We had an amazing pizza pie at "Oma's Italian Restaurant" on the island



, then spent the afternoon frolicking in the sand.



Lily contemplated riding the Gulf waves on her boogie board then settled into sand castle architecture, Liam flew his kite (nearly decapitating an older lady sunning herself peacefully a couple yards from us), Benjamin tried his best to ride the wooden skimmer- more than adequately lubed with wax, and Seth battled to keep his siblings away from his new sand bucket ("MINE!!!") I think my husband has made the executive decision to take a rather lengthy sabbatical from the coming doom of the Pittsburgh winter. If only....

We arrived on Anna Maria Island, on the Gulf in Florida, at about 2:45 yesterday afternoon. I felt an amazing relief the moment our car passed the welcome sign- we all piled out of our van and the kids immediately began trolling for shells. We spied a manatee at the edge of the water and a
gorgeous blue heron. The burdens of swine flu, endless daily chores, and schoolwork just rolled right off of our shoulders and I instantly knew we needed to be here- together- simply enjoying our lives for a change.

(I found Tom this shirt at a thrift store in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, the weekend before we left on our trip. Fate was a'hollerin'!)

In WYTHEVILLE, VIRGINIA, having just finished the FIRST LEG of our Third Annual "Thanksgiving Mystery Tour." Hint: We are heading SOUTH!!!!

For those of you new to this blog, or who don't remember, every Thanksgiving, beginning two years ago, we travel to a destination which we keep secret from our kids until we get there....It is cold here in Wytheville but by this evening, when we stop to celebrate Lily's 12th birthday, IT WILL BE WARM!!!

Tom and I started a business a couple of months ago, which forces us to spend time within inches of one another, in a cramped office space that we thieved from our six year-old son. This may only happen once a day, for a few minutes, but it is fun- it is the way we met fifteen years ago, and what we've always enjoyed.

We are in the midst of planning the annual "where in the world are the silly Sombars" annual Thanksgiving roadtrip. I mindlessly began creating a mix CD on my computer, before being hit over the head with the dreadful reality that my two year-old broke the CD player in the van by dumping about 25 pennies into it over the summer. Tom and I busted out laughing thinking of our few but pathetic options for playing our favorite tunes (it is going to be a LONG DRIVE- I'll give that hint)....bringing a boom box to sit on my lap, hooking up our tiny iPod shuffle to miniature speakers.....

Laughter is such good medicine for a marriage that has some craziness lurking around every corner.

This is a piece by Anna Quindlen- regarding overscheduled kids- the new plague. I liked it, I feel it, and I'm working, along with my husband, on a different path.

Enjoy.

Doing Nothing Is Something – The Overscheduled Children Of 21St-Century
America, Deprived Of The Gift Of Boredom
By Anna Quindlen

Summer is coming soon. I can feel it in the softening of the air, but I can
see it, too, in the textbooks on my children’s desks. The number of uncut
pages at the back grows smaller and smaller. The loose-leaf is ragged at the
edges, the binder plastic ripped at the corners. An old remembered glee
rises inside me. Summer is coming. Uniform skirts in mothballs. Pencils with
their points left broken. Open windows. Day trips to the beach. Pickup
games. Hanging out.

How boring it was.

Of course, it was the making of me, as a human being and a writer. Downtime
is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at
the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the
tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or
compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a
hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels
inside that fuel creativity.

And that, to me, is one of the saddest things about the lives of American
children today. Soccer leagues, acting classes, tutors–the calendar of the
average middle-class kid is so over the top that soon Palm handhelds will be
sold in Toys “R” Us. Our children are as overscheduled as we are, and that
is saying something.

This has become so bad that parents have arranged to schedule times for
unscheduled time. Earlier this year the privileged suburb of Ridgewood,
N.J., announced a Family Night, when there would be no homework, no athletic
practices and no after-school events. This was terribly exciting until I
realized that this was not one night a week, but one single night. There is
even a free-time movement, and Web site: familylife1st.org. Among the
frequently asked questions provided online: “What would families do with
family time if they took it back?”

Let me make a suggestion for the kids involved: how about nothing? It is not
simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children who don’t have
a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk about their day or
just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying leisure-time activity
of my youth. There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what
we might call “doing nothing” is when human beings actually do their best
thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an
entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the
current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by
scheduling.

A study by the University of Michigan quantified the downtime deficit; in
the last 20 years American kids have lost about four unstructured hours a
week. There has even arisen a global Right to Play movement: in the
developing world it is often about child labor, but in the United States it
is about the sheer labor of being a perpetually busy child. In Omaha, Neb.,
a group of parents recently lobbied for additional recess. Hooray, and
yikes.

How did this happen? Adults did it. There is a culture of adult distrust
that suggests that a kid who is not playing softball or attending
science-enrichment programs–or both–is huffing or boosting cars: if kids
are left alone, they will not stare into the middle distance and consider
the meaning of life and how come your nose in pictures never looks the way
you think it should, but instead will get into trouble. There is also the
culture of cutthroat and unquestioning competition that leads even the
parents of preschoolers to gab about prestigious colleges without a trace of
irony: this suggests that any class in which you do not enroll your first
grader will put him at a disadvantage in, say, law school.

Finally, there is a culture of workplace presence (as opposed to
productivity). Try as we might to suggest that all these enrichment
activities are for the good of the kid, there is ample evidence that they
are really for the convenience of parents with way too little leisure time
of their own. Stories about the resignation of presidential aide Karen
Hughes unfailingly reported her dedication to family time by noting that she
arranged to get home at 5:30 one night a week to have dinner with her son.
If one weekday dinner out of five is considered laudable, what does that say
about what’s become commonplace?

Summer is coming. It used to be a time apart for kids, a respite from the
clock and the copybook, the organized day. Every once in a while, either
guilty or overwhelmed or tired of listening to me keen about my monumental
boredom, my mother would send me to some rinky-dink park program that
consisted almost entirely of three-legged races and making things out of
Popsicle sticks. Now, instead, there are music camps, sports camps, fat
camps, probably thin camps. I mourn hanging out in the backyard. I mourn
playing Wiffle ball in the street without a sponsor and matching shirts. I
mourn drawing in the dirt with a stick.

Maybe that kind of summer is gone for good. Maybe this is the leading edge
of a new way of living that not only has no room for contemplation but is
contemptuous of it. But if downtime cannot be squeezed during the school
year into the life of frantic and often joyless activity with which our
children are saddled while their parents pursue frantic and often joyless
activity of their own, what about summer? Do most adults really want to
stand in line for Space Mountain or sit in traffic to get to a shore house
that doesn’t have enough saucepans? Might it be even more enriching for
their children to stay at home and do nothing? For those who say they will
only watch TV or play on the computer, a piece of technical advice: the
cable box can be unhooked, the modem removed. Perhaps it is not too late for
American kids to be given the gift of enforced boredom for at least a week
or two, staring into space, bored out of their gourds, exploring the inside
of their own heads. “To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do,” said
Victor Hugo. “Go outside and play,” said Prudence Quindlen. Both of them
were right.