If there has been a long summer of sunny days your children will refuse to go out and play and instead log way more hours of screen time than anyone, even a professional gamer, would think should be allowed.
If all your cajoling has failed and you finally blow your top and unplug the computers and send the pale-faced, spindly-legged children outside into the shocking sunlight they will whine that they don't know what to do (since they aren't well acquainted with their own backyard, having spent the summer blowing up things online).
If you wax nostalgic about backyard campouts when you were a kid your kids actually will find the tent in the garage and then struggle for an hour to put it up all by themselves and then they will haul out heaping armfuls of blankets and pillows and board games and flashlights and snacks and drinks. You will be so pleased and so proud at this point. And thus the god of Murphy's Law will be alerted to descend upon you.
If all of this has happened...it will begin to rain. It will rain and rain and rain for three days. It will rain so long that you make soup and unpack your fuzzy socks and wonder if fall is coming in August just like summer came in March this year.
Then, when it ever does stop raining there will be a soggy mound of wet canvas and blankets and pillows and ruined board games and soggy pretzels that you, yes you, will have to wade into so that it can all be washed and dried and fluffed and put away again.
Why will you have to do it? Because the campout was your idea after all and besides, by now the kids are back inside blowing up things on their computers that you plugged in during the rain.
Backyard farming with my flock of super talented manure composters and bug hunters.
Backyard farming with my flock of super talented manure composters and bug hunters.
