Week 23: Afternoon
‘Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.’ Well this was the case during our yesterday afternoon play date with my nieces and my friends young children. The wind chill factor gave us a need for winter woollies but the sun thawed us out as we played a game of tip, duck, duck goose and  what’s the time Mr Wolf . The children found shelter in the giant trees nurturing branches as they swung upside down like monkeys. It was nice to see the young ones outside running in the fresh air just like I did as a child. I can remember playing games of red rover, elastics and hand ball. I’d build cubby houses in the thick bushes using big sheets of cardboard as the floor. We’d slide down the paspalum grass slopes on pieces of tin house for sale signs or cardboard. In our neighbour fish pond we’d float our plastic boats using the Lego people as our fleet of trustworthy sailors. I was glad to have grown up in the 70’s. I think I passed on my love of the great outdoors, being creative and using my imagination to my own children as they loved it too. My girls would bring home jars of perfume they’d made from picking all the various flowers in the neighbourhood and mixing them with a few drops of water – magic. My boys and their cousins loved to burn various materials using the sun rays with a magnifying glass and examine insects through the microscope. We’d search for the craters on the moon with a telescope trying to find evidence of life on another planet. My dad taught me how to fish, how to bait up, how to cast and fix the tangles that came with rods and how to gut them and cut them up into fillets to eat. I passed this knowledge onto my children too and I can remember being so excited over the best Mother’s Day present ever – a fully stocked brand new bait and tackle box and a fishing rod. My dad would bring a piece of rope with him in our car as we stopped for a bbq on our travels to make a swing for us or help us make a kite using twigs, newspaper and string. There was no wifi being outdoors during the afternoon, but we will promise you will find a better connection.