Observation on "beauty"

I do a lot of watching how children learn.  I am always amazed at how they see the world in which they live.  I also noticed that I don't always understand what joy they see and get from the things that they do.  So, I decided to push myself and try to see what the children see and feel when it comes to the mud kitchen.
Well today, I planned to take on the mud kitchen and see what is it about that space.  When I look at it, it's just mud and more mud.  My first step was to take a small group and maybe clean it up a little.  The more I said "let's pull this table out and clean it, or "should we sweep this floor" I noticed again that the children were very unaware of all of my hang-ups about the mud kitchen.  They just wanted to play.
So, I threw in the towel and just watched them as they shared with me a bucket of dirt and a shovel and when they came to me with a bowl full of dirt, grass and weed flowers and called it a Strawberry cake.
I began to see the beauty  and thought that I would like to be a part of that joy.  I discovered that "beauty is all around us, sometimes it takes the most simplest things like mud and children to see how beautiful things can truly be."   Ms. Juanita