The camping gear that you use for your yearly campouts with your family needs regular check up throughout the year; you can do this by bringing them out to the yard every weekend, if possible. It should be no problem since you can just assign the task to the kids while you relax in one of your cheap hammocks while supervising them.
The kids have always loved the practice tent pitching as a weekend activity, because they also use the tent as an addition to their playhouse out in the yard. The youngest boy especially loves the tent pitching in the yard as he then plays as the Indian Chief with his costume, fantasizing he is the great Indian warrior and as a neighbor to your girls who stay in the playhouse.
These simulation campouts in the yard with the kids on weekends have become a regular activity for them, as it is play for them at the same time. You and the wife have just been watching them while she does some knitting while you have your beer while lying on the camping hammocks. The little Indian chief especially has been entertaining you with his antics and providing the fun to everyone in the family.
The weekend campouts in the yard serve as an occasion for the kids to be away from the computer games that have always been their off-hours relaxation during the schooldays. The children need the sun and the exercise four their health. The computer has somehow made them lazy in their physical games, so you did right in decreeing that weekends are for the outdoor games, and that there will absolutely be no computer games while they are out outdoors.
When the kids suggest that you sleep out in the yard for the weekend, give the approval immediately, and ask the little Indian chief to accommodate his sisters in his Indian tent. You and Mom may just spend the night on the best camping hammocks. You can just use your thick jackets if it gets a little cold towards the dawn hours, or you can also crawl in to the little Indian chief’s tent.
Or you can curl up with Mom on the bedrolls while you watch the stars above and recalling your early honeymoon years when you were just starting your family. You can do that after the kids have retired to their own sleeping areas in the little Indian’s tent. They were all around you earlier on the camping hammock listening to the bedtime stories of your days as a child. The kids have always been enjoying listening to them, although they doubt that there was no TV in your childhood as the stories you have been telling them seem to be the same stories they are viewing on TV now.
That should not be surprising at all, since the creators of these TV cartoons may jus t be basing their stories on the ones they also heard from their moms and dads in their own childhood years ago. |