When I went to pick up the kids from daycare today, my 5 year old daughter wanted to stay longer. We usually all leave together after a half-day at daycare because the kids usually have activities and in the summer, we want to just spend time together since there is a break in their after-school activities. She was adamant about staying because she wanted to spend more time with her friends, especially because she won’t see them as often when she starts kindergarten in the fall. I agreed and left with my 4 year old son (which he was very confused by because we didn’t come home with his big sister).

We spent a short amount of time at home snacking before heading to a part for soccer time. I wanted to just have some fun outside while my son got some touches with the soccer ball. I also don’t mind trying to learn soccer because I don’t really know how to play. I asked my son to teach me and he showed me all his tricks, like shielding the ball away from the defender, dribbling, shooting the ball in the goal, and kicking the ball in the air. We also played some games like scoring in each others goals, passing the ball to each other, kicking the ball super far, trying to kick the ball in the air, and taking turns kicking each soccer ball towards the other soccer ball to knock them together. Safe to say, we played a lot of different games.

Halfway through our time at the park, my son wanted to play a game of “tractor tipping” where he was Lighting McQueen and I was Frank the angry XXL Metroactual Combine trying to get that race car for tipping his tractors. We played the tractor tipping song and ran around chasing each other. After another snack, it was time to go pick up his big sister.

I really enjoyed the quality time with my son because I feel like there is much less of that now that we have to juggle three kids (and a crazy needy bernadoodle). My daughter also had fun spending more time with her friends and wants to do it again tomorrow. Now that there is a way to spend quality time with my son while everyone else is happy, I think we will do it more often until the end of her summer camp at daycare as long as my daughter is happy to stay longer. It’s a rare win-win-win scenario for all the kids and being a parent of three, you take those scenarios 10 out of 10 times.