What Nothing is... a relative definition.

Sometimes, when you have had 5 hours sleep, you just gotta let the 6 year old take a 15 minute long shower. Because then she's happy and not asking me to do anything for her. Which she does a lot. Especially this BOOORING week between end of school and beginning of her lifeguard camp at the beach. Bunny does not suffer inactivity well. Man, she would have been a pip growing up where I did.

For some reason the word indolent pooped into my mind when trying to figure how to describe my summer days as a child and teen (and quite a few of them in college, too). Then I became worried -- do I really know what that word means? I have a killer vocabulary, but a lot of words I know only from context of having read them and I have to think for a long time when my husband asks me for a definition. So I looked it up. Yeah, I do know that word. And yes, my summer afternoons were indolent. ;) To the point of sloth, I tell you. But hey, sloth is green, right? Not going anywhere is green, heh.

My kids are used to a lot more activity. So we go to the park everyday (even this week when we're doing 'nothing'). Nothing is a highly subjective term, I have learned. To me growing up, nothing was pretty damn near NOTHING. Maybe my sister and I would walk to the stables or around in the woods or to the creek. Maybe we'd pretend the shadows of all the old trees in my yard were houses and just pretend all afternoon. We had a really well, I'm going to go ahead, be un-pc, and call it a retarded game of tag, that somehow was one person inside the house and another outside the house, and we'd try to figure out which window the other was at and scare each other by screaming and jumping into the window. Maybe we'd really get bored, dig up the little 'onions' of onion grass, and piss off my parents by making 'soup' in the bird feeder. There was a lot of playing in the pool. Many afternoons we HAD to be inside because of thunderstorms. So we watched movies and maybe my mom made us tea and cinnamon toast with butter an sugar (yum). We'd go weeks without seeing other kids besides me and her, really.

To my kids, nothing is going to the park for 2-3 hours, playing in the pool every evening after dinner (and much of the afternoon on weekends), having friends over to play, going to friends' houses, tons and tons of crafts. I don't know, their nothing sure is more something to me! But then, if I asked Bunny, she might find the concept of wandering over acres and acres, and ACRES of land, and getting to see horses exciting. I guess familiarity breeds 'nothingness'.