There is a particular sound a house makes in spring, and it is the sound of children who have been indoors approximately eleven minutes too long. You know the one. It starts as a hum, becomes a negotiation, and ends with someone wearing a colander and refusing to discuss it.

The good news is that the Downs in spring is practically built for small people. Everything is soft, everything is blooming, and the light stays long enough that you can run them ragged and still get them home before supper. These are the outings that have kept my own three upright and mostly cheerful this season. A note before we begin: pack a change of clothes for each child, and one for yourself. You will think this is excessive. You will be wrong.

1. Low and slow broom lessons over the fern meadows

A child’s first broom ride should be no higher than a kitchen chair and no faster than a determined goose. The fern meadows past Millhaven are perfect for it. They are soft to land on, flat enough that you can see trouble coming, and wide enough that a small person cannot get into much of it. If you do not own a training broom, the Downs Granary keeps a few on the lending shelf by the door.

Start them hovering. Let them be proud of hovering. The zooming comes later, and honestly, too soon for most of us.

2. Tadpole counting at Brindle Lake

The shallows below the Brindle footbridge fill up with tadpoles this time of year, and a child with a jar and a mission is a child who is not, for one blessed hour, taking the house apart. Bring a jar with a wide mouth, count what you catch, and put every last one back before you leave. The counting is the point. The putting back is the lesson.

And keep one eye on the deeper water. Now and again, if the morning is still and you are quiet and lucky, the lake’s kelpie will surface near the far reeds. Do not chase it and do not call to it, just look. To see the kelpie even once is a magical gift, the kind of thing a child carries for the rest of their life, and most folk go a lifetime in the Downs without the privilege.

3. A morning at the Beastiary

If you can get a place on the visitors’ list, a supervised morning at Grandma Windward’s sanctuary is worth a dozen indoor afternoons. The little ones get to feed the baby griffins and pegasi, which is exactly as messy and as marvelous as it sounds. Keep them calm and slow, mind the beaks and the hooves, and let them watch. There is no faster way to teach a child patience than asking them to stand still while a hungry griffin chick decides whether to trust the hand that holds its breakfast.

They will ask about the unicorns. Everyone always asks about the unicorns. But no one gets to see the unicorns, not even the grown ups, because they are far too fragile for visitors. Explaining this to a child is its own small lesson: that some things are kept safe precisely by being left alone, and that a kindness can look, at first, like a disappointment.

4. Pressing wildflowers

For the rainy mornings, and yes, even in a wet spring like this one we get our share. Send them out between showers to gather whatever is blooming along the lane, then press it flat between the heaviest books in the house. The reading roundup pages work nicely for this and are, I would argue, finally being put to their highest use. In a week you have keepsakes. In the meantime you have twenty quiet minutes, which is the real prize.

5. Volunteer at the tinker’s workshop

Note that I said volunteer, not meddle. The fairies who work out of the tinker’s workshop have a great deal to do this time of year, coaxing the buds open and threading warmth back into the soil, and they are glad of small willing hands. Let the little ones help wind the spring-springs, sort the seed packets, and carry the dew jars without spilling, and they will learn that the season does not simply arrive on its own but is brought in, gently and on purpose, by someone who cared enough to do the work. Most of the workshop folk are happy to have the company. Ask first. Bring a thank you.

6. Building sprite houses at the wood’s edge

Give them a patch of ground where the meadow meets the trees and a free afternoon, and watch what they make of twigs, moss, fern fronds, and a few smooth stones. Whether anything actually moves in is not the question. The question is what they build, and what they tell you about it afterward, which will be a great deal.

7. The Millhaven market scavenger hunt

Hand each child a short list before you go in: something yellow, something that smells nice, a vendor who will tell you a story, the best jam of the morning. Suddenly the market is an expedition instead of a errand, and they are pulling you toward stalls instead of toward home. You will spend a little more than you meant to. You always do. The jams this year are worth it.

8. Making Nana Ferrow’s honey cake

At first this one sounds like an indoor adventure, and I will grant you it ends at a kitchen counter. But getting there is the outing. The recipe calls for three eggs, and somebody small has to go and find all three, which on a good morning means a patient hunt through the henhouse and a negotiation with the hens that the child will lose with great dignity. And the honey must be Dorran honey, nothing else will do, which means the long walk up the ridge above Brannock Crossing and the truly brave part of the whole adventure: begging a jar of it off Dorran himself, who does not waste words on children any more than he does on anyone else. Send them up with coin in one pocket and good manners in the other. They will come home with honey, or they will come home with a story about why they did not, and at this age the two are worth about the same.

None of this requires much. A jar, a borrowed broom, a free afternoon, a willingness to do a load of washing you had not planned on. The Downs gives you the rest. Send them out into it while the sending is easy, because they are small for such a short while, and the spring never feels long enough.

Posy Hartwell writes about family life and the small seasons of the Downs. She has three children, two of whom are currently outside, and would like that noted for the record.