That's Ian and his friends having fun. Imagine that.
This past Sunday my son’s little league baseball team had an end-of-season party to celebrate their mutual love of baseball. We hosted the party at the park and had loads of food, trophies, and Cracker Jacks on hand.
You know what we didn’t have though? An overpriced bounce house. Or a video game rental truck. Or pony rides.
Nope. This last Sunday our poor kids had to rely on a $10 soccer ball and a bucket of water balloons for entertainment.
And they had a blast.
I sat on my lawn chair watching as the boys and their siblings did what God intended: run around barefoot on the grass in the sunshine chasing one another while sqealing in delight.
I thought about how we, as parents, so often overcomplicate things with our desire to please our children; how easily we get caught up in the false belief that if there isn’t a giant bounce house perched somewhere on the lawn, our party will be a disaster and our child and his friends will just die of boredom.
But don’t you see? We’ve created a monster, and it’s filled with hot air and costs about $200 bucks a pop to maintain — when all it really takes is stepping back a little and letting our kids rediscover what it means to play together and entertain one another.
Listen, I love a good bounce house and pony ride as much as the next mom. I love cotton candy machines and I love showing up at a party I didn’t have to pay for that has all three of these things. But I’m tired of trying to keep up with the latest party fad guaranteed to provide my sons with hours of fun when they already know how to have fun. Turns out it’s far less complicated than I thought.
On Sunday, my son and his friends didn’t notice the coordinated team color tablecloths I had set out, or the Pinterest-inspired concession stand decorations I had put together. They weren’t overwhelmed by the fact that I had cut the napkins to look like home plate, or that their trophies were taller than last year’s.
They just didn’t care.
Because they were too busy having fun playing one last game of baseball together as a team, barefoot and free — kids vs. parents.
And I didn’t care that THEY didn’t care. Because I was too busy cheering them on.
And for the record, I’ve never seen a bounce house that could make a bunch of kids — and adults — as happy as we all were that afternoon.
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Kids don’t need bounce houses to have fun is a post from: OC Moms: The Mom Blog
