Time to put a little more free play into our days thanks to warm Kamik boots

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Kamik and as always the thoughts and opinions in this expressed are my own.

My 89-year old grandma came to visit us from Canada recently.  She bravely made the nearly 4 hour drive from her home to our cabin in the mountains where she stayed with us for a night-I think it’s the farthest she’s traveled in a long time and I really appreciate that she came all that way to visit me and roast marshmallows by the fire with my kids.  I love talking to my grandma about her adventures growing up and the stories she has about being a mom to six kids.  She’s never really been into gadgets and modern technology so she teases me a little about what I do for a living, but we also love talking together about the importance of letting the kids free play and this is something we both totally agree on.  She’s had a cabin at the beach in Point Roberts Washington for as long as I can remember and she used to make us swim even on what even seemed like the coldest of summer days-but those are some of the fondest childhood memories I have.  I even tell my kids “stick your hands in your armpits” when they are cold because that is what she used to tell me when we got out of the water and into the chilly air.  I love her joie de vivre and it makes me realize what’s really important for childhood: Playing outside. Breathing fresh air.  Time with trees, mountains, water, sand and sun.  When Kamik asked me to think about how we incorporate free play into our days, I thought of how packed our days are with lessons, team sports and structured activities.  How do we free play?

We head to the mountains on weekends

We live in a pretty urban part of Seattle and cars drive quickly through our neighborhoods and we noticed we were spending so much time in the city going from one organized activity to the next.  So on the weekends after soccer we now head to our place in Snoqualmie Pass, a cabin we’ve had for about 4 years located about an hour’s drive from Seattle where we are surrounded by mountains, trees, streams and lakes.  This is a place where it is easy to just send the kids outside to play for hours.  At the cabin we have walkie-talkies that the kids can use if they go for a farther adventure and we make check in times. Warm, dependable gear is so important for outside adventures in all weather and we love Kamik waterproof winter boots.  The kids are dying for this year’s first snow so they can try their new boots out when they build snow forts and play outside all day long.  Up in the mountains the kids wander and play and they’ve caught frogs, invented new ball games, whittled sticks and hunted for kindling for fires, found curiously shaped rocks and come home happy and full of dirt and joy.  We always have our rainboots handy too because in the Pacific Northwest we never know what the weather is going to do and having boots on an adventure on a rainy day is always a great excuse for a good puddle jump.

10 minutes outside

At home in Seattle when I feel like the kids have spent too much time indoors or doing schoolwork, I send them outside for 10 minutes.  10 minutes.  It’s not a ton of time, and even the busiest of schedules can allow that.  I don’t set a timer or anything, so they usually they end up hanging outside a lot longer and they feel better for it.  But no one really says no to 10 minutes, even on a rainy Seattle day when it might feel better to sit in the house and cuddle with a book.  I don’t really know what they do outside because it’s their independent play, but sometimes they shoot hoops or wander through the garden and climb the trees or find the neighbor kids and hang out a bit.  It’s not as free-range as when we grew up but it feels doable for city kids and it’s a start to free play.  I find that if I the hubby and I also put our boots on and go outside (I wear the Kamik Sienna 2 and he wears the Hudson in Charcoal) we all have a lot of fun playing together doing whatever the kids want us to do and it reminds us of being free-spirited and younger and it helps us feel less stressed from work.

When I talk to my grandma about her childhood and how she remembers roaming the neighborhood, her eyes light up mischievously and I swear she is nine years old again.  She remembers one day: “we were playing outside as usual, cops and robbers and the robber had to be tied to a tree (gently of course) but we all went home for dinner when all the mothers called us home and my next door neighbor’s mom comes by while we were sitting down to dinner and asks if I’d seen my friend.  Of course, she was the robber that day and sure enough we found her still tied to that tree( she was okay) and we all had a good laugh.”

Even now, decades later, my grandma giggles uncontrollably and I do too, thinking about the silly things that happened when we used to play freely as kids that we overcame and that we still remember decades later.  I want all of it for my kids too.  So thank you Kamik for making me remember how much free play is important and how I need to figure out how to intentionally bring this back into our lives. #freeyourplay