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Health & Fitness

Mother Nature's Playground

Come summertime, the great outdoors often provides all the entertainment our kids need.

It must have taken my neighbor half a day to clear all those broken branches and rogue twigs from his manicured lawn. They were so carefully piled off the grass, patiently awaiting the first s’more fire of summer.

Amazingly, it only took the kids roughly ten minutes and two roundtrips to relocate those branches across his neat and green acres and adjacent driveway to my less neat plot. After a few more minutes of planning, stacking and consensus-building, Suburban Survivor Island was born! Don’t you just love summer?

This time of year, those super-sized sporting-goods and craft stores have nothing on Mother Nature. While you and I lie awake at night, listening to the wind howl and hoping the hail doesn’t dent the hood of our car, our kids are likely praying that a tree or two gets knocked down so they can cut the trunk into stools for their forest fort. I know this to be true because the logs that resulted from our tornadoed pine tree two summers ago never made it to the fireplace and instead have been moved multiple times around my yard, currently residing at, you guessed it, pint-sized Survivor Island.

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And like most houses with kids under the age of twelve, we have a monstrously gawdy playset, complete with awning. This spring, as you can imagine, it has been getting a lot of use, but more for the mud pit that has formed beneath it than the swings and ladder above the ground. Not exactly what we envisioned when we sold our soul to buy it but at least the kids are playing near it.

Even pets can’t always trump the gifts of the great outdoors. Fresh off his million-dollar annual check-up, our family fido was quickly pushed aside in favor of slimy worms and a bevy of ants. How could a beagle possibly compete with that? Oh, if only he harbored a tick or two.

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Everywhere you look there are signs that despite the allure of video games, giant toy stores and organized sports, kids, at their core, are still kids. You need to look no further than any little league ball park, where at least one outfielder is picking up dandelions instead of groundballs.

So while I wish nothing but blue skies and balmy breezes for us this summer, my kids won’t be too disapointed with a few torrential worm-producing downpours or branch-scattering storms. 

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