Playtime

With a long weekend - a really long weekend, given that Cleo's school year ended at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, and that summer camp doesn't begin until Thursday - we've had a chance to get our summer on, in full form. A pre-Memorial day swim in the pool? Check. A morning watching the dragon boats and pirate ship on the Inner Harbor? L. took care of that, yesterday morning. In fact, L. even took for her an inaugural scooter ride, on a sharp Hot Wheels razor scooter lent by a friend, on the flat paved planes of Cross Keys.

But of course a 3-year-old doesn't really need an entirely structured environment in order to generate some spontaneous summer fun. Above, you can see Cleo taking advantage of the space between bench and fence (of the gap, as Rauschenberg once said, between art and life) in order to do some impromptu climbing. And then, too, there's the lilting little song about swinging that she had improvised while rocking back in forth on the Meadowood bucket swings, just a few minutes before:

If you could pump
Then you can try it
But if you don't want to
Then that's fine, too.

Want to swim? You can try it. But if you don't want to, a bench is fine, too.