Messy Stuff
Posted on June 8, 2007 - Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Do you let your kids play in the mud? Here in Guatemala, playing with water, dirt or anything that might smudge you seems to be considered hazardous. My in-laws are convinced that Dorian is going to die because I let him play outside, horror of horrors!
Really, my son hasn’t played a lot outdoors since it is a complete construction zone around here. But today, he was yelling and making a lot of noise and kept waking up the baby, plus, I wasn’t getting any work done, so I just decided to go out and wash clothes while he played in the sand pile. Well, of course, he wasn’t satisfied to just dig around in the sand!
I gave him a little tub with a few inches of water in it so he could “wash” like Mama. He didn’t wash. He drank the water off his toy shovel, which was also covered in sand. After several scoldings, he left off doing that and proceeded to scoop water into a sand mold he has and mix it with sand. So far, so good, he was staying relatively clean and apart from drinking sandy water, wasn’t endangering his health in any way.
I was getting quite a bit of laundry done when Dorian spotted a puddle. A big, muddy one that is permanently in the middle of our front yard because that is where they mixed the concrete to build the house and there is a dip in the middle. You can´t even dig a trench to drain it off because it is all concrete. Anyway, he made a beeline for that and before I knew it, he was splashing around happily in the water.
Now, this is where a Guatemalan mother would freak out, scream at her child that he was about to die and rush to clean him up and put him in dry socks and shoes before he caught some unimaginable disease. I decided to let my kid keep playing . . . after all, he was pretty darn thrilled to be stomping in water and I happen to have a long childhood history of playing in dirty puddles and nothing ever happened to me!
So, he kept playing. Then he found an orange and things took a turn for the worse. The orange looks like a ball, so he started tossing it around and guess where it ended up? Right, in the puddle. Where he fished it out and tried to eat it. I put a stop to that and then he was squatting down in the water to roll the orange around. What he didn´t realize is that his bottom clearance is all of 2 inches, since he is such a little guy! So his legs, shoes and bum got completely soaking wet.
By nap time, my little boy was covered in mud and sand and dripping wet. I practically had to hose him off! But he was SO happy and tired, it was really worth letting him make all that mess. So, my question to my readers is, would you let your kids thrash around in a muddy puddle just because it made them happy and gave you a chance to do some chores?
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Hell yes! I know this post is from last year but this is something i feel very strongly about. My mother-in-law is from El salvador and we differ on a few things. I am all for preserving the special moments of childhood. My son was just playing in a torrential downpour the other day here in the US and he had a ball. What’s a childhood without mudpies, stomping mud puddles and playing in the rain?