Childhood is Magic

This morning, Mal found the basting brush in a drawer, and decided that he wanted to "paint food." So, we toasted a slice of bread, melted a pat of butter, and mixed some green food coloring in with the butter.

And after that, we added jelly on top, because Mal just doesn't appreciate plain butter toast like I do.

Then tonight, at about 9 PM, after he'd watched the "Nighttime" episode of Daniel Tiger, Mal decided he wanted to go outside and "find out what's special at night." At the time, I was in the middle of a very long hold waiting for customer service to fix an error. But James manned the speaker phone while I took Mal out onto the porch.

After we'd handled that business, Mal said, "Okay, let's go in the car!" So... We did. James, Mal, and I got on shoes and decided to go to the lake to see what was special at night over there. I'm glad we did!

First, when we got there, we drove through a scene where the police had their high-beams on and were talking to two people with very large dogs. We decided to go in the far entrance, and then park.

As we pulled into a space, we saw a frog under a tree. It's funny, because that's one of the things Daniel Tiger sees on his night walk, and Mal had (wrongly) said on our porch, "I hear the frogs!"

Before we got out of the car, James and I got to see the frog catch and eat something. Then we walked over, and the frog was nonplussed by James's flashlight pointed at it. I told Mal, "If you want to pet it, you can. It will jump, if you do." So he did, and the frog hopped away. Mal was tickled.

See the vertical-ish line to the left and about in the center? That's the frog's back.

Then we went over to the playground, where a little girl was actually playing in the dark as her family packed up their stuff from an afternoon on the water. There were boats coming in, and a surprising amount of activity, for it to be 9:30 at night.

It was actually pretty nice, Mal getting to play on the playground without burning his legs on the slide, and without my having to hide under the play structure for shade.

When we left, we were going to drive around a bit more and decided to stop by Sonic. Mal ended up falling asleep on the way back from Sonic, without even eating any of his French fries. So guess what he's having for breakfast tomorrow?

If we didn't have a toddler who wanted to explore after dark, we probably wouldn't have gotten out this evening. I'm glad we had a tour guide who wanted to explore the magic.

The moon through our trees.

Cloud cover