Goin’ On A Bear Hunt

This morning my husband told me someone on the neighborhood Facebook page had posted about a neighborhood bear hunt.   The goal was to give the children the motivation to get out and walk around as exercise.   The idea was simple: hide stuffed bears in your front yard for children to see as they walked by on their "hunt."

It was sheer genius, whoever came up with the idea first.   Bears were put out and kept out until seven p.m. or just about dark.   There were bears everywhere.   And people had gotten creative about it too. They hadn't just stuck a bear in a bush or under a tree.   People had created entire scenes with their bears (or other stuffed animals).

Across the street from us was a scene at the beach with bears on a beach towel, decked out in snorkel gear.  Sunscreen was by their side and they both had a can of seltzer water in their paws in a coozie.   There was a porch on our street with two bears having a sleepover.   They were in pajamas on a sleeping bag with a giant game of Jenga between them.

Blake, our sitter next door, who was an avid rock climber, had two bears rappeling down from the second-floor wearing climbing harnesses complete with powder bag.   There were bears in tricycles or other children's toys, bears hidden in all sorts of places and some houses had done things up by putting out quantities of stuffed animals all over.

My daughter wrote a story about it for part of her school work today.   It's interesting from her third-person perspective how the bear hunt went.  

     Today little kids were going to have a bear hunt.  They looked for bears.  These bears were stuffed bears.   The bears were easy and hard to find.   A little girl named Reese put a Christmas bear with Creeper and B. B. 8 in a chair on her front porch.  She also put some bears in some trees.  They were going to go om the bear hunt too.  There was also a tiger on their basketball hoop.
     Reese was blind so her parents and brother named Greyon had to tell her what the bears looked like.
     There were lots of bears.  The bears were everywhere.  People were aloud to put bears out for kids to look for.  But the kids weren't aloud to touch the bears.
     Reese had a dog.  Her dog loved stuffed animals.  Her dog wanted to chew the bears when they saw them somewhere.
     Reese loved the bear hunt.  There were Christmas bears.  Some were Halloween bears.  There were Easter bears.   There were regular bears.  Ther were big bears.   There were even tinny little bears and a special bear on Reese's front yard that said I heart Reese.

The first thing about this story that amazes me is she explains that she's blind.   She doesn't talk much about being blind.  She's still accepting the blindness.  When I read her description I realized that that statement, along with the one about not touching the bears (because of COVID-19) that my daughter went on a walk and had to listen to us tell her what we saw.   She had our words as the only way she could experience the bear hunt—and yet she loved it.

The other thing that impressed me about this story is her ability to end a story by coming full circle and ending with something that gives the story closure.  In this case we come back to her yard in which there is a special bear that happens to have the words, "I heart Reese".  Well, the heart is a picture, not the word, but you get what I mean.   Her bear was the most important bear of all to her.   She's eight-years-old and can finish off a story better than I can after over three thousand blog posts.   Soon enough I'm going to just have her take over here.

The Big Boy Update:  My son found a yoyo the other day.   It must have come from the dollar store or the dime store (if they still existed) because it was terrible.   I thought I had another yoyo and I did find two more after a bit of a hunt, but neither work well and as they are also of the cheap variety and some years old.   He and I watched videos online tonight about on tricks and proper technique.   I haven't told him, but I ordered a Duncan yoyo and we're going to see if we can learn to walk the dog and some other tricks when it arrives in a few days.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was fairly adamant that it should be bears in the bear hunt and nothing else.  We have a lot of stuffed animals and she acquiesced.  There were many kinds of animals in the bear hunt so we weren't alone in branching out from bears alone.