After a long day in the sun at Sixth Island yesterday, we spend most of the day indoors watching movies and playing Wii games, but as a mom, I cannot let my kids sit inside all day, so we got out of our darkened rooms around 3:30 to walk to the pool for our usual Monday swim. Before we even arrived (please note that the walk takes about 2 minutes at a casual pace from our rooms), my oldest had stopped completely and turned the other direction in the pursuit of grasshoppers. This has become a regular activity lately each time we are outside in a grassy area. My son is very good at catching all manner of small creatures from the slow moving hermit crabs he used to play with as a toddler to the quick darting geckos trying to camouflage themselves against the walls of buildings and eventually to the barely visible ghost crabs on the beach. So, grasshoppers are just the latest challenge for him. At the snack bar on Saturday night, he caught both geckos and grasshoppers, but was most excited to reveal the grasshopper which stayed right in the palm of his hand while he was showing me, but then decided to make a break for it when shown to his brother and my boyfriend, almost landing in my son’s Roy Rogers, which had just arrived at the table seconds before.
At any rate, as my youngest son and I kept plodding toward the pool, my first born all of a sudden began yelling, “I caught one, Mom!” as he ran towards us. I love it when my children connect to and get excited about nature, so even though we were going to the pool to swim, that activity was periodically interrupted by sessions of grasshopper catching. At one point, while showing me a grasshopper at the side of the pool, he jumped right in to swim with me! I carefully gathered him up in my hands to shake off and be on his way by land, but we decided not to bring them over to the pool again.
While the boys played imaginary games and swam, I went about my usual routine of sitting in the sun warming and reading for awhile before jumping in to do some water aerobics exercises and some laps. Over the years on the atoll, I have developed an even deeper love for the water and for swimming than I ever had growing up, and I’m happy to share that with my kids. They love to go to the pool, and their swimming skills are improving constantly. In fact, we usually have races to one end of the pool and back, although we have had to establish a “handicap” system like in golf or bowling in order to make it fair between the ages. This means, my youngest usually gets a head start of 5-8 seconds, and my oldest is about to lose his handicap because I can’t swim that much faster than him now.
Swimming is such a relaxing form of exercise and good therapy for a body that’s ailing from almost anything. In the past, when I have had a twisted ankle that I can barely walk on without tension or pain, I can go swimming and feel almost 100 % better afterwards, and it seems that swimming is the preferred exercise for those at the end of physical therapy and in recovery from a surgery or injury because it is so gentle on your body and joints, but yet still provides a full body workout. I can tell within a couple of weeks of consistent swimming a difference in my strength, stamina, stress levels, and over all muscle tone, which is quite amazing because it doesn’t even feel like hard work. While I sat out to dry and read some more after my swim, the boys had a snack and began wandering off and catching grasshoppers again. They probably spent more time doing that than swimming today, but that’s okay with me.
As we started to leave, one grasshopper jumped into my son’s shoe, and I shooed it off, but my oldest said, “You should have left it there, and he could have ridden on his shoe all the way home.” The ideas children get in their heads are so fascinating and fun (like the one yesterday where the son who is afraid of sharks imagined he could put a motor on the tail of a shark and a steering wheel on his head and ride on him through the water), but this idea of a grasshopper riding on a shoe reminded me of our trail walking in Alabama this summer with my parents where a butterfly hitched a ride on the back of my dad’s hat, then moved to my son’s arm, my other son’s back, and finally my shoulder and stayed there until we got to the car, and upon trying to get him to fly off, he came inside the car and rode on my mom’s seatbelt until we arrived home where he finally found a place on my parent’s roofline to light. I have pictures to prove this. It was so enchanting as many butterflies are too “flighty” to stay in one place very long, especially on a human resting spot. Not once have we ever been able to get a butterfly to land on us or ride with us in the jungles of Roi where they are abundant or even in the butterfly house at the Botanical Gardens near my parent’s house where we were offered butterfly “food” to put on our arms and entice them. And really, in the end, it’s more fascinating and memorable when things like this happen completely unprompted and unexpected, just like the grasshopper expedition today at the pool. It’s not part of our usual routine to swim with grasshoppers, but spontaneity results in new found enjoyment of life if you will only let yourself indulge in it.
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