You might be surprised, but this month I'm not writing about the holidays, gift-buying, or instilling the spirit of the season in our kids. Rather, I'd like to devote this piece to a topic that doesn't get enough attention: the weather. People just don't talk enough about the weather, right?
I live in Colorado, and it's been quite chilly. The recent "polar vortex" that brought sub-zero temperatures to much of the country also brought back memories of cold spells when our kids were small and had disproportionately ginormous energy levels.
We are a sports family, and sports families can't be hostage to the weather—every day is a sports day. Like the U.S. Postal Service, "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" kept our kids from playing ball (well, thankfully, gloom of night did slow things down a bit). That meant we had to design "all-weather facilities" in our small home.
With a playroom that was barely big enough to store all the sports equipment and toys, our dining room became the default basketball court, the living room became the baseball diamond and hockey rink, and the hallway became the soccer field. The dining room was the hardest to adapt because of the inconvenient chandelier—but unscrewing just four Phillips screws brought down the lights and made room for the six-foot indoor hoop. The square faux Oriental rug in the center of the living room had the right number of corners for all four bases, so we only had to move the coffee table to make room. Since our fireplace never worked, it wasn't much of a sacrifice to convert it into the indoor hockey goal. Soccer was the most dangerous because the hallway was narrow and every kick went straight at the goalie or ricocheted off the hall wall right towards the goalie. Our solution: The goalie wore an old catcher's mask. Yes, we could have used the living room hockey rink as a soccer field, but the only part of soccer that our kids loved was the penalty kick, so the hallway was perfect. Even though all the kids played tennis outdoors, we never managed to successfully adapt it to the indoor venue despite our clever deployment of an old volleyball net and racquetball racquets.
It's safe to say that our indoor arenas didn't improve our home's property value. Although we made the kids use soft foam balls, bats, and hockey sticks, every wall got scarred, scuffed, chipped, and dinged. We could have patched and painted, but we preferred to see the vivid testament to a house well lived and childhoods well played.
is Professor and
Vice Chairman Emeritus of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado. He is the author of four books for parents and families, includingNo Regrets Parenting
and 940 Saturdays
. He is also a Parents
advisor
and a contributor to The New York Times
Motherlode
blog. Visit his
blog at noregretsparenting.com
.
