Seeing the trees instead of the forest

I climbed a tree yesterday. Two of them, in fact.

I should probably preface this by saying I don't climb much of anything but stairs as a general rule. My sole childhood experience with tree climbing consisted of hauling myself up into the only one in our neighborhood that wasn't too short and scrubby to hold a fourth-grader, and then screaming for twenty minutes because there was a lizard on the trunk of it and I wouldn't go past the thing (it was a whole three inches long) to get back to the ground until someone went to get my mom. Yeah, I was a chicken -- still am, in a lot of ways.

My daughter is not. She's five, and she's spunky and sassy (both traits I adore unless they're being channeled into her impression of a teenager and directed at me) and she loves to climb anything. So when we went to Maymont yesterday and darling hubby promised her a tree to climb, we listened to 25 minutes of "that tree? How about that one?" while we walked across the grounds to the ones he was looking for.

They were the most fabulous climbing trees I've ever seen. Monstrous miracles of nature and time, they stood probably 50 yards apart, an oak and a pine, both with several thick, side-growing branches that hung low enough to the ground for even my toddler son to climb up onto.

My daughter's face broke into a grin usually reserved for Cinderella Castle at Disney World and she took off for the oak at a dead run. I watched her with the proud smile of a mom who loves that her child is rushing headlong into an activity that she herself always feared. Monkey number one is not afraid of anything. She hopped easily from branch to branch until she was standing over my head, far enough off the ground to make me a little nervous.

She grinned at me. "See, mommy? It's not scary. It's fun!"

Monkey number two agreed, giggling and "whoa!"-ing as hubby helped him around the lowest branches.

I watched the two of them for a few minutes and decided it was time for me to face my fears. It helped that I didn't see any lizards.

It wasn't as scary as I thought. Not scary at all, in fact. I laughed and chased my little ones and posed for photos with them and generally had a perfect autumn afternoon.

Grownups are supposed to be responsible. We go to work, pay the bills, keep the toilets clean and the laundry done -- but it's easy to get so bogged down in the mundane everyday details of keeping a family running that you fail to appreciate said family.

Take a minute to ignore the forest of things on your "to-do" list and see the trees through a child's eyes. Leave the laundry. Go outside. Jump rope, skip, play hopscotch -- or climb a tree if you've got one. It'll put a smile on your face that won't fade -- even when you get back inside to find that the cat has barfed in the laundry basket.