Marvelous MUD

Last day in New Zealand. Heading out to Sydney early tomorrow morning. Today we finished building the foundation of a sweet little waterfall water feature at the Linwood Playcentre. Yesterday we layed boulders, gravel and hardware cloth wire mesh to create a base for the concrete. Today the cement truck came and with a hardy team of volunteers we scooped, shoveled and smoothed a batch of black concrete into a nice waterfall full of channels and waterways and spots for kids to dam up the flow. (stay tuned for pictures, coming later. first things first!)

Back to Whangarei and the Point Preschool.  After hanging with the kids in the Wild Woods we all made our way back to the preschool (for a rest I thought. silly me!) When I got there lots of activity was happening including a bunch of boys flying paper airplanes (I got to construct a few “custom” models with  the OVERSIZE paper the fellows handed me). Then over in a far corner of the yard near the boulder scramble and giant sand pit area I spotted some activity in the small dirt patch. I headed over and saw a teacher and a small girl barefoot in pit as they smooshed dirt into mud with a running hose plopped in the middle. “Cool”, I thought and meandered around the yard a little bit checking out the funky chicken coop they had built with the children.  When I came back around to the dirt pit there was no dirt to be seen: it was all MUD! Deep brown, rich, smooth, silky, muddy-mud! Complete with about 5 kids happily jumping in, laughing, splashing, splooshing, and shrieking with joy. YES!

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How simple. How awesome! Stripped down to their underpants and teeshirts these kids were having a ball — with nothing more than a small dirt area and water. It was so natural and so much fun it I had the funny thought that this sort of space and activity should be a feature in every play yard. (well? shouldn’t it?!) Almost like a marketed feature of a playground: the “space web”®, the “curly climber”®, the “triple slide”®, the “flying fox”®. Instead here it’s the “MUD PIT”®! (Except that its not anything you have to fundraise for and purchase and add resilient surfacing around, and follow ASTM playground guidelines for, etc etc.). It pure, natural MUD. Good clean fun. When the kids are done they get hosed off, wrapped in cushy towels, and changed into clean dry clothes. When parents pick the kids up and see the stray bit of dried mud behind their ears they know their children were having loads of fun that day.

Sure, its not something that happens everyday. (when the MUD PIT is not being used its transformed into the DIRT PIT®.) And sure it takes some conversations with parents to get them on the same page. And yes you’ll need some towels and extra clean clothes and maybe some clothes will get real real muddy by accident….but so what! That’s childhood, baby. What fun. Does it get any better than this?

copyright Rusty Keeler 2010. Please contact me for reprinting this article.