Summer with my four year old

My four year old is at home for the summer. Feel it would not be the right thing to send her to one of those things called summer camps which basically is school all over again with a new bunch of kids and a new set of adult caregivers. I can only put myself in her shoes and decide for her (evil laugh). I would not have wanted to "settle in" for two weeks in a new environment, during what the Lord in all his mercy, meant to be a break from overambitious parents and schools. My vacation. A break from terms like "coming out of my shell", trusting adult strangers to do the right thing by me, being organised into groups for adult led activity, being told to finish my snack or else. A break from being assessed, developed, pruned and cultured....into being as unlike myself as is possible.

Instead I want her to do nothing, play in the mud, spend as much time playing with her friends as she wants. And heres where it gets nostalgic: vacation with her cousins as I mostly did, sometimes taking a two day train journey across the country to be with them, resulting in so many fun and poignant memories.

Cut to reality. I live in the suburbs of Dubai. Its hot hot hot this time of year, so you only venture outdoors after 5 in the evening. No playing in the mud in these overinformed underliving times. Unless you're a slumdog. No cousins to visit by train in the year 2009, you need a plane now, and I ask you, does this even happen nowadays, visiting or being visited for summers.

(A hopeful aside:I recently launched a Facebook effort to get all the cousins on the maternal side to start with, to meet in 2010, under one roof. We'll get all the schedules to match and hopefully spend a couple of days together. Amen to that.)


So we are back to "do it this way" activities led by mum instead of teacher. I now have to be playmate, cousin, teacher and mother all rolled into one. Or let the TV babysit her.

The days roll on....she sure can push the envelope. "Last, last..." she says with one finger held up and her head bobbing from side to side, eyes and eyebrows raised. She is negotiating her third piece of chocolate. We play a form of hide and seek that makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. She tells me where she is going to hide each time and asks me to look for her. I try to tell her what the "right way" is. She thinks I just don't get the point. I find it is possible to fight with a four year old over and over again, despite resolutions to the contrary at the end of every single day.......