The days before Christmas Eve are all about preparation. There’s so much to clean, so much to cook, so much to get ready just to cook or to clean. There’s an art in knowing when to help and knowing when helping is simply getting out of the way.

Today, K made the pierogies for Christmas Eve, and while she was at it, she used up the rest of the chicken from Wednesday’s rosół (L’s favorite, made especially for her birthday) to make some chicken pierogi. All in all, she made well over a hundred of the little dumplings, which means that flour was flying all over the place.

Were the kids there, cries of “Can I help?” and “Why can I help?” and “L could help — I want to help!” and “Can I have some dough?” and a thousand other things would be a constant added challenge to gauging the amount of filling versus dough to make it all come out, the challenge of making cutting-board full of dumplings quickly enough that the first ones don’t dry out before the whole board gets slipped into the freezer. Not to mention one’s sanity.

So after lunch, I packed the kids and their bikes into the car and headed to the nearest park. Southside is not nearly as crowded on it’s busiest Sunday as Cleveland Park is on an average Sunday, and when we arrived today, we had the park almost all to ourselves.

Almost as soon as we arrived, a young man with a yellow safety vest and an unsteady stride approached us. “Hi,” he smiled awkwardly, then pointing to his bandaged wrist, asked, “What’s this?” I looked at his vest, which has his name printed on it and a telephone number, and it was quickly clear that the young man had Down’s Syndrome. I looked at his wrist and replied, “It looks like you hurt yourself. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s this?”

I explained again, glancing around to see where his parents might be, glancing at L and E to see where they were.

“What’s this?” came the voice again.

E was approaching me at that point, calling out his usual mantra — “Daddy, come play with me!” — so I simply repeated my explanation and excused myself. The Boy and I headed to the biggest slide on the playground, and glancing back at the yellow-clad boy, I saw him head to another father on the playground. Pointing to his wrist, he was clearly asking the same question of almost everyone, and it was still unclear where his parents might be.

“Who was that, Daddy?” L asked as she ran up beside us as we headed to the bigger playground with it’s enormous slides.

“I don’t know, sweetie.”

“Then why were you talking to him?”

“He was talking to me,” I replied, knowing where the conversation was heading.

“Why?”

I explained, and L, having recently become aware of the autistic students in her own school, asked if he had “bad autism” or just “a little.”

“He isn’t autistic, honey. He’s mentally retarded. He has something called Downs Syndrome.”

“What’s that?”

I explained it quickly, and since we were then at the bigger playground, she found that explanation adequate and ran off to mount the ladder to the slide.

Still no sign of the lad’s parents, but by then, my attention had shifted to the Boy’s climbing. Lately, he’s grown more confident and more willing to take risks, which means he was climbing on things like the chain ladders that just a few months ago were unthinkable challenges for him.

I stood at the base of the slide, waiting for him. As he climbed up the ladder, my view was briefly obstructed, and the normal parental thoughts paraded: What if he falls? Should I be by him to help?

I stayed where I was. He didn’t fall. I learned the same lesson for the millionth time: I have to let go. I have to step back. I have to let him fall.

And later, when they were riding their bikes in the empty over-flow parking lot and the Boy fell, I walked calmly over to him, calling, “Oh buddy, it’s nothing. Get up — brush it off. You’re fine.”

I never figured out who the yellow-clad young man’s parents were. He talked to almost everyone in the playground and wandered freely. In fact, I wondered whether or not they were even at the park. Maybe they dropped him off and went somewhere for a while. Shopping? Who knows. Yet I’m not willing to make any kind of judgment about their parenting choices. They’re probably just letting him climb alone for a while.

(Final pierogi count: 148.)