When my dad was a kid his mom was sick of him running around like a maniac in the house and she told him to go outside. Being a compliant little guy, he did without any fuss, but when he wanted to come back inside, the front door was locked. So was the back door. He knocked, rang the door bell, stood outside the windows and screamed, but inside he was not admitted. If I remained unimpressed by this regaling of childhood
Now, some of you may read this and not quite believe that any mother would do this to her child, particularly with today's parenting sensibilities. But if you ever had the pleasure of knowing my grandmother, then you likely aren't surprised. Some aspects of the story might be exaggerated, but this is also the same woman who used to put my dad on a dog runner when he was a toddler so he could run around outside freely without drowning himself in the cow pound, so the locked door story doesn't seem quite out of character.
I can also sympathize a bit with my grandmother. Wild kid running around with a trail of chaos just behind them? What parent doesn't want boot the little hellion out the door and deadbolt it behind them? And while the circumstances that eventually led me to essentially kick E. out of the house one morning were a bit different than those previously mentioned, my sentiments, when you really get down to it, were right on par with my grandma's.
A little bit of outdoor time does a kid good.
I am not a terribly outdoorsy person. I think a lot of this has to do with being one of those wired people who has a difficult time "just being" (something to work on, right?) and so being outside becomes "boring" to me. But I wasn't always like this. Sure, I wasn't a huge outside person as a kid (I'd like to believe that some people are more inclined towards the outdoors than others), but I didn't have a hard time keeping busy once I was out there. There gardens to dig in, creeks to jump into, things to hunt for (though I was never really sure on what the "things" were), forts to build, and during the winter lots of sledding, snow balling, and snowman and snow fort building. I also had the benefit of living in an extremely kid-friendly neighborhood, and while my parents weren't ones to enforce outdoor time very strictly, I had friends whose parents did, so if I wanted to play with someone, I was going to be outside.
But let's fast forward to our little house here in Maine with my sweet little E. She also isn't naturally inclined to go outside. It's almost always my suggestion, and because I rarely want to go outside myself, I don't usually suggest it. But it's always in the back of my mind that she should be outside. And without the benefit of a gang of neighborhood kids to come drag her out, it's up to me to make sure she goes.
In the past, I've sent her out and gone out, too. In theory, this is a great thing. I certainly need more time outdoors as well. But then I'll get bored, or I'll have to attend to something else, or the baby will begin to fuss, and I'll have to go in. Though E. might be playing happily outside, as soon as I decide I need to be indoors, so does she. So, for a long time, our outdoor time had come in small fits and bursts.
Then something occurred to me. E. plays much better on her own. She's a fantastic independent player and can go on for hours, given the chance. I thought about all the outdoor play I had as a child, and while I remember much of it being with friends, virtually none of it was with my parents (who both mastered the skill of being such boring playmates I learned early on to not even ask). Why should things be so different for E.?
So here we were one morning and I looked outside. It was sunny, sort of, and it was reasonably warm (meaning, there wasn't a major risk of frostbite should you choose to venture out). I thought to myself, "Why isn't E. outside playing?" Instead, she was curled up on the couch for a post-breakfast T.V. show, still in her jammies. As soon as the show was done I asked her to go get some socks on, she was going outside.
Without divulging too much information that could later make myself or my daughter look pretty bad, let's just say there was a bit of a fuss, but eventually, E. was standing out of the porch, bundled in her snow things mumbling something about having a mean mama followed by plans to build an igloo. While very tempted to lock the door behind her, I didn't and I went back to whatever it was I had planned to do that morning. E. popped in a couple of times complaining of cold hands or a cold head (which were quickly remedied with the discovery - finally! - of the warmer fleece mittens and a warm scarf wrapped around the head), but all told she played outside that morning, by herself, for far longer than she usually did.
And so it begins. My goal is to have E. outside for at least a half hour every day. For those who are already outside kind of families, this might seem like a pretty paltry goal, but for our fairly housebound crew, it's a pretty big step in the right direction. All it's taken so far is a lot of patience on my part, "good" weather, and the faith that even though we're fairly short on outside play things, E. has the creativity and grit to figure out what do.
And then maybe she can tell me.
