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“Go outside and play!”

Easier said than done, right? One mom's attempt to get her kids off the couch and into the great outdoors.

Summer is short in New England, so every year I am bound and determined that the whole family will make the most of it. But my kids, who still believe those eight weeks will stretch on forever, resist. They want to play the Wii (they have an “Outdoor Playground” game, offering all the convenience of the outdoors with none of the pesky actual doors). Or they want to head to the concrete pool or to the plastic play structure-filled park. I protest: We live an hour and a half from the nearest mall; shouldn’t our outside experiences be filled with nature? Hikes. Pressing wildflowers. Bark rubbings from trees. Kicking around the pig’s bladder — no, wait, that was Laura in Little House.

Let’s don’t get carried away.

I’m not exactly an expert in outdoor play; I cannot identify wildflowers and I invariably forgot which book we pressed them in. For our entire first year in the “country,” I’d push Sam (then 6) and Lily (then 3) out one door only to have them come back in another. Once they’d picked a few dandelions, they were done. Pioneer children probably played with rocks and corn husks because all they had were rocks and corn husks. Kids with 47 small cars and dolls seemed to require a little more to get started.

I needed an instruction manual, and I found it in Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods. Louv says children need to interact with the natural world on their own terms in order to make themselves a part of it. They need to experience nature, not just look at it out of the car window. One of the things Louv suggests is creating outdoor play spaces, so I looked at our empty yard and started dreaming of tire swings.

Our trees, though–a row of pines–were all wrong. They looked sticky and prickly and supremely unappealing. I griped about them one day to a friend with a chain saw (when you live in the country, you have friends with chain saws), and he revved up the saw and took off a few limbs. Sam grabbed a branch and climbed up-a lesson, for me, that kids don’t want some sort of perfect outdoors, they just want to be able to do something with their outdoors. A few weeks later, we set a beam between two of the trees and hung a tire and a baby swing. I though Richard Louv would be proud, especially because we added a sand pit with stackable stones and turned a blind eye to the kids playing in the nearby puddles, too.

But even though we built it, the kids didn’t always come. Now I’m chasing four kids (Wyatt and Rory are 4) out the door and wondering why they don’t get that this freedom is something to be savored.

So I push. Popsicles are an outside food. No more playdate tea parties–here’s a picnic, take it out! We plant things (sunflower seeds, mint) and we move things around (sticks and leaves and piles of beautiful freshly picked dandelions). I swallow my squeamishness and catch the frogs and salamanders that are drawn to the puddles; I sit outside and relax until I’ve bored the kids so much that they run off to do something on their own (that’s my favorite). I try. Because this organic lifestyle I want my kids to have isn’t going to happen on its own.

And then, somehow it does; As summer moves along, they find their own way outside. This was bound to work, I’ve realized–it’s not like fighting against the desire to eat sugar and fat. Getting oudoors is a kid’s natural urge. Louv was right: They don’t get bored with moving the same rocks and dirt and sand. Every time they do it, it’s a different world. A natural, organic, muddy, frog-and freedom-filled world of their own.