How Will You Save Your Children This Summer?

I will say this: this summer has turned out to be unsuccessful so far, and it does not look like it will get much better. As the school year drew to a close and summer approached, my son even said something like, “Well, I’ll be on summer vacation soon, not that it matters because we can’t go anywhere and something. what to do. ” … “He is nine years old and has to go through those typical summer experiences that he will remember for the rest of his life. Long days at the pool, barbecues with a large family, trips to Ohio to visit their cousins. And all this is impossible.

I was determined to make the most of it. I look around all the time and ask myself, how can I save this? How can I make this summer so that he tells his children about it. In the summer, the pandemic tried to steal, but we held out and even had some fun, working from home and worrying about what the next year would bring.

So, I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far, and then you tell me what you’ve done, and maybe we’ll all leave with a few fresh ideas.

I buy everything I can find outdoors

Finding a heck of something that is outdoors and related to kids is not easy right now. But I decided that right now I would spend more time looking, I would spend more money (within reason) to win something, and I would drive on to pick it up.

Also, I tried to stop saying, “There is no place for that in this house / yard.” Instead, I find a way to make it work. This is how we got an inflatable pool, which is small but big enough . And this is how my (very kind) husband-in-law ended up with a basketball hoop in the driveway because our house has no driveway.

I am stubborn about this. If I cannot find it today, I will look again tomorrow and then the day after tomorrow. And eventually I find one version of something somewhere in my state, and we go after it. I know that time and money are not luxuries that everyone has at the moment, but if you have one or the other, I urge you to persist in looking for small additions. Sheer stubbornness is the only way my son got a new bike a few weeks ago when his old bike broke down. If there was one bike out of stock (anywhere!), I would find it.

We bike to our favorite foods

We usually go to our favorite local place to get ice cream several times over the summer. But this year, when we started cycling in April or May, we realized that this favorite spot was just a few minutes away by bike from our home. We rode our bike and ate a lot of ice cream, that’s what I’m talking about. I may or may not try to see how many different ice cream flavors I can taste before they close in the fall.

Anyway, shortly after this epiphany, we realized that the little hot dog hut we liked wasn’t that far away either, so we started cycling there for some fun, cheap dinner on weekdays. So at least this summer we’ve been biking for hot dogs and ice cream, which doesn’t seem like a terrible legacy in terms of a pandemic.

I ordered a (safer) impromptu weekend

Like everyone else, we had to cancel everything from a day trip to Hershey Park to a beach getaway at a hotel and a big hut in Poconos that we were going to share for a long weekend with a bunch of friends. However, a couple of weeks ago it occurred to me that if we did everything right, we could still leave.

I found a private Airbnb where we could avoid shared places and not even contact the host. It’s on the beach, so we can physically distance ourselves on the sand, or we can sit on the balcony and enjoy the view. We won’t do everything that we usually do, like going to restaurants or walking along the boardwalk. We mainly bring food, drinks and lodging in our small apartment with us, but we will be grateful for a change of scenery.

As a bonus, we used some of the summer camp money back to pay for it, which felt like a weird moment of retribution for losing so much of our normalcy this summer.

Tell us in the comments: what are you doing to save the summer for yourself and your children? Are there new games you’ve invented, or activities you enjoy, or new traditions you’ve started to make you feel like a real summer and not just another three months at home?