We’d just picked the kids up from the sitter’s house this afternoon.

“This is not the way to home,” Atticus warned us, as Kevin turned the car west, down a state road that would wind a bit through the woods.

“We’re going a different way home,” we said.

As we came upon the still-iced-over pond, I asked Kevin to stop the car for a minute, so I could take some pictures from the open window. The boys both gaped over the frozen pond.

“Is the water stuck, Mommy?” Atticus wanted to know. “Aww.”

Kevin explained how water is more likely to freeze in a pond than a river because it’s not moving as much.

Then, he asked Lucas if he would walk out on the ice.

Lucas said he’d walk out on the edge first to see if it would hold him, and then move out to the center if it did.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Kevin said.

I explained that we can’t be sure from one solid area that the rest is necessarily solid, as well. Just because you step once or twice or ten times without crashing through to the freezing water beneath doesn’t mean your very next step won’t buckle under your weight.

(This is especially true around here in southern Virginia. My dad has old tin-type photographs of early 19th-century people skating on the rivers around here, but it’s not a normal wintertime activity. I don’t think I know anyone who’s ice-skated outside a rink, actually.)

We talked about what would happen if you were to fall in, too, how the thick ice that held your weight would become your crystal prison from underneath, fighting for air and muscle-shocked, searching for the hole that granted you access to the frigid water. What an awful feeling that must be!

And we talked about George Bailey and his friends sledding onto the frozen pond in It’s a Wonderful Life and how his brother would have drowned if not for George, who ended up with a deaf ear. (They both want to watch the movie now. Yay!)

So Kevin hammered in the lesson (“So don’t ever walk across the water”), to which I threw in a clause (“Unless Jesus tells you to walk across the water”), which he cautioned against (“You better make sure it’s Jesus”).

And then we were off to the house from the back way, through our favorite tunnel and on down the highway.