I never knew toddlers meant so much yardwork

A couple of weeks ago it got nice outside. I have a fenced in backyard so the idea of a giant toddler cage appealed to both me and Maggie as she could roam around, grass between her feet, and play on a playground all her own.

That was the idea.

What I learned quickly was that even outside with next to no way to accidentally hurt yourself, toddlers are inevitably drawn to whacking themselves in the face with tree and bush limbs. There’s no way they could have missed seeing it… but whack.

My neighbor came over and helped raise all tree limbs to above eye level, which resulted in about 20,000 little sharp limb segments being all over the place. That resulted in backbreaking efforts by both me and the neighbor to clean up as much as was possible before the toddler assault.

The day before Maggie’s 2 year birthday party there were wasps outside in a woodpile, wasps in a bush, random psycho bugs here there and everywhere. I spent hours removing incentives and dropping bug-b-gon everywhere there were pointy bugs.

By the end of the day there was nothing there. By the birthday party there were twice as many. I hesitated to break out the sprays at the birthday party, but what I hit was so far away from where anyone was I decided it was a better bet than leaving them to fly around and sting.

Of course there was mowing, and there was weed eating, and removing some thorny plants, and more stick removal, and random in-ground removal of sharp rocks, bricks that somehow were buried underneath it all, cleaning up random trash that blew into the yard.

After all of that work, the kids at the party never ventured near any of the areas I’d made safe. Ah well. Everyone left with the same number of eyes they came with so I’m happy… if completely sore.