Party at the Park

My nephew turned a year old last week. His parents threw a party for him at the park on Saturday.

The day was humid and mid-80s, so the first part of the party, the part where the kids played at the park, was kind of miserable.

The birthday boy, though, thought the balloons were pretty awesome. Can I pause here to say that chubby one-year-olds have the cutest walk? Seriously, the waddle this kid was doing was all sorts of awesome.

Right around the time we called the kids in from the sweltering park so they could eat and watch C open his presents (with much help from his big brother) it started to sprinkle.

The sprinkles were a welcome relief to the humidity (though, yeah, sprinkles just sort of take 90% humidity and push it right up to 100%, right?)

As food was eaten and presents were opened, the sprinkles became heavier and were soon a downpour. The kids were delighted. My older nephew, the birthday boy’s big brother, was quick to take off for a run in the rain.

Both Alyssa and Olivia looked to me, silently asking if they could follow suit.

I figured, why not? It was a warm rain and everyone had already eaten. Heck, my mom had been planning to bring out some water balloons so all the kids were going to get wet anyway.

They had so much fun. They ran around the pavilion more times than I could count. They stood under the steady stream that was created by the downspouts. They shook their hair at me in an attempt to get me wet too.

The rain pretty much continued through to the end of the party and the kids were all drenched. All the parents kind of looked at each other and realized none of us had brought changes of clothes. Duh, why would we?

So we were all trying to figure out how to get our soaking wet children home without causing the seats in our cars to be soaking wet.