For card-carrying adults, Saturday mornings are nothing like the sugar-cereal/morning cartoon induced stupor of childhood. Saturday mornings now are usually a swirl of getting people to the right places and buying/washing/cleaning all necessities for the upcoming week. In other words, they’re no damn fun AT ALL.

Except for yesterday morning, when something completely wacky happened. My neighbor built the world’s longest slip and slide on the slope leading down to the river. He used a 200 foot by 16 foot sheet of plastic his grown son ordered online just for that very purpose. They rigged up a sprinkler at the top and a garden hose midway to keep the plastic wet, and poured Palmolive over the whole thing to make it slippery. By the time the kids and I went down there to check it out, the 20 kids sliding up and down the hill were a sudsy mess. (Note to two sets of grandparents: The slide did NOT end in the river.)

My kids hung back for awhile, until they recognized some kids from their school. Turns out Girl goes to school with my neighbor’s grandson. Boy soon fell in with a pack of boys and before I knew it, they were all tumbling down the hill, on tubes, pool floats and bare stomachs, over and over. I called Boy’s best friend who lives a few streets over, and he showed up in his bathing suit, ready for action. The rest of the day, my kids kept saying, “Man, that was fun!”

It was the closest thing to sledding my Texas-bred kids have ever experienced. And the best redneck slip and slide ever. Sometimes there are advantages to living outside the homeowner association zone.