Small and light.

Do you remember being really little and literally throwing your body around in the name of fun? I do. I remember playing on a playground next-door to my house and taking a running leap before flinging myself down the slide on my belly. I also jumped off moving swings and dove on and off of rapidly spinning merry-go-rounds, amongst other things.  I was small and light and I used it to my advantage.  This morning at Kindergym, I got to see Sonja do the same. 

The Esquimalt recreation centre has an incredible bouncy castle. Inside the castle, along with the endless fun of the bouncy floor, are two ladders. Climb to the top of these ladders and you get the prize of sliding down a steep slide. Sonja needed help getting up the ladder the first time, but after that, she managed to hoist herself up onto that high first rung.  I actually wasn't sure there would be a second time, since she looked pretty terrified during her first slide. But soon she was all smiles and each time she climbed that ladder, she grew bolder and more fearless.

There is just something so cool about watching a little person being so confident; straining to climb and pull herself up a ladder, sliding with glee, bouncing off and running, sprinting to do it all over again.

A couple times when she was running back to bouncy-castle entrance, Sonja took a quick detour to check in on Haven. She wanted to see how her little sister was doing and make sure she had toys to play with. What a kid.

As much as I recall being small and fairly indestructible, I also sadly remember when I grew a bit older and bigger and things started to really hurt. All of a sudden I couldn't shake off a fall from the monkey bars so easily. Hell, I couldn't even hang or dangle from the monkey bars anymore because I'd grown too big and too heavy; my strength-to-weight ratio was no longer working in my favour. A sad day, to be sure. 

Was that the moment I started to leave my childhood behind? If not the moment, then most certainly the canary in the coal mine. Is this also the reason my teenaged friends and I were so drawn to playgrounds after dark? Were we trying to reconnect with our younger, smaller, lighter selves? We never talked about it, but I remember playing on playgrounds quite a few times as an angst-ridden teen. I never said anything at the time, but it always left me feeling a little sad because even though we were all trying so hard to be grown up, here we were acting like little kids again. And most of time, I wished I could just be a little kid again. 

It's just as well I didn't have these insights back then, since I wouldn't have had the delight of spending countless hours brooding and writing cryptic, anguished poetry. And what a shame that would have been...