Wholesome Recreation

This past weekend we took a much needed fall break. I took days off of work, my kids had a few days off of school, and off we went to the cabin. Hooray for the cabin, what a perfect opportunity to find some peace in this crazy world.  We know that part of having a strong family is having wholesome recreational activities together. Wholesome recreation increases family bonding as well as reduce negative emotions. However what counts as wholesome recreational activities? In our lives today our time is more and more crunch, patterns show that in today's world when people are recreating they are more escaping.  doing activities that require less and less brain activity such as staring at what I call a "glowing box" watching TV, playing on the smart phone, playing video games, or on social media. It seems that we are connected to more and more people electronically, and fewer and fewer people for real life. This is part of the reason we planted our Garden out in our Front yard, to encourage us to be in  the front yard so we can get to know our neighbors (more on this in another post).  As we see an increase in spending time in doors connected to electronics we see an increase in anxiety, depression,  and adhd, as well as health issues related to being sedentary.  My grandparents were raised on farms and orchards. naturally the spent most of their young life outside.  there is more and more evidence that the move to indoor's and the lack of out door experiences is negatively effecting people as a whole.  So this week end I decided that despite it being a bit chilly we would not stay in at the cabin. We spent sometime planting daffodils all over the cabin property. I love this because in the spring they look so pretty. and it was some good hard work that I could do with the kids.  Then we went up to the reservoir.

My father was the engineer over the reservoir, he designed the reservoir, he designed the campsites around the reservoir, and coolest of all he designed the dam for the reservoir. then he over saw the construction of it all. He marked which trees to cut.  And one of them he even cut down for our Christmas tree when I was little. It is here (where the trees were cut) that my family likes to hang out in the fall.

Normally it is all underwater, but during the fall the water levels go low enough we can hang out  at the river bottom.

we were all running around and playing climbing on and off of tree stumps (that I would have assumed after 30 years of being under water would have somewhat decomposed by now, but they haven't) we stumbled on a bunch of rocks. The rocks appeared to spell something. As we took a closer look we realized that they did spell something. . . Lurch. . . they were the same rocks that we had put there last year and spelled Lurch with. . . seeing as our last name is much too long to spell with rocks L O E R T S C H E R, we abbreviated it down to L U R C H. It was fun to rediscover our creation from last year and to see it left undisturbed I wonder how many years it will remain there untouched.

 

It was amazing how spending time in the quiet out doors did so much for my personal calmness. but it is also interesting to note that while my kids can rarely go more than 25 minutes at home without fighting, up in the lake bottom while jumping on tree stumps and jumping over rivers they all play together happily and don't fight at all. I wonder did siblings fight as much back in the 1800's as they do now? or have glowing boxes rewired our brains to argue?