As part of Ginger’s Bring Back the Words series of prompts, I am posting a moment of peace from my week.

I was going to do this prompt days ago but guess what, there has been little in the way of peace this week. Lots of noise, fighting, adjusting, deep breathing, and some sleeping, but little that I would call peace, until today.

This afternoon the kids and I walked up to the elementary school to play in the playground. It’s a really nice playground, with big trees that provide some shade, and several different levels of playground equipment. We played there before it was Arlo’s school, when my heart leapt to my mouth when he was a toddler climbing the so-many-feet-tall green playground structure. And we have spent many, many hours there since he started school, during which hours I have watched him jump to the ground from that same green structure.

Today, both kids were all about the monkey bars. Arlo has a graceful way about him on monkey bars, a rhythm. He has the same rhythm when he walks, which looks more like skipping or dancing. He uses his whole body, head to toe, to propel himself from one bar to the next. He learned to do the bars halfway through his kindergarten year and has incredible upper body strength. I am awestruck every time.

As a younger sibling, Eli has learned the monkey bars a year earlier than his brother did. He moves from bar to bar with a more jerky movement, his lower body stays stiff while he swings. And he can’t reach the higher bars because his arms just aren’t quite long enough, but he tries and tries, dropping to the ground, laughing, getting up and trying again.

The two of them on separate sets of bars, swinging without speaking, all concentration and the slap of bare hands against metal. I could watch them forever.