Today was the first really amazing, warm, sunny, beautiful spring day, and we celebrated by heading out to the park in the afternoon. You can tell it was a successful trip by the incredible volume of sand sprinkled throughout the house. Gal Smiley had an impressive amount of sand between her toes, and she was wearing socks and shoes. I have no idea how she got it in there, unless she injected it with a found needle.

One reason that we brought half the park’s worth of sand back with us is that we took some shovels and pails with us today specifically for sand play. When we got to the park, all three of us plonked our butts down in the sand and started to dig. We built tons of sand castles and jumped on them, and Captain Jelly Belly had a great time burying and “finding” a little plastic dump truck that travels with our sand stuff.

Since it was such a nice day, the park was crowded with kids, and within a few minutes of our arrival, we’d attracted a real crowd of munchkins who wanted in on the sand play. Lots of other people bring sand toys to the park so I’m not sure what the big deal was with ours, except maybe for the fact that my superior knowledge of sandcastle building (free tip to y’all: you have to dig deep to get the really wet packing sand) was impressing the kiddies. Anyway, I’m happy enough to share our sand stuff with whoever is around — heaven knows my own kids have helped themselves to a stray pail and shovel many, many times on park visits in the past, and I’m always careful to make sure they return it before we leave. But I couldn’t get over the aggressive nature of today’s mob. At any given moment, there were at least three or four kids circling us, watching for the very second we’d put something down, and try to grab it. Older kids thought nothing of coming up to Gal Smiley and asking to use the very shovel that she had in her hand, or to try to take her half-full pail away and use it themselves. I like to promote sharing, but we were actually using our own stuff, and it really doesn’t seem like too much to ask to use our own stuff.

So that put me in the awkward position of having to tell strange kids stuff like, “Um, I think she is using that,” or “It’s okay to borrow things we aren’t using, but my son is busy with that truck right now.” I was pretty polite, I think, but saying stuff like this to other people’s kids always feels to me like stepping over a line somehow. Parents — even ones that are happy to sit on a bench reading a book while their vulture children hover over our sand toys in a rather rude way — are very, very sensitive, and easily offended, and having a “Mommy Incident” at the park isn’t something I look forward to.

In the end I avoided any newsworthy events, and we finished in the sand and packed up our (obviously, fabulously enviable) sand toys and headed home. And I’m sure we’ll be back there tomorrow…hopefully not drawing as much attention as we did today.