Reading Outside with a Baby

Most people think hot when they think Texas. Makes sense. What they don't generally think is hot and humid and buggy. That's because most people think of west Texas with all of its dust and cactuses and cowboys and such. If you live in east Texas, like us, you can't really stop thinking about hot and humid and buggy. It's just the way it is.

Being watchful. I swear. 

Every now and then, though, the right blend of weather and season comes around and you end up with a truly nice day. A day that is warm, but not hot. A day that is low humidity. Most importantly, a day in which all of the biting flying insects are dead. There aren't many of these days and we try to grab onto them and enjoy them. That's what happened way back when I only had two little kids. One was mobile, a toddler if you will. The other was fairly stationary. The day was beautiful and I had some reading to do. I decided that a blanket in the yard was the ideal place.
Now, some of you might have tried this whole baby on a blanket thing before and come to the same conclusion that I did. Babies are drawn to the edge of a blanket like a moth to a flame. Babies that will lay in the middle of the floor in a house and cry so that you will bring them the toy that they dropped six inches away will suddenly develop an overwhelming sense of wanderlust and go wiggling off toward the unknown. They cannot be stopped. They will reach the edge, and they will shove whatever they find in their mouth. Dirt? Down the hatch. Rocks? Give them a chew. Bugs? Fast bugs run away in a panic, but slow bugs have a bad day. Leaves? This is where the story gets interesting.  
You see. I was reading my book, studying for a class in fact, and I was pulling my son back from the edge much more frequently than I was turning pages. He got his had to terra firma once or twice but all in all I was doing a pretty good job if I do say so myself. Then my wife came home and ruined it all. We didn't have one single problem until she walked up to us to say hi. My son rolled over, looked up, and smiled. From between his grinning lips there was a tiny piece of green. My wife grabbed it and gently pulled expecting flick a small piece of grass off his lip. Have you ever seen a sword swallower? Not the part where they swallow, but the part where they pull it back out? Yea, that's what it looked like as my wife pulled the very very long skinny leaf out of the baby. Dammit. I was doing so well too.