Yesterday was supposed to be such a nice day. I was going to take the kids to Pioneer Park in Brownsville to get a relief from the heat and enjoy some friends. I love this park because it has a nice easy access river play area and a new playground. There is plenty of room to run if we just wanted to run around, you can camp and also geocache. Anyways, it was going to be a hot day and we went with the Murray's and Geoghegan's to play in the water, have some lunch and play at the park. Sounds fun right? We should have stopped there because the problem came when we decided to go back down to the river to do some more wading. As the girls are letting the current take them down the river they started playing, "I'm losing my shoe....." (pretend you hear girls faking that they are yelling and freaking out while giggling and thinking they are oh so cute). Well guess what happened, my oldest, the most dramatic of them all, really does lose her shoe. And of course, not up the river where I was at but down where there is no one else who can catch it. I tried to get my comfy toes out of the cool river and my had-3-kids body off of the rocks in time to go catch it but it was gone gone gone. Replaced was a seven year old girl screaming, crying, wailing "my shoe, I want my shoe, my shoe is gone forever" Normally the teaching mom would have been there saying "well I'm sorry, next time you'll keep better track of your shoes, you have more shoes at home, stop crying already". Not this time, for some reason the sympathetic mom kicked in and went chasing after her shoe. First I tried attempting to climb around all the bends, than the thought came through my mind that I could swim down the river, that left my mind as soon as it came in (would have made for some really good blogging though). So instead I decided it would be much easier to try and go up the bank and climb back down where her shoe would land. All the way at the other end of the park I found the camp host who tried explaining to me how to get down there without killing myself. I must have looked pathetic enough and he felt sorry for this little girl that we could still hear wailing, 200 yards away, that he decided to climb down there himself and rescue my daughter's shoe. He threw her shoe up the bank at us and now we owe him some cookies. In the end it was OK because we had the opportunity to meet the nicest couple from Florida spending their summer being camp hosts in their RV at Pioneer Park. I had to include this little poem that someone who asked to remain anonymous (she was still with us while the other mom went home to put the babies to bed, I'll let you decide who it was) wrote. Soon this mom will learn not to go places with us since every time we go somewhere something astronomical comes along and it makes for an interesting day.
The sun shone bright on the river that day
It seemed like any other
There was one false dash for shoes astray
Caught nimbly by the mother
Then, alas, they played downstream
Far from our reaching arms
We heard hue and cry and wailing too
As they all sounded the alarm
My shoe is gone forever, she cried
Sobbing with emotion
It’s floating along way too fast
It’ll end up in the ocean
The mother courageously attempted rescue
Far beyond a normal try
She finally raced down the hilltop path
To see if it raced by
An angel in plains clothes came
To rescue the said shoe
Many blessing were poured forth
For the brave rescue
As we all went back to our parked cars
With very tired tots
I heard the mother thinking aloud
Next time – Aqua Socks.
All in all it was fun but just an interesting ending to an adventurous day of just trying to keep cool. Hope you found relief from the heat in a fun way.
One more thing that I wanted to add. Society as a whole can be very helpful and generous when it comes to moms. Most of us give our society a bad wrap and sometimes that is warranted but I think for the most part our society is fairly trustworthy, helpful and kind. It's too bad that we do have the people within our society that make it so we can't trust each other or enjoy each other. My friend Angie had an experience yesterday with a kind employee at a store and coupled with my experience I thought it was worth mentioning that as a whole we really do live in a society where most people can be fairly helpful and kind. Lets show each other the love of Jesus by displaying kindness to one another.
