It’s already started.
“That’s SO BORING!! What are we going to do? I’m BORED.”
After a weekend full of activity, god forbid, they have an hour where they have to find something to do for themselves. Miss E has already started asking “What are we going to do today?”
They are about to learn that sometimes the answer is NOTHING.
Gasp.
Oh sure, we have a few weeks of camp planned and a trip or two to the beach, but there will be afternoons where I turn on the hose and sit in the yard with a book. There will lots of days with no TV, no LeapPads, no iPhones and they will have to dig into those eleventy billion toys that never get played with and figure. it. out.
And if they don’t, I can easily find something for them to do…like wash windows, scrub baseboards (a task even I don’t do) and mop the kitchen floor.
I’m always amazed at how quickly kids pick up the word bored. It doesn’t matter that we’ve just gotten home from a play date or the playground, they can easily proclaim their boredom within seconds of not having anything to do. I can offer up coloring books, playdough, paint and water buckets and someone will still sigh at me.
As a parent, I would kill for the opportunity to be bored. Wouldn’t you? Oh to have an hour or two where nothing was planned and you had to just create something to do. I can’t remember the last time I was bored.
Of course I remember those days. I remember telling my mother over and over again how there was NOTHING to do.
This summer my children will learn to be bored. They will learn that the two of them can have far more fun with no defined activity than anything I could possibly come up with.
They already know how to do this. They just don’t know it.
They’ve been playing for the past hour while I folded laundry and typed out this post. I hear squeals of delight, a prince proclaiming his victory, a daddy helping his baby be a princess and Grover and Elmo having an epic battle. I have no idea how messy it is upstairs, but I don’t really care.
Next time they’re bored I’ll ask them to clean up.
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