Yesterday, after school, after snack, bathroom breaks, washing hands while singing the alphabet, three kids jumping in my face to tell me about their day (even though one of the three was stuck to me like glue while the other two were at school) I decided we needed some time outside just playing.

Also, a neighbour had knocked on the door asking if the girls could come out and play and I wished I had come up with the idea first.

Ellie explained that there was a boy in her class who was “Highly, highly, highly, highly, mildly allergic to dogs,” while Hanna taunted Chloe. When I asked her to stop taunting she swore up and down there was no possible way she was taunting her little sister and then followed up, “What is taunting anyway?”

Time to get outside.

The kids started to play a game with some neighbourhood hoodlums where they would hide a baseball hat somewhere on one of two yards and they would race to be the first to find it.

Then they turned to me to do the hiding for the entire group which I gladly did because I was tired of staring at two black urns, pretending to know what to do with my planters, still full of dead stalks from the fall.

The first time I hid the hat, Hanna found it handily and ran to the finish line, quickly taunting the others and then denying the taunting, then asking what it meant again.

Ellie found the hat the next three times and I started to think my kids were geniuses.

They may not be piano prodigies or chess champs or have any tolerance for a flat sheet on their beds, but something about their spatial reasoning was kicking some hat-finding ass today.

On our way inside to make dinner (given the fries that had been in the oven since Sunday were thrown out by Child Services) I heard an older boy say to Ellie, “Wow, Ellie, you are really good at this game!”

I smiled to myself and then I heard my child say, “Oh it’s easy. My Mom’s just really sneaky so I just think of the sneakiest hiding place and it’s always there.”