How Are You Salvaging This Summer for Your Kids?

How Are You Salvaging This Summer for Your Kids?

I’ll say it: This summer has been a bummer so far, and it’s not looking like it’s going to get much better. As the school year wound down, and summer approached, my son would even say things like, “Well, I’m going to be on summer vacation soon, not that it matters because we won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything.” He’s at an age—nine years old—where he should be having those quintessential summer experiences that he’ll look back on the rest of his life. Long days at the pool, barbecues with the extended family, trips to Ohio to visit his cousins. And none of it is possible.

I’ve been determined to make the most of it. I keep looking around, asking myself, how can I salvage this? How can I make this a summer that he’ll tell his kids about. The summer the pandemic tried to steal, but we persevered, and we even had some fun among all the working from home and worrying about what the next year would bring.

So I’ll tell you what I’ve done so far and then you can tell me what you’ve done and maybe we’ll all walk away with a few fresh ideas.

I buy all the outdoor stuff I can find

Finding freaking anything that is outdoors and kid-related right now is tough. But I have decided that right now, I will spend more time searching, I will spend more money (within reason) to score something, and I will drive farther to pick it up.

Also, I have tried to stop saying, “There’s no room for that in this house/yard.” Instead, I find a way to make it work. That’s how we ended up with an inflatable pool that isn’t big but is big enough. And that’s how my (very gracious) in-laws ended up with a basketball hoop in their driveway because our home lacks a driveway.

I am stubborn about it. If I can’t find it today, I look again tomorrow, and then the day after that. And eventually, I find one version of something somewhere in my state, and we go get it. I know that time and money are not luxuries everyone has right now, but if you have at least one or the other, I encourage you to be stubborn about finding the little extras. Sheer stubbornness is the only way my son got a new bike a few weeks ago when his old bike broke. If there was one bike in stock somewhere (anywhere!), I was going to find it.

We bike to our favorite foods

Usually we go out for ice cream at our favorite local place a few times during the summer. But this year, once we started biking a bunch in April or May, we realized that this favorite spot was but a short bike ride from our home. We’ve biked to it and have eaten a lot of ice cream, is what I’m saying. I may or may not be attempting to see how many different flavors of ice cream I can try before they close in the fall.

Anyway, it wasn’t long after that epiphany that we realized the little hot dog shack we like also isn’t terribly far and so we started biking over there for fun, cheap weeknight dinners. So if nothing else, this summer will be the one in which we biked and biked for hot dogs and ice cream, which doesn’t seem like a terrible legacy as far as the pandemic goes.

I booked a (safer) impromptu weekend away

Like everyone else, we had to cancel everything from a day trip to Hershey Park to a beach vacation in a hotel and a big cabin in the Poconos that we were going to share for a long weekend with a bunch of friends. It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago, though, that if we did it right, we could still go away.

I found a private Airbnb in which we could avoid any common areas and wouldn’t even need to come into contact with the host. It’s on the beach, so we can physically distance ourselves on the sand, or we can sit on our balcony and enjoy the view. We won’t do all the usual stuff we’d do, like going out to restaurants or walking the boardwalk. We’ll mostly bring our own food and drinks and hunker in our little condo, but we’ll be grateful for a change of scenery.

As a bonus, we used a chunk of refunded summer camp money to pay for it, which felt like a weird little moment of retaliation against having lost so much normalcy this summer.

So tell us in the comments: What are you doing to salvage the summer for you and your kids? Are there new games you’ve invented or activities you’re enjoying or new traditions you’ve started to help this feel like a true summer and not just three more months of being stuck at home?

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