Doin' Nothin'

I haven’t checked a single thing off my “to do” list this week.

I keep drawing arrows to tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

But it’s okay. My cousin and her two little boys were visiting us from North Carolina. This was a much anticipated event, so my kids and I have been doing things that we don’t usually do – all in the name of fun.

We had no itinerary – no plans at all, really – for five days. This is not normal for me!

We stayed up late and spent entire days doing nothing.

When we were tired of doing nothing, we did things like playing with Legos at the library, going to Sunday School and playing on our “killer death swing.”  We went for spins on the motorcycle. We had friends over for dinner. We went to The Natural History Museum, toured the “Parade the Oval” recycled art tent at Wade Oval downtown and ate dinner at Don Tequila (and we ordered three cheese dips!)

We went to the park, ate pepperoni rolls from Great Harvest, visited Squire's Castle and jumped to our hearts’ content in the giant “Jumpy Thing” we rented for Adelaide’s birthday party.

We danced through a milkweed blizzard. We spent two mornings at the beach, looking for beach glass and building sand castles. We went fishing and canoeing at Hidden Lake.

The kids goofed off, ran around the yard, dug in the mud with sticks and shovels, told goofy jokes, played board games and Donkey Kong and roasted marshmallows.

In short, we had a fantastic time.

Summer seems like a pretty good time to let certain things go. I mean, getting nothing done might really be getting something (more important) done anyway: sitting in the sun and soaking up life.

Sometimes it seems like I am ruled by my to-do list.

But this week I didn’t miss it at all.

This summer, I hope we can all toss our lists aside and have at least a few days to do "nothin'."


--from my 6/7/13 post for www.mentorpatch.com