lets us and mingle among the hikers and child hunters.
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