a day to grow

Sometimes our son seems to grow more in one day than in a whole month. My wife and I were talking the other day about when we should stop call him baby; of course he is still our little baby (and I guess he will continue to be as long as we live), but we both feel that he is quickly outgrowing that label.

Thursday morning I prepared a little picnic lunch, packed a backpack, put sunscreen on our baby and myself and then we took our bicycle to the nature activity center prettily situated on a mountain side overlooking the town where we live as well as the sea beyond. The recreation area has been closed all summer due to the coronavirus emergency declaration, but from October it is now open again and when we arrived only a few cars were parked outside the entrance. My son could not wait to get off the bike and run over to the little river that flows through the area. Water fascinates him; always when we are out playing he stops and looks at the water visible in the storm water wells in the street. The sea and flowing water though, really has the power to enthrall him. I tried to convince him that we would come back to the river later, but it took me to lift him up and carry him a to not be stuck looking at the river all day.

I wanted to use the early morning with few people for our son to enjoy the big lawn, free to run around as he pleases. Imagine my surprise when we walked up the hill and came to the field with not a single person in sight. Far away we could hear what sounded like schoolchildren singing but other than that it felt like we had the whole mountain to ourselves. My baby’s eyes started to shine as he made his way across the lawn to the slope where he practiced running uphill as well as downhill without tumbling over more than once.

On the top of the hill there are camping cabins and we could find ourselves a bench to sit on. Still no one in sight to see my baby sitting all by himself dangling his legs eating bread and rice and fish. He looked so proud to be sitting there on the bench next to me; I could feel that he too felt that he is a baby no more, that he is indeed a little boy now able to do grown up things all by himself. He even proudly wore his sun hat without any complaining at all. Already October, but autumn seems to have postponed its coming and we were enjoying a summer’s day picnic, talking about everything we could see from our bench.

Since it was a warm summer’s day, what better way to end our excursion than by playing in the river. We made our way to the little beautifully created river bed, took off our shoes and my baby could not wait to start walking around in the little stream, holding my hand jumping from stone to stone. We saw a mother with two sons also playing in the river, trying to catch small fish with a hope-net. Me and my son found no fish but a big frog swimming in the river. I exchanged pleasantries with the mother, commenting on the warm day, how nice it was for our children to be able to still play in the water. Her children were four and six years old, and she seemed to have a hard time believing my little baby, who was almost the size of her youngest, was not yet one and a half.

A tired little baby let me dry his legs and get him dressed without any complaining whatsoever. Back on the bike it didn’t take long until he was fast asleep in his child seat and as we slowly rolled home I was thinking what a beautiful day it had been. What an amazing thing to be able to share nature with a little baby boy. And that the father and son who came up the mountain both had grown a bit when going back home again.