With a break in the clouds, the unseasonably warm temperatures, and a free day for everyone, there was only one place to go: the park.

First a bit of playground fun. L has been growing more creative in her daring, but still needs a bit of help every now and then. Her grand idea of swinging down from the monkey in one fluid motion ended with frantic calls for help. Her insistence that she could take whatever spinning madness I could produce on the tire swing ended with her begging me, though not in a panic, to slow her down.

Afterward, bikes. It was fairly amazing to see how L has changed with her bike riding. Adjacent to the park we were visiting was an abandoned BMX race track, with only the starting gates remaining. The Girl was eager to try riding down the lower portion, below the gates themselves. Once I showed here how to navigate the lowered starting barrier, she rode down the concrete ramp seemingly countless times. And the Boy, as he always does, imitated her. Yet, also as he always does, his trusted his intuition and didn’t even want to try going from the top of the ramp.

Finally, an odd adventure: we’ve had a leak in the crawl space, and I’ve tried a few things to figure out what was causing the leak exactly. When I suggested that the Boy could go into the crawl space with me to check the latest effort, he was literally ecstatic. “Daddy, I love the crawl space!” And as L always does, she wanted to join us. I took the camera down to snap a few shots of the damage (which was not as bad as I thought), and of course I had to take a quick picture of the kids in a once-in-their-lifetimes location.

And while that bit of hanging insulation looks awfully close to them, it really wasn’t — an effect of the lens.