Restless Kids and Rainy Days

This is a rewrite of an article that 
appeared in The Virginia Beach Sun, August 24, 1988.


I think sometimes the biggest overriding factor in raising kids might just be luck.

As the former governor of Maine, James B. Langley’s mother told him at his graduation, “Despite all the honors, there is one circumstance more than any other that will determine the turnout at your funeral. And that will be the weather.

That was luck Mrs. Langley was talking about.

Take summer vacations—please!

Our kids, Jessica, eight; Danielle, six; and Dylan, four were all at the age where they were pretty much confined to the house, the yard and the immediate neighborhood. Kathy and I knew that we would have to have some kind of a plan going into the summer.


I was going to try and take them swimming a lot in the evenings. She was going to visit parks and take daytrips to the beaches during the day. We enrolled them in the library’s summer reading program. We bought them some coloring books and some new puzzles.

For a while it appeared that we had done all the right things. The summer reading programs went well for about a week. Jessica was reading about five or six books a day. Danny and Dylan were listening attentively to stories about elephants that lived in houses, beagles that bought bagels, and alligators with personality problems.But then everything started to fizzles.

The reading was down to a book every couple of days, television was starting to mooch in on so-called "quality time,” and possessions were slowly becoming objects of contention rather than sources of entertainment.

The dog days of summer peaked a lot earlier than we had expected—on Fourth of July weekend. That is when the children were so bad or so bored—take your pick—that we didn’t even go to the fireworks show. Instead we put them to bed early and asked ourselves that old question, “What are we doing wrong?” We didn’t know. We thought we had been doing all the right things.

But then a funny thing happened. That week I started building an addition to our patio. Dylan discovered that it is nice to fool around with hammers and screwdrivers and especially retractable tape measures. But what was really nice is that the three of them discovered that there was almost no limit to what they could build with scrap 2x4 and 2x6s.

Using the basic theme of their favorite television show, the Thundercats, they built fantastic castles and dreadful dungeons, filled aplenty with trap doors, secluded rooms and secret escape passages. They did this morning till night for maybe a week, perhaps longer.

Somehow, during this period they slipped out of the construction mode and became instant gourmet cooks. For several days the wood went untouched as the three of them worked diligently at their benches making concoctions like strawberry chocolate pie, blueberry salad, and cherry soup.

While in the process of picking leaves, grass, and roots for the salads, soups, and desserts, they turned over the right brick and became re-acquainted with their old friend, the rolly-polly.

Now, I grew up calling them potato bugs. And I don’t even know what other people call them or even what their correct name is, but they’ve always been rolly-pollys with my kids; and more importantly, are always good for several days of collecting, observing, and God knows what else.

It was hard with the heat that summer to remember the last good rain, but eventually we had a couple of days of rain during that period that seemed to come at just the right time—which is to say, just about the time the last rolly-polly was frightened away.

And with the rain came the mud, and for a few days despite our constant protests, everything they did seemed to revolve around the mud. Although our protests were persistent, they were by no means forceful, because, truth be told, Kathy and I were very much aware that somehow our luck was continuing to hold up. A few dirty clothes were a small price to pay for hours of fun and contentment.

Around this time, Georgie, the cat that had wandered into our lives back in January, and then wandered out, suddenly wandered back in. She eventually earned permanent membership in our family—a status attained when she got her own shot record and an entry under the heading Terrana family medical expenses.

If that didn’t make her a family member, I don’t know what would. At any rate she was back and the kids watched her eat, teased her when they shouldn’t have and annoy her when she tried to sleep under the picnic table.

We found a baby bird one night learning how to fly and that was good for a while. And we certainly had not counted on the lightning bugs every night, although we did draw the line at bringing them into the house.

We didn’t know how long it would continue but we were confident. I knew the rolly-pollys would be moving back again and low and behold I was right. And, in time, the wood scraps began to find their way back into the yard, again. All that in addition to the cat and a little more rain and we knew everything was going to work out. I guess the credit goes to the kids. But a little luck sure didn’t hurt.