Date Day at the Dirt Pile

Down the street from our house, there is a giant dirt pile.  It's the result of a new house that's being built.  It appears to be the dirt that was displaced when they dug the basement.  For whatever reason, progress on the house has stopped, but the dirt pile remains.  It's right along Iowa St., so everyone can see it, and apparently the developers were okay with the public helping them remove some of it, as they put a big "Free Dirt" sign on it.  Some people have taken some of it away, but it's still a huge pile of dirt, maybe 15 feet tall, 15 feet deep, and 30 feet wide.  For my date day with Joshua today, I thought it would be fun if we went to play on it.  As I recently mentioned, he no longer has training wheels on his bike, but I then realized I needed to get him a kickstand.  It recently arrived, and today I put it on his bike and taught him how to use it.  The dirt pile is far enough away that it was reasonable to ride our bikes there, so here he is as we begin our journey with his first time riding his bike with the kickstand on it.

We rode down the long sidewalk to the dirt pile.  Along the way, Joshua noticed a giant worm, so we stopped so he could hold it.

He climbed to the top of the dirt pile and felt like the king of the world.  I brought some tools that I knew he would like to use to dig and smash the dirt, including a screwdriver and a rubber mallet.  He really enjoyed slamming the rubber mallet into the dirt, breaking it up.

I don't let him play with my regular hammers, because they are too dangerous with the metal head and the sharp metal claw, so getting to use the rubber mallet was a big thrill for him, as it felt to him like he was finally getting to use one of my more grown-up tools.

As I always try to do on date days, I got a picture of the two of us together.  Here we are on top of the dirt pile.  You can see the elevation based on how far below us the neighbor's yard is.

We then took a break for lunch.  I took him to Pie Five, which is one of my favorite new fast food restaurants.  He ate his entire pepperoni pizza and loved it.  I branched out from my normal Jack Stack pizza to get their Hawaiian pizza (Maui Wowie?), and it was delicious.

After lunch we still had some time, and he really wanted to go back to the dirt pile, so we did.  We both had a lot of fun there.  It's really convenient it's so close to our house, as it's perfect for him, and it's free!  But presumably it'll be gone soon.  But if not, I may have to take the girls too, because as soon as I told them about it, they said they wanted to go too.  Hopefully we'll be able to do that before it goes away.