By now, your summer should be sizzling like a beef patty over a bed of hot charcoal.
The temperatures are high, the grass is slightly crunchy, and thunderstorms keep
showing up for dinner. Kids are desperate to squeeze every ounce of cool out of
the pool and play out of the day.
I don’t want your kids to overhear me, so lean in toward the computer and I’ll
whisper an obvious truth: Vacation is nearly over!
But here at Summer Celebrations, we still have four more holidays to enjoy.
There’s still plenty of fun left for your family. There’s still
time to let summer be what it should be.
What should summer be?
In her wonderful article for Time magazine last summer, entitled “Free
the Children,” Nancy Gibbs writes that summer is the time when kids have to
“adjust to days measured out not in periods or practices but in large clumps
of opportunity called Morning and Afternoon.” It’s free time, but many kids
don’t know how to use their freedom. We strive to keep our kids from getting
bored, but she calls boredom “the imagination’s dusty wilderness [that] is worth
crossing if you want to sculpt your soul.”
The wise parent can help her child across that wilderness with a well-timed
activity that can get the imagination up and running. That’s what Summer
Celebrations are for. These are meant to bring the family together to get ideas
flowing. (Any of the activities we’ve posted for June
and July can be used, even if the
holiday has passed.) Whether they call you to gather around the table or amble
outside, these are meant to be simple, fun ways to encourage creativity in your
children.
And if you get your child’s creativity humming, a hot summer day becomes
one more treasured chance to draw, to write, to invent, to explore.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
