Sunday was bright and beautiful. Windy, and chilly enough that going sweater-less meant goose bumps, but the sun was warm and awakening.
After a morning full of sand and fast food, Loo decided that she wanted to ride her bicycle (with training wheels) around the duck pond. Loo is decidedly small for her age, in the bottom quartile, and so she's been slow to take to physical activities that involve equipment. She owned her bicycle for a good half a year before she was able to ride it steadily for a hundred meters, and even now, she needs a bit of a push to get started, and lots of help to ascend slight hills.
She's never biked around the duck pond before, which is a good 1/4 mile in circumference. I was a bit concerned, but thought, what the heck. It was too beautiful a day to deny my spunktious daughter anything.
So we set out, with her father and little Kali following, on her pushable big wheel trike. Before long, we had left J and Kali far behind, and they ultimately decided to turn around and head home without attempting the full walk. But Loo was steady and confident, easily guiding her princess bicycle around the duck pond. When we were half way around the pond, we came upon a garage sale, well in progress. The only items left were some ceramic mugs and holiday tsotchke and a lot of used clothing. Not of much use to a non-holiday-heathen like myself.
But the enterprising children of the garage sale proprietors had also set up a lemonade/girl scout cookie stand by the roadside, and Loo immediately stated that she was thirsty. Loo has only recently been introduced to the world of lemonade, since she is much more sweet than sour, so I wasn't sure she would be amenable to the stand's offerings. But she insisted that she was and we exchanged a dollar for two plastic cups full of what can only be called fluorescent-yellow-from-a-mix goodness.
We sat by the duck pond, on a curb, our legs stretched out in front of us, drinking the more sweet than sour faux-monade.
I've never seen my little girl drink so heartily, in such complete and utter satisfaction of some deep thirst. And her face simply beamed with contentment - satisfaction with the feeling of the sun on her face, the warm ache in her thighs, being able to spend alone time with a parent who has had very little alone time to give recently.
She is so not a baby anymore.
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