Columnist Adair Lara is the author of The Granny Diaries (Chronicle Books, 2007), a satiric guide to grandparenting. She is a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, and lives in San Francisco with her husband, three blocks from the grandchildren.
So the grandkids have been over a lot this summer. They are the only enrollees here at Camp Bobbie. (They call me, their grandma, "Bobbie.") While all of their friends are on a perpetual-motion machine all summer – two weeks with the family to Maine, followed by soccer camp, Lego camp, Mandarin Chinese camp, and the like — my granddaughters, ages six and eight, are here at my house in San Francisco, at Camp Boring Bobbie, where I'm busy remodeling my kitchen, putting four kinds of yellow paint on the wall and trying to figure out things like whether the sink should have a rear drain or a central drain.
I feel as if I should be doing more with them than just letting them tool around the house, reading Judy Moody books, painting footstools, and building sleds out of laundry baskets that are drawn by stuffed dogs tied to them with twine. There's a digital-music camp starting up at the rec center up the block, and I keep thinking I should sign the girls up for it, or at least stop studying quartz countertop samples long enough to assign them some spelling words or something.
Whose Problem Is It?
Then I remember something: My mother never entertained a kid in her life. She had no lessons to drive us to. No playdates. No camps. There was no "self-improvement" in our house growing up, and certainly no talk of children's self-esteem. Modern parenting, essentially, had not yet been invented.
In the summer, my mother's policy was that a kid in the house was a kid running up the light bill. We had 90 days in which we had nothing to do except what we thought up ourselves. Sometimes I'd whine to my mother, "There's nothing to do," as she turned another page in her library book, the cellophane cover crackling. (She had no email to check, no kids to drive around.)
"You could clean your room," she'd tell me. "That would be something to do."
My siblings and I were often bored – by the middle of summer, the appearance of a meter reader could set off a stampede of kids down to shady Lagunitas Road — so I invented clubs and tried to get the neighborhood kids to join. I practiced standing on my head with my feet against the wall, puzzling my mother with the trail of dirty footprints left on the wall. I read through the D's in the World Book Encyclopedia. I experienced the spaciousness of time.
The English writer G.K. Chesterton said leisure has three meanings: ''The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. The third (and perhaps the most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.''
The grandkids have just crumpled up newspaper from our recycling and are playing "War," in which they take cover and lob paper grenades at each other.
So, will I sign them up for camp? Probably not. They are very busy here, doing nothing.
Get more ideas for spending summer days with the kids from Grandparents.com:
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