Wonderful Wildness

I was checking out some videos I asked Ashton to upload to YouTube for me and found this old video of the twins. When they were about two, I found them out in the garage rocking out together.  I cranked up the music and filmed them.



These twins of mine are wild in all the best ways. Sure, they've made more than their share of crazy creative messes (read about some of the most memorable here) and they've nearly given me about 1000 heart attacks showing off abilities I didn't know they had. But they've got that beautiful boldness and sparkling spunk and creative curiosity that are such wonderful parts of wild kids.

Sometimes the wildness around here drives me crazy - my kids all have a wild streak. They love to try crazy stunts on their bikes, to leap off play structures, make elaborate messes with all their building toys and crafts,  do flips across the grass. I've learned while making the mess often involves a couple of hours of creativity and fun, helping them clean it up usually just takes a few minutes.  And when it comes to their physical exploits,  while they often seem to scare other people watching, they don't scare me anymore. Thanks largely to their dad's insistence, they've been able to test limits a lot in their lives and that's led them to expand their abilities and limits. I watch them scamper across rocks on a hike or land a little jump on their bikes and wish I had even a fraction of their kinesthetic abilities and well-founded confidence in what their bodies can do.

I love that we've done a lot of hard and sort of scary things together. We conquered Angel's Landing and the Narrows in Zion together a couple years ago. We hike and bike up just about any mountain we can find. Plus we've done a lot of wild and scary non-physical things together. We've worked together to build The Power of Moms and we're getting going on a new companion website, The Power of Families (Jared is our webmaster and does so much to support and build the website and the kids have loved helping with data entry and making and editing videos as well as helping with extra chores around the house when I have a crunch time - I explain what I've got on my plate and they're so good to help pick up the slack). We've moved to new places and started at new schools and jobs where there were countless unknowns. We've tried all sorts of interesting foods and learned to like almost everything. We've stretched and grown and learned so much together. And sometimes it took a little "wildness" to get us to where we needed to be.

Can you have real learning and stretching and fun and memories without some monitored messes and watchful wildness?