the call to brilliance

I am reading The Call to Brilliance. It validates the thoughts I've always had as a learner myself and some of the tendencies in my parenting that I occasionally worried were wrong. For example, I let the kids play outside with the hose for maybe 20 minutes unattended. When I came out, the sidewalk, driveway, and frontwalk were covered in mud. The children were covered in mud, and they had dug a large hole around the municipal water valve in the frontyard. I was not upset by this; I wondered if I should be - would the neighbors feel angry that our house looked so shitty, was I being an irresponsible neighbor, would the water dept. complain? Honestly though, who cares if there is dirt outside of the geometric parameters of where the dirt is supposed to be. It's on the ground. And on the kids, so they just hosed themselves off. Kids like to play in mud. I am thrilled that my daughters still appreciate these finer points of life. The other day I refused to let them watch TV, so after some period of whining, I discovered them up a tree in the backyard. The next day, they were playing a game with a cricket they'd found, tossing it across the yard and finding it again and again. It reminded me of a great teacher I'd had in elementary school telling us emphatically of the good old days, when they were so poor that they would play a game of loogy-ing into the air and catching it in their mouths.