Maybe on a weekend afternoon, you decide you'll all go to the beach, because it's a nice day and your sleep-challenged toddler loves the beach so much, and it's well before his nap time, and you figure he'll toddle around on the beach a lot and tire himself out and fall asleep on the way home. And then you get to the beach, and you turn around and see this.
So you stretch out all your parent-flexibility and decide to let him sleep. You park at the beach and, in whispers, devise a new plan: you'll take back roads all the way from Jenner to Petaluma, where you'll eat dinner at your friends' restaurant. The drive should take you a good ninety minutes, allowing him a nice long nap.
The drive is heartbreakingly scenic and, by necessity, quiet. Every so often one and then both of you peer over your shoulders, nervously, as though you are carrying a backseat full of illegal explosives, and then, seeing closed eyes and flushed face and tiny chest solemnly rising and falling, you grin at each other with relief so profound it borders on hysteria. He wakes up when you're almost through Sebastopol.
So you Google-map for playgrounds between Sebastopol and your friend's restaurant and end up at a beautiful park you've never heard of a few miles from your house. And the slides and sand and open spaces turn your sleepy-faced baby into a blur of joy.
Maybe late that afternoon there is the crispest, roundest moon you have ever seen in the pinkest sky.
Maybe the reddest trees.
The End.
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