Bad day today

It's work related. But, now I wanna learn not to deal with pointless down feeling or stress. Here's what I decided to do this afternoon. With the kids.

When the weather and the mood are right I normally take my bike out of the garage and bike around my neighborhood. Oftentimes I do it with my niece not for being scared of doing it on my own but more for teaching her the world is out there to enjoy, not in the house. Today I asked my nephew to join us, too. Problem with him is he can't ride. I told him to walk.

As always, we didn't plan where to go. Despite big houses, there are so many cool things in our neighborhood which are mostly nature related. That's my definition of cool.

Because I will attach quite a lot of photos, as usual I will leave a caption underneath the photo instead of saying too much in the intro. And, I rarely want to leave my iPhone at home when I'm out for the great camera that it carries. I knew I would have some things interesting to capture.

I wanted to go to a place that we had never been before in the neighborhood.

Here's the first place we stopped by. We certainly had been a block away from this side of the neighborhood but it might have not been so interesting to us back then as we noticed this afternoon that the houses and environment were still under construction. Some time ago, this place might have been full of bushes.
We actually named this discovered playground "Playground Dead Rat" for this reason (link to a photo of a dried out dead rat found in the playground and that my niece ran over by accident). I'm sure you've seen worse.


We'll certainly come back to this playground for the sake of being proud of having discovered and named it.
We had enough fun at the playground. Saw this and that. Did this and that.

We continued biking.

On our way to our unknown next destination, we saw this rambutan (hairy fruit) tree. I wanted the fruit but couldn't reach them. The tree was behind a brick fence that was quite tall. I tried standing on my bike's paddles but still couldn't reach the branch that had three rambutan fruit hanging. Still insisting, I lifted my nephew and he got the fruit for us. No photo for that tiny bit of fun. Unfortunately.

I let my niece lead the journey. She took us to this area that we certainly had been before a lot of times. However, the area felt and looked different.

The place is now much greener due to the plants including grasses and trees that have started growing their confident fresh green leaves. Rain didn't happen until just over a month ago after many, long months of complete dryness.

Oh. We noticed my nephew peed his pants which I never know when it happened.

I let the kids play around a bit and explore the place. I always know it is important to go out and enjoy nature. I love nature. When I was around their age I had gone in to the forest and spent a lot of times on the beach.
They need to play with dirt, get wet in the rain, dig the ground to discover something, lift small rocks to find hiding insects, sit on the grassy ground, taste the grass, swallow a bit of rain water, climb a tree, pick fruit off the tree, get dirty, try to catch living chicken, get close to animals, handfish fish, feed animals, get close to a beehive, get stunk by bees, etc. That's what I did when I was around their age and do until to date sometimes -although I can't do as much. Otherwise they will miss out the real fun of childhood when they get too old to not be able to do all those things mostly due to work and stress of life.


There are tall trees, too.
I noticed another rambutan tree but it was surrounded by very bushy bushes.

And, for the tall trees, grasses and bushes that all looked green and fresh, we named the place "Playground Jungle".

We moved on.

On our way to our possibly next destination, still in the Playground Jungle, I noticed this pathway which I actually had used a couple of times before as a shortcut to the big main road just a block away from Playground Jungle.
And... I wanted to have fun a bit more. I said to my nephew, "hey, go to the end of the pathway. I want you to see if there is a way for us to reach the rambutan tree without having to go through the bushes".

He obeyed and left.

Winked at my niece. And...

Of course, we rode our bike as quick as possible leaving him behind.
No bikes were hurt during the scene.

At last, as the sky was getting darker, we discovered another new place that, we believe, didn't exist until a few weeks ago or something.

We thought it was really cool to find this small farm/garden in the middle of our neighborhood!
I immediately knew what was growing by the leave: chili plants.

Hmmm... I was a bit confused what we could do for fun now.

Okay, maybe some photos of us with the farm in the background...

Hmmm... a bit boring.
Let's try with different models.

Okay but still boring.
Different position, maybe?

Again, just okay.
I honestly ran out of ideas. I told the kids to be very careful making steps in the farm because the last thing that we wanted to do was to step on the bumpy soil.

Okay, so I thought taking a photo of the tall trees around the farm would be cool, too.

More than one photo of this would be boring.
But... something happened. A fun idea came across my mind.
I gave some careful instructions to my niece about what she was going to need to do.

Count up to three out loud. I will jump. Wait for a half second and tap the shutter

Hence...

Quite cool. Very shaky. But, not bad as a second attempt.

Her turn was not bad.

My nephew rocked it!
I wanted(needed) more fun.

Duo... instead of solo.







For the farm/garden and our jumps, we named the place "Garden of Jumps"

Fun ended. We had enough of it. The kids needed to study in the evening. I was aware of not letting them too tired for the evening.

...
Just on the other corner of our house, I turned my head for this.

This is what is left after our favorite tree collapsed. It's almost entirely covered with wild vine. I was hoping it'd grow back but I'm glad enough they didn't take everything from the collapsed tree and left the root with a bit of the trunk left where it had grown for many years.
Later in the evening edit: We talked about our next adventure involving a big river separating big main roads further outside our neighborhood but very reachable. Cannot wait.

Good night.

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P.S.:
- Tomorrow is my first Japanese class...
- Just in case you were wondering I didn't re-order the timeline of the photos or the story. The photos were ordered in this post as the time they were taken.