An outside day

We couldn't believe it when we awoke this morning and felt an actual, perceptible, cool breeze floating through our window! An authentic breath of September! You have to understand that it's probably been about five months since our air has felt this way, and, partially since I know it won't last long, I was sufficiently inspired to take the kids to a nearby park for the morning. We brought our books, and did lessons at the picnic table/in the gravel/by the swingset, etc. Eliza was happy to listen to a chapter of the Boxcar children and then run off to play; Caroline, who is usually rather challenging to distract at home, spent quite a while filling a cup with gravel among a bevy of other toddlers and then roaming the playscape; Ian got to swing to his heart's content in between sessions of math workbook and listening to a chapter on Alaric the Visigoth from Famous Men of the Middle Ages (and in between math pages, he could run around a tree and back). I'd say it was one of our more successful days -- was it extra Vitamin D we were all benefiting from, or the built-in breaks available to those of minute attention spans for things that don't immediately interest them? I think we may need to make this something of a tradition.

On another note, does anyone know of a cheap and easy device that allows one to record sounds? I'm thinking of a modern descendant of a tape recorder. Caroline, who for most of the summer was an absolutely bear (not in the teddy sense) to put to bed, has lately become rather endearing at bedtime. We've gotten into a good groove as regards the bedtime routine: nurse, read a couple stories, turn off light and say goodnight to whomever or whatever we saw that day. Then the parent on duty sits by the closet or bathroom light and reads until she falls asleep. It was my turn tnoight, so as I lay there entranced by my book (an amazing, thought-provoking book called Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker that, in this day of Madeleine McCanns and other terror-inducing headlines, should probably be required reading for every parent, IMHO), Caroline was in full swing. Even with a slight fever, probably teething-induced, she was singing and chattering away, "reading" her Maisy book in the dark, singing "ring arounda rosies, pockabo posies, ashes ashes we all fall DOWN!" then bidding goodnight, with kisses, to each of her body parts, and then, quite suddenly, falling silent, as if someone had flipped her switch.