Boys and dirt

What is it with boys and dirt? Or is it just my boys and dirt? They are obsessed with it, they find it, it finds them. I just don't get it.

As one of two daughters of a fastidiously clean (and I really mean fastidiously clean) mother, dirt is just not something I have had a lot to do with in my daily life. I don't mean that to sound like I am some sort of princess - what I mean is that I inherited (albeit a watered down version) my mother's liking and tendency towards cleanliness and order, I work in an office, and as a general rule I don't tend to come across many opportunities to get dirty. The dirt I am referring to is not just the ordinary scruffiness of little boys, I am referring to seeing a patch of dirt, a garden bed, a pot plant, a bit of mud, and moving immediately towards it and covering themselves with it. They love it, and do it without fail.

It is true that at the moment they have opportunities to get amongst the dirt thing all around them - we have a relatively new patch of lawn that we have recently top-dressed, we have a new sandpit for them to play in which results in sand everywhere, we have relatively new garden beds, and our local park has recently developed a very large, dry mound of dirt right near the children's playground - but the gravitation towards it just amazes me.