We have a huge grassy field behind our house.  It used to be a water run-off area that was basically an overgrown forest.  The city came and knocked down all the trees and blackberry bushes, and levelled it out.  For the longest time it was just a giant dirt area.  The kids had way too much fun with that.  The city has a huge sign up that says they are planning on making this area into a park starting January 2006.  My youngest daughter is mortified and has been since the middle of January that they’ve done nothing yet.

Last Saturday afternoon we told our kids, and a few of the neighborhood kids that we were going to play kickball between 7-8pm.  Then those kids ran all over the neighborhood to spread the word.  We had about 14 kids show up, and we had a blast.  We told them that we’d be back there on Monday at the same time.  Last night we only had about 9 show up right at 7pm, but by 7:30pm we had about 15 kids.  Again, it was so much fun.  The kids are having a blast, we just need to figure out how to better keep score.  We keep losing count of where we are at.  We told the kids that we’d play again on Thursday night, and they wanted Wednesday – nope, Thursday night from 7-8pm.   “Please, can’t we do it from 7-9pm”, they begged.  We’ll see!  There is no school on Friday, and so maybe we’ll go longer.  

We even have the littlest kids coming to play.  One little guy(maybe 3 years old) doesn’t hardly even speak English, and we have to tell him when to run and when to stop, and he has no clue as to what he’s doing, but is so proud of himself for playing with the big kids.  It’s nice to see the older kids helping out and encouraging the littler ones.  We are trying to include everyone, and make it fun for all.  The older ones seem to have picked up on the whole “go easy on the little ones so they will have fun as well” idea.  It makes for a fun time.  I’ll try to take some pics on Thursday.