As I sit here typing this, it’s coming down cats and dogs outside and my daughter is dancing around in a circle playing a drum. When I asked her what she was doing she started chanting:
Rain, Rain, Come and Stay
We Need You Here So We Can Play
Rain, Rain, Come and Stay
Make Our Trees and Flowers Happy and Gay!
When I burst out laughing, she gave me the toothiest grin and went back to beating her drum and dancing in a circle. To understand why this is so funny – you’d have to know my daughter. She doesn’t like rain. When it rains she can’t go outside. When it rains we can’t go to the zoo or the park or any number of other places we might otherwise go pay a call on for a family day of fun – but here in North Texas – we’ve been in severe drought conditions.
June 19th, our area declared we had gone to Stage 3 water restrictions – this means you can water your lawn with sprinklers only once per week on the designated day and not between the hours of 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. It means the splash park at our community pool is turned off until the restrictions are lifted. It means we cannot fill the pool with new water and must use the water recyclers exclusively.
In A Child’s World
For my daughter it means no playtime in the sprinklers on a hot day. It means no setting up of the slip and slides one of the grandmothers purchased for her. It means all the water play at one of her camps was canceled. It’s means carefully tending the garden we planted because the flowers are getting parched and we can use a soaker hose, but didn’t have one until this weekend.
While we only went into Stage 3 on June 19th, we’d been in Stage 2 since early May – that changed our current conditions to two days a week instead of one – without much rain in sight – we were half expecting to see Stage 4 restrictions by the end of the month and worried about water rationing that might contribute to closing the pool or water parks – I’ve seen it happen.
Kids don’t understand water conservation – though my five year old has now had an extreme lesson in it. When they started calling for rain on July 4, there were lots of our neighbors who complained it might interfere with the fireworks – personally, I would be more happy with a thunder and lightening show as long as it brought steady, fresh rain to our parched lawns, trees and growth.
While this may seem like an odd topic for Family Fun – my family has had a lot of fun with the intermittent rain we experienced this afternoon and my daughter is still dancing her rain dance – she wants the rain to stay – she wants the flowers and trees to be happy and gay.
There are worse ways to have fun than singing about the rain. How’s the weather in your area this week?
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