A federal naked offense

My kids spend 80% of their day half naked. Don't get me wrong - I (...usually...) get them dressed in the morning. But being a mountain goat is hot work. As is practicing hula hooping with your fake hula hoop. And playdough always finds its way into the fibers of shorts-clad bottoms. And shirts get in the way of making long straight lines of stuffed animals that stretch from bedrooms to the downstairs kitchen.

So they strip. And I just let them. Mostly because I'm lazy but also because I remember being a kid and not thinking twice about going out to stretch out on the front lawn after a summer evening bath in nothing but underwear and a pajama shirt and never thinking, Huh, I'm ten. Perhaps this is strange? but rather Yeah...this is great! until my dad takes a picture and I discover it years later and think it's cute until I realize that the date on the back should have made it strange but for some reason I didn't care at the time even though I was undressed on my front lawn while neighbor kids played Sardines and Kick the Can around me... Yeah.

But I was half naked. And it was all good...apparently.

So when we drove to Santa Fe this spring and found some remote hot springs, I didn't think twice about letting the kids skinny dip as we had no swim suits along.

And when we visited Little Missouri Falls in Arkansas this weekend and the kids wanted to swim in the pools at the base of the waterfall but I was too lazy to make the hike/rock scramble back to the car to retrieve their suits... well, okay, yes, we did have second thoughts about this one. It was in the Ouachita National Forest, and we were fairly sure that federal nakedness was a graver offense than non-federal nakedness. But, shoot, it was Arkansas. No one was around as we had driven miles and miles of dirt road to find this gem, so we let the kids strip. And they spent the better part of the next hour swimming, collecting rocks, and squealing with delight at the schools of fish around them...all while butt naked. And I spent the better part of that hour draining my camera battery dry.

And it was all good. And pretty much par for the course in their little, half naked lives.