The other night my family and I decided to have a picnic in the back yard for dinner. This was something we’ve never done before, but we are making it a point to get outside and do more things as a family.
I tend to overcomplicate everything and make family outings more elaborate than they need to be; sometimes because I try to have a picture perfect outing, we never even get around to half of them. My husband on the other hand is more of a doer and finds ways to make life simpler. So in following his example we just took some blankets outside and ate dinner in the backyard.
We live in a townhouse right now and our backyard is super small and shared with the neighbors, so I’ve always overlooked it and never really thought we could have fun out there. But I am trying to learn to be content and find joy where we are in life. Instead of getting caught up in wishful thinking about the beautiful backyard we might have one day I decided to enjoy my life right at this moment – tiny yard and all!
I searched the other night on pinterest trying to come up with some fun summer activities to do with the kids outside. Of course almost every idea that I saw required a significant amount of prep work for me. Isn’t that how most pinterest idea are? They cause moms to lose their mind and work twice as hard for an activity that their kids don’t even really care about to begin with.
As we were sitting outside on the blanket eating our dinner I kept looking around and wracking my brain about what fun activities could we do. I kept asking my husband “How can we make this experience even better for the kids?” And in that moment I realized that I was doing it again. I was getting caught up in overcomplicating things instead of just keeping it simple and enjoying my time with my family.
My husband simply looked at me and said “Just let them explore.” I didn’t really like that answer. I thought to myself explore what? Our backyard is about 10 x 10 with a few trees, how much exploring and fun could they possibly do? He then looked at our three year old and asked him to find a yellow leaf. There weren’t many so he had to search and low and behold he found one. Then my husband looked at me and said, “See – it’s that easy.”
So I decided to take his advice and just let the kids explore. My 3 year old and one year old had the best time. We spent 2 hours outside just having fun. We explored and looked at the trees, the leaves and the dirt. We played tag. I ran around the yard carrying my son while he flapped his arms and pretended to be a bird. We laughed and played and it was SO SIMPLE.
I realized that my kids don’t need the latest toy or an overly complicated activity from pinterest to be happy- they just need time with us. We need to give our kids chances to use their imagination instead of doing all the imagining for them.
“Imagination is where your child lives. When you play with them you enter their world.”
At the end of the night our hearts were full and the boys were covered in dirt. It was a pretty perfect evening with my family and I almost ruined it by trying to make it pinterest perfect. The pressure we put on ourselves of wanting our kids to have a “good” childhood and thinking that can only come from pinterest worthy activities is just false pressure.
We need to let go of the unrealistic expectations we place on ourselves and just enjoy the simplicity of our kids.
