MUD!

I was looking for a specific picture for a post that I'm working on and realized that I never shared these from early May of 2012.

The weather was starting to warm up, the rain had ceased, 2-week-old Tyler had just gone down for a nap, and the other kids and I headed outside to enjoy the sunshine. 

Our big plastic playset had killed a small portion of grass underneath it and left a nice mucky mess after our April showers.  Of course, one of the boys quickly found the mud. 

After all, boys are drawn to mud like a man to the smell of bacon.

One boy turned into two, and then a little girl joined in the fun. 

They squished the mud and jumped in it. They made mud balls and threw them at each other. Zac was the target of most of the ammunition, but he didn't mind. He laughed every time it hit him. He licked his face over and over and said, "Mmm, dat yummy!" 

His gets his refined palate from his daddy.

They played for 2 hours in the mud, laughing and squealing. I stayed out of the line of fire and happily captured the moments on camera.

I wasn't worried about the muddy clothes; I was delighting in their fun. Clothes and bodies can be washed, but childhood can never be repeated.

One thing that never crossed my mind while they were playing though? How upset their daddy would be when he got home and saw a huge mud hole in the yard. The little patch of dirt, where the playset had been, quickly grew into a 6-foot circle of clumpy, gunky, icky, goopy mud. 

Oops.

It took that entire summer (and my diligently keeping the children out of the area) for our grass to grow back. 

Thankfully, it didn't take that long for my hubby to forgive me. 

I still think about this day and smile. Their smiles in these pictures are priceless. The memories, even more so. The joy they had in playing in the mud is so precious to me.

And the pictures are pretty cute, too.