Mud Walk
Posted by Wet Dad on April 07, 2021 at 23:54:01
It has been wet and grey here recently with quite a lot of seemingly continuous rain. Very boring and dispiriting for us all, so the recent sunny days over the Easter break have been a time to have a bit of fun and get out and about for some fresh air and a bit of exercise without getting really cold. I have three sons; twins of 15 years old, Alan and Barney, and 12 year old Sam, and whilst all of them have been back at school recently, I have been home-schooling them during the pandemic along with their on-line school lessons, so we have all got to know each other far better than before when they were at school full-time and I was working in my home office at the bottom of the garden. It’s been enjoyable but tiring.
It was Barney who said the magic words “Mud Walk” over breakfast as we talked about what to do for the day. It has become a tradition in the family for a Mud Walk to happen when any one person suggests it and no-one else can come up with a real solid reason not to. They have learned not to abuse the system by overdoing it and it makes it more fun by happening only a few times each year. I’m not against them getting wet and muddy in the normal course of messing around with friends and so on but that tends not to be deliberate. I had the freedom to get as wet and muddy as I liked without getting into trouble when I was a kid, so give them the same freedom – they all know how to use the hose to get clean and the washing machine to keep their clothes as pristine as well worn jeans and tops need to be.
So after breakfast we set off on our walk, there are plenty of footpaths out into the countryside from our village so we picked the ones that we knew would be wet and muddy or led through fields that flooded regularly near the river so could be relied upon to be good places for a bit of mud sliding or splashing through puddles. Barney was the first to get a real soaking as he challenged Alan to do a dive into a big puddle and slide through it. They both ran ahead at speed and Barney threw himself forward and splashed down before sliding a few yards through the mud and water. Alan had stopped running at the edge of the puddle and let his brother go on, so a few choice words were exchanged between them when Barney, freshly soaked, had rolled over and sat up to see where his brother was. Alan eventually stopped laughing and joined Barney by doing a forward roll through the puddle and than crawling on his belly through the mud to where Barney was still sitting. What a mess they were, soaked through and covered in mud; blue jeans shiny wet and mud brown and their tops largely the same with muddy faces and wet hair.
Sam and I couldn’t let them be the only ones having fun so we both splashed down into the mud and crawled through it to join them. After that we just jumped in every puddle we came across, threw ourselves and each other into any sloppy, wet mud we encountered and generally enjoyed getting as wet and muddy as we possibly could. We ended up walking along the side of a narrow drainage ditch which was filled with muddy brown water and about six feet wide from the top of each side. We challenged each other to jump across repeatedly until Barney slipped as he took off and crashed into the water, which turned out to be waist deep on him. That was the only prompting Sam and Alan needed to join him so they spent a while pushing each other over in the water and incidentally washing most of the mud off themselves before they clambered out and ganged up in pushing me in and then jumping in again to splash water all over me. That was refreshing. We sat on the bank for a bit as we caught our breathes and drip-dried before deciding to head back home. Needless to say we all ended up getting as muddy on the way back as we had been before. There were quite a few people in the village out for a walk in the sunshine or taking advantage of the dry weather to wash their cars and we got a few jokey comments as we passed by and had a bit of a laugh with our neighbours about being so wet and filthy, but no-one seemed to disapprove.
I hosed the boys down and then they had fun doing the same to me with added buckets of water which they had got out to help me wash the car which was in sore need of a clean after the recent wet weather. By the time we had finished that we were largely clean, still soaking wet but not dripping, and it was almost time to think about lunch.
- Re: Mud Walk Kayne 08:44:44 4/10/2021
(0)
- Re: Mud Walk Luke 10:22:16 4/08/2021
(1)
- Re: Mud Walk Wet Dad 16:09:18 4/08/2021
(0)
- Re: Mud Walk Wet Dad 16:09:18 4/08/2021
(0)