One of my favorite things about being a parent is having a
good excuse to re-live the most fun parts of my own childhood. Adults aren’t
supposed to do things like go down slides, or jump in bouncy houses, or ride
roller coasters, or make homemade play-doh – but if we’re doing it with our
kids, it’s okay. So my kids are my excuse for breaking out the water guns, and putting
marshmallows in my hot chocolate, and going to the amusement park. Or, in the
case of today, my kids are my excuse for going to a farm and feeding the
animals, going for a hay ride, making spin art, sticking my head through
painted pictures and having my photo taken, and running through a field picking
apples.
Today, my husband and I took our two kids apple picking.
At the ages of 2 and 4, had that been all we did, they would
still have had a wonderful time. They loved walking through the tall grass
between the rows of trees, they loved carefully examining each apple to be sure
it was unblemished and evenly red, they loved twisting the apple off the
branch, they loved dropping the apples into the bag with a satisfying THUNK, they
loved touching and smelling and looking and listening. But because Mummy and
Daddy remembered all the other fun things you can do at a farm from doing them
when WE were kids, we did so much more than just pick apples!
Making spin art brought back a sudden, deep-buried memory of
a bulletin board in my sister’s room bearing a piece of spin art and a signed
photograph of Mr. Rogers. I hadn’t thought about either of those things in more
than 30 years, but seeing my kids’ creations brought it back like it was
yesterday.
But most of all, I remember the fun of spending time with my
family, all together. I remember all of us singing in the car on the way to the
orchard, I remember holding my dad’s hand in one hand and a bag of donuts in
the other as we waited to pay, I remember my mom hoisting me up in her arms at
the end of an exhausting day running through the apple trees.
And I hope that 30 or 40 years from now, my children are
remembering the same happy memories of their childhoods.
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