River Dance

The family surveys the raging river.

Nothing says Summer like a boy, a dog, a stick and some water to throw the stick in.

Searching for good beaver dam sticks and/or rocks.

One of the construction engineers strategically places a rock on the "beaver dam".

My oldest son and his family arrived for their annual visit yesterday and today we all headed down to the river for some serious play. There are three grandkids in this bunch. The oldest is a girl who is 9. Number two is a boy who is 7. The youngest, another boy, is 4. With a couple of sticks and the river, the kids can keep themselves occupied for hours, blissfully leaving the adults to sit in beach chairs, sip coffee and take pictures. We did however collectively undertake something more serious this year, the construction of an ersatz beaver dam. This was motivated by the desire to deepen one of the shallow pools along the river in the hope of transforming it into a swimming hole or at least a deep wading pool. The dam got off to a really good start and everyone had a good time contributing logs, sticks, rocks and gravel to this first phase of construction. We even appear to have raised the water level in the pool behind the dam by 3 to 5 inches. Wow! Who knows, if our dam is good enough maybe Benny the Beaver will come back, finish off the dam and settle in. We'll see.