After School

I can remember being eager to leave school at the end of the school day but every day after school Liam and Jonas ask if they can play on the playground. I used to come up with any excuse about why we couldn't stay. Although Adele is 4 years younger than Jonas and 6 years younger than Liam she thinks she can do pretty much whatever they do. She follows them up the stairs to the big, open top, cork screw slide like she is just another one of the big kids. Meanwhile I stand on the outside of the play equipment with my arms up, waiting to catch her if she falls. And then when the kids who stay in the after school program come out they crowd the playground making it hard to keep track of her.

Since the weather finally got warm again I have stopped finding excuses about why we can't play on the playground and let them have some fun. I am not so eager to get home and fight about doing homework and starting dinner. Liam and Jonas usually run off to find friends from their classes. Adele is happy to run back and forth and go down the slides. Recently there are a lot of little girls who have started following her around. They follow her up the stairs and make sure she is safe while she goes down the slides, making it a lot more pleasant for me because I don't feel like I have to follow her every move and if I ever lose her I just have to look for the crowd of little girls running and around and I know she is somewhere in there, safely surrounded. I wish I could get a picture of it. Sometimes there are 10 of them. Every now and then one of them will run back and report to me, "Adele fell, but she got back up and kept running." Sometimes she seems to like having them around but other times, like when they try to hold her hand or pick her up, she pushes them away and runs as fast as she can in another direction. I thought it was the sweetest thing one day, there were a lot of girls following her and they were crowding her a little too much. She saw Liam running around and she ran to him and put her arms up so he would pick her up. It melted my heart that she knew she could go to her big brother to "save her".