Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog is one of my favorite antidotes to the frustrations of modern life, and the outrageous stories she finds make great pass-along blog fodder, though they probably don't do my blood pressure any favors.
In an attempt to resurrect the once-normal sight of kids playing outdoors with their friends till the sun goes down—now unthinkable to many parents despite a crime rate lower than when they themselves played outside unsupervised—she declared tomorrow, May 22, to be Take Our Children to the Park...and Leave Them There Day. I don't think she was expecting quite the firestorm she created when she suggested that pre-teens could survive for half an hour without their parents hovering nearby. You can read all about it, positive and negative, on her blog.
None of our grandchildren is as yet old enough to participate in tomorrow's event, but I think it's quite exciting enough that the six-year-old is bicycling (in tandem with his father) to the park—some 75 miles away!
In honor of the day I reproduce one of my favorite Baby Blues comics, sent to me many years ago by a friend.
He did have some people wondering when he was ahead of us (out of sight) on the trail, due to his not wanting to stop for more than a minute or two at a time.
And Noah and Jonathan bicycled in the parking lot (dead end, only for "walk-in" campsites, so less traffic than the street I grew up on, where we used to lay in the middle of it to see how long it would take a car to make us move out of the way).
The part about laying in the road brought back memories. We used to do something similar at night with car headlights. Difference was that the cars were on Rte 97 and we were laying down on our little side street (not that the cars couldn't be turning in there, but there were only 6 houses on our dead-end street).
