Best Buddies and a Mr. Sneaky-Pants

During preschool last year, Jared and another boy, Max, really hit it off well in class. They go to different preschools this year, but they've kept a nice bond, and when they see each other, their joy and excitement is just the most adorable thing EVER. It's hard to coordinate schedules, so it doesn't happen often, but it happened yesterday. Jared had been counting the days since we found out earlier in the week that Max could come to play, and it bordered between excitement and pure obsession. Nearly ever other word out of his mouth was something about Max. At 7am yesterday morning, Jared wondered WHY, oh why was Max taking so long to get to our house; he should BE HERE BY NOW! When the time finally arrived and we opened up the front door to welcome Max into our home, the boys greeted each other with shouts of excitement and exuberant hugs.


They promptly threw on boots and coats and headed outside to enjoy the first rain-free day in awhile (and by rain, I mean some serious RAIN, which resulted in some major flooding in our state). I very stupidly didn't take all the extra rain into consideration when sending them out (with Max's mother's permission...) that maybe, just MAYBE, my backyard may have turned into a bit of a swamp and I should have laid out some ground rules before sending them out. They hadn't been outside more than 10 minutes when Jared came in to inform me that he was a little bit splashed from the muddy water in the garden.

In viewing this picture, you're noticing a few random muddy splotches on his pants and I'll bet you're thinking, "That's not too bad at all!" But what you CAN'T see from this picture (much to my dismay) is that he is DRIPPING wet from the knees down.


Basically, there are several areas of my backyard that are under several inches of water, and the areas NOT under several inches of water are very very GUSHY and mucky, and let me tell you, those boys had a BLAST.

Are you wishing I'd taken pictures of the flooded areas of my yard for a better visual of the fun the boys had? WELL, I was all set to snap a few pictures, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that THIS little cutie had found a handy pair of shoes and had wandered out to do some exploring of his own:


And these would be his sisters "dress" shoes (nice enough to wear with dresses and skirts, etc, but not so nice that she can't run around in them at recess at school), which he so kindly tromped through a few mucky spots with, and shuffled through puddles in:


PS It wasn't windy in that picture I took of Connor... That's pure bed-head, folks, because he wasn't down with me spraying it with water and I wasn't in the mood to fight with him! ha! And please ignore the ill-fitting overalls he's wearing. I had all the clean jeans drying in the dryer and he found those in his drawer and insisted on wearing them.