my boys love to be outside.
my oldest loves to fish. he keeps a fishing rod in the back of his truck.
my two youngest spend countless hours in our cul-de-sac basically running a sports camp for our younger neighbors.

you could say they’re a lot like their dad, but you would be wrong.

in the summertime, my favorite spot was sitting on the air conditioning vent in my room with a stack of comic books.
or reading a Hardy Boys book.
or drawing.
or watching TV.
or memorizing the TV Guide.
i’m not a fan of the great outdoors.

now, my mom didn’t turn a blind eye to this.
in fact, she took a pretty extreme measure to deal with this.
one that made me mad at the time, but in hindsight, i think it’s pretty funny.

she would kick me out of the house for the day.

at a certain point in the morning, she would send my brother and me outside and told us we couldn’t come back in the house unless there was an intestinal emergency. not her exact words, but i’m pretty sure you can infer the caveat to her rule.

at first, it was a lot of “what do we do now?”
but after awhile, we learned to deal with it.
we would re-enact chase scenes from TV on our bikes.
we would emulate our favorite TV detectives or the Super Friends.
we would play for hours in the dirt, making roads and cities for our Matchbox cars.

eventually my parents put in an above-the-ground pool in the backyard, and the adventures continued. i was Aquaman, swimming to save the world.
we were on the run from spies and had to swim back to our underwater base. (some floats stacked on top of one another.)

when it was time for lunch, my mom would pack us a lunch in our school lunch box and we would eat on the porch. she knew better than to give me a foot in the door, or i would be back in front of the TV or locked away in my room.

so, did all this time outdoors foster a love for being outside?
absolutely not.

i really don’t like being outside.
but it did nurture something in me—creativity.
and probably a few abandonment issues. just kidding. i think.

do i think being inside is evil? no way.
but it’s probably really good that i have kids who love being outside so much. if i had a kid like me, we both would lock ourselves inside and rarely see the light of day.

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