Mud, mud, glorious mud.

School finishes early on Thursdays so that teachers can have a staff meeting or do professional development. That means the kids get an extra hour and a half after school to play. Today Dynamo and Sausage took advantage of that extra time to explore down by the creek.

The water from the flood has subsided and left a lovely muddy mess full of all sorts of flotsam and jetsam – mostly sticks and sheep manure, but Dynamo did discover his dad’s six foot crowbar which had been moved quite a distance. I went down after a while to see what they were doing and to make sure they were staying well clear of Dad in the tractor moving a mangled fence. We followed worm tracks, cat tracks, bird tracks and dog tracks. Then they discovered ‘eggshells’, wafer-thin curls of dried mud, so they spent a while seeing how many they could pick up without cracking them.

But it was the discovery of the dried mud as thick as chocolate slice that started the real fun. It didn’t take long for Sausage to work out that a piece of this stuff thrown with force at Dynamo’s back created a lovely thwacking noise and made it smash into a million grains of sand. No points for guessing where the game went from there.

I was just looking at their clothes, wondering how on earth I would ever get them clean, when Sausage launched a piece of ‘chocolate slice’, gave a shiver of delight and announced ‘This is the funnest day!’

Tonight someone sent me a prayer and it seemed so apt for today, I thought I’d print it here –

A prayer for the world's children.

"He took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them." -- Mark 10:16

We pray for the children
Who sneak popsicles before supper,
Who erase holes in math workbooks,
Who can never find their shoes.
And we pray for those
Who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
Who can't bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers
Who are born in places where we wouldn't be caught dead,
Who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children
Who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
Who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.
And we pray for those
Who never get dessert,
Who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
Who don't have any rooms to clean up,
Whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser,
Whose monsters are real.

We pray for children
Who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food
Who like ghost stories
Who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub
Who get visits from the tooth fairy,
Who don't like to be kissed in front of the carpool,
Who squirm in church and scream into the phone,
Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.
And we pray for those
Whose nightmares come in the daytime,
Who will eat anything,
Who have never seen a dentist,
Who aren't spoiled by anyone,
Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,

We pray for children
Who want to be carried and for those who must,
For those who never give up and for those who don't get a second chance
For those we smother and for those who will grab the hand of anyone kind enough to offer it.

Adapted from a prayer by Ina Hughes