Never Met A Puddle He Didn't Like

I should have dressed Ian in a pair of thigh-high waders. By the time we got to school, Ian was soaked up to the knees. OK, before you think I'm totally ineffective at controlling my kid (you'd be right a lot of the time), I tell you I did try to keep him out of those puddles. I nearly pulled his arm out of the socket. Twice.

"Hey Mom! Check this out!" Ian darts away from me (I hadn't caught on to him yet) and dives feet first into a puddle in front of our building, easily ten inches deep, lurking and waiting for little boys on their way to school.

SPLASH!!

OK, wake up Mom.

We walk across the street. Ian is full of studied observations of the soggy landscape, sort of like a National Geographic photographer on a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon.

"Mom! Look at that one! It goes alllllll the way around the bushes and then - oh wow - Mom, look how deep it gets over there!" He pulls at my arm and I squeeze his hand to the point where he starts complaining.

"Mom, oww, you're squeezing my hand too hard."

I let go.

"Mom!!! Hold my hand!!!"

We walk by the aforementioned lake phenomenon and Ian is jerking at me all the way. I can feel the pull of the puddle as if it had all the gravitational force of the moon drawing in a high tide. Ian is almost levitating in its direction.

When we get to the park, I realize my biggest mistake was that I should have avoided the park altogether. It is a wonderland of ponds, lakes, streams - all brown and murky with mud. There's even one puddle that's red - not the silty red of Georgia clay but the toxic, neon orange of a county once full of light bulb factories and still trying to expel the mercury from its soil. Yuck.

"Holy cow, Mom! Check this out!"

I'm checking it. We weave through one puddle after another and I hold tight onto Ian's hand as he contorts his body, trying to stick at least a toe in while I'm speeding him past the water. Then, as she always does, mother nature wins. Ian wriggles loose and he's off.

"Woooohoooo!" he yells, diving flat-footed into a puddle so large it could have played Lake Ontario in a movie.

SPLASH! SPLASH!

I duck to avoid the spraying water. Then I run around to the other side of the puddle to grab him as he comes out the other side, ready to scold, like one of those frazzled mothers in the supermarket trying to keep Hyperactive Harry from ripping open a bag of Goldfish.

Just as my hands get to him, however, I see how elated he is. He's grinning from ear to ear, his blond hair flying and his eyes lit up by the intoxicating blend of mischief and mess. There wasn't anything I could say except: "That was fun, wasn't it?"

He totally agreed. I let him do it one more time and then patted him down with cheap paper towels in the school bathroom. He had a blast, and I'll just have to think of a good excuse when I have to haul him into the pediatrician for the flu later this week. Hopefully the doc doesn't read my blog.