Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking

Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking: Spent the last couple of days upon a mountain top in Tennessee*.  It literally rained all day on Thursday.  There were five of us in a relatively small house and by 6:00 PM I was ready to go do something.  So when the Bear** wandered by I said, "C'mon let's go outside and play."  


He stopped and looked at me and I could see his little three year old mind working on it.  


"What?" he asked.  
"Let's go outside and play." I repeated.
"But it's raining." Is what he almost said.  He got half of the sentence out and then he stopped himself.  You could honestly see him thinking it out in that instant of time.  "It's raining, but Dad is saying let's go outside?!"  Instead, it went like this: 

Me: C'Mon let's go outside and play.
Bear: What?
Me: Let's go outside and play.
Bear: But it's . . . I need to get my shoes on.

So once we were both properly shod***, we went out.  I informed him that we were going to go for a walk and stomp in some puddles.   Normally whenever we go anywhere and he sees a puddle he immediately asks if he can splash it and we promptly say, 'no'.  But now we were on a walk with the specific intention of locating and stomping in puddles.  He really couldn't believe it.

Every time we'd come to a puddle he would look up and ask me, "Can I step in this one?"  "Absolutely." I replied.  The bigger the puddle the better.  We found one big one that was fifteen feet long or so.  It required a dozen trips back and forth before we could move on.

We also stopped under a lot of trees and gave them a good shaking.  Which I assumed he would shriek about and try to avoid.  Instead he commented that it was like it was raining hard and then we would immediately begin looking for the next puddle or tree.

A wet tennis court provide a good bit of fun too.  Though there were no trees and the puddles were so thin you couldn't get any good splashes out of them.  We did play some game that I honestly couldn't comprehend the rules to.  However it did involve a lot of running.

When we got home it was bath time.  The Pook said we looked like a couple of drowned rats, but we didn't care because we'd "stomped puddles and shaked a lot of trees."

Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking: A+

* - If that made you think of a song, it just means you're old.
** - No I did not kill it.  Please see here: http://misterbgrades.blogspot.com/2012/06/principal-players.html
*** - Me in flip flops.  Him in Crocs.