When I was a kid, summers were unplanned. This sometimes meant stretches of excruciating boredom, but for the most part it was pretty heavenly. In my memory, those summers--I am speaking here of the period from when I was six to, say, 12-- stretched out for impossibly long periods, and they constitute a kind of golden era of my childhood. My sister and I woke up each day with no particular plan, no camp to go to, no program of self improvement. This left us free to explore the neighborhood and do things like perfect the art of making mud pies and bring them into the house. We attempted to dig our way to China via the back yard; we created elaborate "pretend like" games in the back yard with the rooms of our "house" marked off with sticks. We read a lot of books--my mom took us to the College Park Library, which I recall as a dark place with heavenly air conditioning and shelves of endless delight where I made the acquaintance of Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" series. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we once made catnip tea with some catnip leaves we found in my mom's cupboard, tasted the results and decided it tasted worse than ditch water, and then had the brilliant insight to tie the used tea bag around the cat's neck. (Note to file: cats can, if sufficiently motivated and while under the influence of a mind-altering substance, climb a tree backwards--and no, I would not encourage my own children to do this.) There was also Vacation Bible School (we were given no choice, and besides my mom was the director) and ironing, which was one of those chores that never ever went away. And we watched TV. Every day at 11 it was "Hollywood Squares," followed by re-runs of "Father Knows Best" at 11:30; this was followed by the "News at Noon" on WSB-TV, which was followed at 12:30 p.m. by "Armchair Playhouse," which was a two-hour movie, usually a re-run of some 50s fare. Obviously, the fact that I can recall this schedule in minute detail 40 years later tells you that I lost entire brain lobes to the Boob Tube--and that, I tell my kids, is why mommy is not a Nobel Prize winner today.
Anyway, we have been experimenting with this approach to child rearing around her for the past three weeks, and I can report mixed results. On a day-to-day basis, life has been pretty free-form: lots of breakfast eaten in front of the TV, lots of running of mundane errands, lots of time at the community pool, lots of playdates. It's been fun to wake up each day and think, What shall we do?--and to do some of the things that are on my list of Neat Things to Do That I'll Probably Never Get Around to. Suzanne and I explored the Aquatic Gardens in Washington, D.C., which is one of the city's least-known botanical treasures; we got there early one morning and watched the lotuses open. Heavenly. Rebecca and I have gone to a family wedding in Alabama, and tasted the dubious joys of wilting in our best clothes in 90-degree Birmingham heat because the bride must've decided sometime last winter that the Birmingham Botantical Gardens would be a lovely spot for a reception. (Not in June, honey--at least, not in Alabama.) We've gone paddle-boating at the local park. We've watched the Fourth of July fireworks on the lawn of a local office building, camped out in lawn chairs. The kids have been berry-picking; we've explored a local horse farm. We've hosted sleepovers. We set up the sprinkler in the back yard and ran through it; we had a picnic. I have introduced my oldest daughter to ironing, carrying on a mother-daughter tradition (unlike my mother, though, I don't make her iron her dad's shirts; it's pillowcases and napkins only).
But in the interest of journalistic objectivity, I must report also that there have been days from hell, when the kids seemed to take sadistic delight in discovering every single one of each other's psychic buttons and using this knowledge to inflict sophisticated types of psychological torture, usually while in the back seat of the minivan. There has been a fair amount of screaming, "I'M BORED!!" in tragic tones, and more than once I have gone upstairs to lie down with a headache, exactly the way I remember my own mother doing when we were kids. These past three weeks have also been a brief experiment to see if my kids could ever OD on TV, and the answer is: no. Their capacity for endless hours watching "Fairly Odd Parents" and "Spongebob Squarepants" and "Drake and Josh" is exceeded only by their memory of every plot twist in every episode, because they have seen them all before at least six times. My 10-year-old, in particular, is capable of spending the whole day parked in front of the tube--an amount of TV viewing which many an elderly stroke patient in a nursing home would have trouble tolerating, and they have an excuse.
On the whole, my conclusion is that there's something to be said for Quantity Time, as opposed to Quality Time. That picnic in the back yard, for instance, would never have happened if I'd planned it; it was a wildflower of a moment that just grew out of the circumstances at hand: the day was gorgeous, the kids were out there playing already and I decided at the last minute to order pizza for dinner. But Quantity Time is a delight which, like really good chocolate, a person should taste only in limited quantities.
Anyway, the kids start camp next week. THANK. GOD.