In Which Jackson Drags Home a Stick

Before Jackson woke up on Friday morning, I was playing with Grant in the family room. Then a sound came from Jackson’s bedroom: “I think I’m awake. I think I’m ready to play now.”

While Hailey and Grant took naps on Friday afternoon, Jackson and I walked to a small retention pond about four blocks from home. We fed Rice Krispies to ducks and watched dragonflies. Jackson picked a daisy and said, “This is for Mommy.” But a few minutes later, he dropped the flower in favor of a six-foot-long stick. The whole way home, he held my hand with his left and dragged the stick with his right. He said, “I’m going to use it to wake up Mommy.”

I play in an informal softball league through NMU. The games are played at a park with no diamond—just a grass field—and the families of the players sit on blankets to watch. Jackson sometimes takes one of the team’s bats (33 inches long) and plays with it during the game, so this week we took his little orange bat (about eight inches long) to see if that would distract him from the big ones. During the pre-game huddle, which happened to be around the full-sized bats laid out in a row, Jackson snuck in and put his little bat next to the big ones.

After Hailey read about Christ coming to visit the Nephites in America, Jackson took over the story and said, “Jesus came down and said, ‘Hey, you need to repent!’”

And now for a fact that is fun: in June, the high temperature in Marquette was 92; the low was 37. But don’t worry. That’s in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.