What you did last summer?

The word vacation brings a bundle of different kind of memories, some priceless, some luxurious, some emotional, some ancestral, and many varied thoughts followed by it. As a child, my vacation was more about going to maternal places to stay, playing in heat getting tanned, playing indoor games, eating mangoes, experimenting new ideas and learning through various hobby classes. The list can go extensive as earlier it uses to be two months vacation in summers, as in India summers are typically too hot to bear in any part for the locals. 

Being a mother to 7-year-old this time after years, I got to enjoy the vacation again in the same old way. Playing, watching TV, going swimming in heat, visiting friends and family, hosting friends and family, reading books, travelling, exploring new experiments to create some achievement memories and some disastrous to laugh over. As a working parent all these years, I realised what I have missed in the last six years. 

It is small things you find fun in, and you keep sloughing to find joy in worldly things. The quick ice-cream break in silence to avoid any disturbance to elders, the swings are going high to give you adrenaline along with warm summer breeze in your wet hair, the birds chirping especially cuckoo and reading those grandma storybooks or Panchatantra or the rakshasa vs divine. 

With life getting so in western format, we have missed these activities with kids, making them find their vacations in the digital world. Living nuclear and then due to no leaves at work keep them away from grandparents and their affection. So many malls have activities planned for weekends so parents can bring kids and make them experience the activity world. 

Can we go back to our roots in some or other way with a balanced approach towards natural providing and materialistic providing? Are you parenting? Or conducting a fundraising project called kids?