One of the things that I love the most about Spring and Summer is being able to take advantage of being outdoors. If you live in a climate where it’s nice and warm all year round I greatly envy you at times. But the payoff is being able to see the full beauty of all four seasons at their finest. Warm Springs with a rebirth of plants and flowers gives way to hot days of Summer and endless days in the pool. Fall creeps around the corner bringing with it a crisp chill in the air and a beautiful change of scenery followed by snow filled Winters. After Fall and Winter our kids are bouncing off the walls (and have been for sometime), so just to be able to get outdoors and run around is a bit of a novelty.
I’ve found that we can take the kids food shopping, or anywhere that requires walking, and magically their legs stop working. They’re more tired and hungry and bored then they’ve ever been, despite feeding them moments before we arrived. What I’ve found though is that same amount of time walking is nothing when we’re outdoors. Our kids are 4, 6, 8 and 13 but we were able to walk 3 miles on a walk without complaining on a few months ago! Not even a peep! That was the first of many walks we’ve taken this year where they’re so busy being outdoors that they ‘forget’ to be tired. I know the same goes for me as well though – put me on a walk in our neighborhood for the gazillionth time and I get tired and bored pretty quickly as well. The best way for me to exercise is to get the whole family out to somewhere new outdoors whether that’s a park or even just a walking path and we all enjoy it so much and don’t even realize we’re getting exercise in as well.
So if you’re like us and your kids kick and scream (literally sometimes) when you take them shopping, take them for a walk to somewhere interesting and try it out. You may just find that if you take the same kid and put them in different surroundings they behave completely differently. And that’s important because in most cases that’s true. And being able to see and understand that gives you insight that your kids choose to behave according to their surroundings. Not because they’re bad kids, or you’re a bad parent. Knowing that hopefully you can get a smidgen of comfort the next time they throw a fit in the store, you can be reminded that yes my kids can behave well if we were somewhere else. Let’s face it, wouldn’t we all be a little cranky being brought to a store where we see tons of things we’d love to buy but every time we ask we’re told no? It’s OK to cut yourself and them some slack, so grab that ice cream and let them get those fruit snacks with all the dyes and sugars. You can always take a walk later to get those jitters out. 😀 The photos shown here are from a walk we took through a park this week.
