One of the most pleasant surprises of the Fall and the Winter this year has been the boy’s attitude towards playing outside. For the past four-and-a-half years, we’ve had to strong arm him to get him outside. If the Wife or myself didn’t go out with him, he would invent and try every excuse his little mind could muster so that he wouldn’t have to go outside.<\/p>\n
Then, about mid-Fall, something funny happened. Around dusk he started asking if he could go outside. Then, he would grab a flashlight, grab the dogs and trudge out to the backyard and … play. Running with the dogs, playing with the flashlights, whatever games he could come up with.<\/p>\n
Even with the meager first snowfall, he was outside in a flash to play in it. He took the dogs with him as well and would kick the ball around for them as well as throw snowballs. With the latest storm, he’s been going out a couple of times a day, always taking the dogs with him. I watched for a few minutes this morning. He was out there with a shovel throwing as much snow as he could into the air with it. The dogs were jumping into the mini-maelstrom trying to … well, do whatever it is they’re trying to do.<\/p>\n
I can’t really say that it’s rewarding because I’m not entirely sure if or how we might have affected his decision. I can<\/em> say that I’m happy for him. He’s found something here that he looks forward to.<\/p>\n As do the dogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most pleasant surprises of the Fall and the Winter this year has been the boy’s attitude towards playing outside. For the past four-and-a-half years, we’ve had to strong arm him to get him outside. If the Wife or myself didn’t go out with him, he would invent and try every excuse his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}