Wanna see something cute?

This past Saturday, Seth and I entertained two little friends of ours while their mother had a day for herself. We met Shawn and Teresa and Keira and Shadyn when we lived in Navy housing, and we have so much fun in each other's company that we still keep in touch. Shawn is out to sea at the moment, and so I offered to take Keira and Shadyn off Theresa's hands for an afternoon so she could do, well, basically whatever she wanted. (Apparently that doesn't happen very often once one has children. Being yet without, I wouldn't know.)

Anyway, we promised the kids that we would do the two messiest activities imaginable: gardening and baking. The plan was to garden for the afternoon and then bake in the evening when the weather cooled off. Saturday was perfect garden planting weather -- sunny, light breeze, about eighty degrees, very nice -- and I had just been given a whole bunch of bulbs from a friend who recently changed houses and is reworking her landscaping (thank you, Leann). We donned hats and sunscreen (naturally, I had to put both on first), and went out by the porch.

Now K is four and S is nearly three, and it was amazing how patient and diligent they were while we were out there. They waited while I shoveled the landscaping bark out of the way. They took turns using the rose trimmers to cut little holes in the plastic. And for the most part, they were very patient digging holes with teaspoons because we didn't have a garden shovel. They squealed at all the little bugs that came out of their holes. (Shadyn was convinced that every single potato bug was a spider come to eat him.) They hauled 2 inches of water at a time from the spicket on the other side of the house and joyfully upended their buckets over the bark where their bulbs had been planted.

Max is always delighted to have company, but he decided that it was just a little too hot to be working in the backyard. He hid under the porch unless K and S started making a lot of noise, which convinced him that he was missing out on something. Then he would come out, make a circle of the vicinity, and duck back under the deck. Shadyn was most impressed by this. "Mac under there," he kept saying. "Mac go under there, ee spider."

However when we went inside (Keira said she was "cold" (hot)), Max was very attentive to his guests and demonstrated his willingness to help them finish their snacks. He took the banana chips right out of their hands. It took Keira a little while to let Max put his lips on her fingers and ever so delicately removed the chip, but soon they were both feeding him so many chips that I began to envision a seriously constipated dog waking up around midnight with a need for the ER. What you can't see in this picture is that both Keira and Shadyn are sitting on piles of banana chips to protect them from Max's prying nose, and seconds after this picture was taken, they both got off the chips and Max dove in and inhaled both piles.

After snack time, we planted a bit more, tossed the kids in the tub, tried to get them to take a nap, and mixed up some cake batter for cupcakes. Cupcakes weren't so interesting to Shadyn however because Seth had just started up the grill. "Migh Jenny, I go outside, wat Mighter Sef make fire, okay?" Soon both kids were outside, watching Seth pile the briquets, douse them with lighter fluid, and light the match. Of course, neither of them wanted to eat their hamburgers. Max got both of them eventually, one by subterfuge (He never had such a filling day in his life. Bad dog.).

After dinner, the kids brought their coloring book out to the porch, and we read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (now finished, began book 3 last night). This picture is actually posed. Shadyn and Seth were sitting like this (aren't they cute? Doesn't Seth look like a natural? I can't wait to have kids of my own.), and I ran inside to get the camera. When I came back out, Shadyn was sitting up and pointing to the sky, insisting that all the sparrows flying overhead were dragons, and he kept insisting that there were dragons in the clouds as well, and "I gotta kew those dwagons." When he saw the camera, he curled back up against Seth and waited for me to take the picture.

Some people say that other people's kids are the surest form of birth control. I've been around some kids that bear that out, although in those cases, I usually end up thinking about parenting styles, not kids in general. I admit that after all that activity on Saturday, I was too tired to do the dishes. (I should have gotten a picture of the sink. I think half my kitchen ended up getting dirty.) Granted also that trying to get a cranky 2.9 year old to take a nap is a matter of patience and stubbornness. And I think I understand that once I have my own kids, I won't be able to pack them up and send them home in the evening. Still, there's just something about kids and how they follow examples and are so eager to help that they get in the way (and they're so cute too) that makes me want to say "Who wouldn't want to have kids?" The sooner, the better in my opinion.