Escapades of Summer | What Are Your Kids Doing?

Summer is here and school is out. Where are all the kids hiding? I haven’t seen any riding bikes or playing outside.  Here I go with the when we were kids….But it’s true! When we were kids we begged to go outside and spent most of our time out doors We had lots to do in the summer as young kids–butterflies, fish, tadpoles, turtles and minnows to catch for starters. Then there were carnivals to plan and baseball and kickball games to play.  My brothers and I always got up early–probably because we went to bed early. We’d eat our cereal and immediately want to go outside and play with our friends.  Usually we had to wait patiently for it to be a respectable time before we were allowed to go knocking on doors.

I’m not sure what the kids do today, but remembering the summers of my youth sure brings back fond memories. Not quite sure I appreciated the fun times then, but it sure sounds dreamy now. Oh the things we would think up.  I was lucky enough to grow up living on a lake. That made for plenty of stuff to do.

One summer it became our ritual to pack a lunch and paddle out to the island to dine alfresco–no parents allowed.  On one of these days, after we ate our lunch of ham sandwiches and peanut butter tandy cakes, we went exploring on the island. There were lots of ducks on the lake and it was egg laying time.  We found what we believed to be abandoned white-duck eggs.  For some reason, the white ducks were not that diligent at tending to their eggs, and we would find eggs randomly laying outside of a nest or sometimes in the water.  My brothers and I decided that we would take care of these eggs until they hatched into ducklings. No we didn’t sit on them! We wrapped them up and carefully placed them under the lamps in our house to keep them nice and warm. We practically stood over them waiting for something to happen that first day. The next morning we woke up and no signs of hatching. Surprisingly our mother was very tolerant of our “eggs”capades.  Since there was no hatching activity and it was a very warm day, we decided it would be best to put the eggs outside and let them bask in the warmth of the natural sunlight.  We carefully, wrapped the eggs in towels and laid them out in the sun.  Since nothing was happening it wasn’t necessary to watch over them, so me and my one brother went off to play and swim with  friends, while my younger brother stayed behind intent on being there when a duckling emerged.

It was only a short time when we heard a blood curdling scream from the brother tending the eggs.  We were sure the scream meant the eggs were hatching, and we bounded out of the water and ran as fast as we could to where our younger brother was guarding the eggs. As we got closer there was a horrible smell and our brother was screaming even louder and frantically running in circles where we had left the eggs wrapped in towels. At first we didn’t know what had happened. Had our brother gone mad and squashed the eggs? No, the eggs had heated up and exploded as he was peering over them–the eggs all popped and exploded and his face was covered in rotten eggs. This happened over 45 years ago and I can still see my brother and the towels covered in egg and smell that rancid smell. We calmed my little brother down, and everyone was pretty bummed because this meant no ducklings;  but we weren’t giving up. There would be other homeless eggs to hatch.

Appreciate Summer while it lasts. So what are your kids doing this summer? We’d love to hear about their escapades.