bubbles!

Do all kids love blowing bubbles? My experience says yes.

Back in Angeltown, when Kiddo#1 and Kiddo#2 took karate, I used to sit outside with Kiddo#3 (age two or three) and let him play in the front where there was more space. Many of the non-karate kids did this. One day I brought bubbles, and I blew them for Kiddo#3 to chase.

Two minutes later, three ten-to-twelve year old girls charged squealing up to the bubble-fest and shouted, “Here they are! This is where they’re coming from!” and proceeded to chase them alongside Kiddo#3, his eyes alive with delight as he watched them shimmer and float until something changed and they burst.

The girl across the street, then sixteen, used to love playing bubbles with my kids.

And I like it too, so there you have it. We have one of those electronic bubble machines, but I prefer the wand-and-blow approach because you can experiment with the size, rate of speed, and number of bubbles. Plus, you can catch them again on the wand afterward.

Every time, watching a bubble linger on the air far longer than any of its wand-siblings, I wonder if it ever happened that a bubble never popped, just glided through the upper atmosphere for decades, shimmering and perfect.

Today, though, it’s too hot to blow bubbles outside.

Kiddo#4 brought me the plastic container and said, “Blow bub.” Then, when I didn’t seem to get it, “In baff.”

Babelfish tells me that’s “Mom, I’d like to blow some bubbles with you in the bathroom.”

We’re just back from fifteen minutes of blowing bubbles in the bathroom, on the grounds that the tile floors won’t absorb bubble juice and it probably needed an encounter with soap anyhow.

“Catch,” he kept telling me. “Catch.”

But some things, like bubbles and moments and delight, you really can’t catch. You can grab, but you can’t catch.