When Kids Make Your Summer To Do List

I’m the Queen of the Never Ending To Do List. It’s an awful lot to fit on a beauty pageant sash. I asked my son about his to do list for the summer and the results were entertaining:

1. Play Minecraft

This habit forming technological gem is creative. You use blocks to build houses and other structures. It’ s like Lego, but without the mess or tripping hazard. There are different missions, like assassin missions. Truthfully, most missions are assassin missions, because you can kill entire afternoons sucked into this vortex.

2.Go to the park

He loves picnics because I’m like Yogi Bear and he’s my little sidekick, Booboo. We never go to the park without eating a lot of food and I hate shaving my legs (but I do it, unlike Yogi).  When I was pregnant, I had a red gingham tankini and my dad said I looked like a picnic blanket about to give birth to a bunch of napkins.

3. Head to the beach

Why? Because you can find lots of shells. My kid wants to add googly eyes to them so we can make our own sea creatures. I’m a mom, so at my craftiest, I made a whole person. He is inspired by my creativity and is interested in generating sea life. I’m flattered he wants to walk in my flip-flopped footsteps.  As a littler person, he loved to hunt for turtles and whales from the shore, normally at lakes that contain neither of them. It’s like me looking for lipgloss in my purse. We can hunt for hours and never find what we are looking for, but discover all sorts of other weird stuff in the meantime.

4. Camping

My son likes to go camping because he gets to meet his neighbours. We live in a condo so that’s a pretty quaint custom for him, to sit outside and enjoy the fresh air conversing with someone who lives next door. He loves roasting marshmallows, which is kind of annoying because he never gets that excited when I burn things he intends to eat. He enjoys taking a break from electricity, because the demands of Minecraft can be a lot of responsibility (like cleaning his room, something else he likes to take a break from).

5. Water sports

This from a kid who I have to fight to get into the bathtub: water in lake form is incredibly exciting. He likes boating because it’s less work than swimming, particularly if someone else is paddling. He adapts this approach to most areas of his life, allowing him to live a life of leisure while others do the heavy lifting.

In the end, it’s good to have goals. He’s into setting marshmallows aflame and meeting the neighbours, while I’m just hanging out here trying to find my lip gloss. It’s the little things, truly.