Leaf Jumping and Growing Up

It's Sunday morning here and we are not at church.

I have to admit, I'm thankful for the quiet day.

But the reason we are home is not a fun one.  S4 woke up with the flu.  He had tons of fun a friends house yesterday, he played hard all day and fell asleep exhausted in the middle of the living room last night.  This morning he woke up and said his tummy hurt.  

Since then he has gotten sick four times.

He is the most pitifully sweet sick kid.  He apologizes for throwing up, he smiles sadly at my worried gaze, he says please and thank you like he is some sort of inconvenience.  

As if.

I was laying all curled up in the chair watching over him as he dozed back off to sleep for a bit on the floor and happened to look out the window.

Outside S1 and S2 had gotten the pickup untarped from the leaf job Jake and did yesterday.  While the boys were gone we went and cleaned the leaves out of a sweet old lady's yard.  She believes only my husband can do the job right and just has the biggest crush on him.  When she met me for the first time yesterday she said surprised, "Oh, I know you! I've seen you on tv!"  

That was a first.

Anyway, it was dark and spitting rain when we got home.  We had pizza to bake and were starving hungry so we had just left the leaves for today.

S1 and S2 untarped them and then wandered off.  S3 took one look at that huge pile of leaves and knew just what to do.

 I watched him as he scaled the side of the big dodge and poised himself just right to dive into the leaves.

Over and over again he climbed the truck to jump in the leaves.  He would scale different sides of the truck to get an all over leaf experience.

 It was the funniest thing to watch as I lay curled in a chair waiting to see if my youngest was about to be sick again or just going to sleep.

And then I wondered, at what point did my two oldest get so old that they would not see a truck bed full of leaves for the fun it is?

I watched S3 throwing leaves up in the air and letting them fall down on him, not caring who seen him or if he was the only one in the bed of the truck, he was just taking the fun moment for what it was.

And my two oldest were "too old" to have this fun.

When did we all get too old to have this simple fun?

How did this happen?