I am not a naturally unscheduled person. Give me a Sunday, and I will fill it with sport, errands, and a birthday party in a suburb we’ve never heard of. I like plans. I like traditions that anchor us when so much else keeps changing.
Which is why it’s funny that our newest tradition is, essentially, planned nothing.
It started by accident, the way the best traditions do. After our winter trip, the kids’ custom coloring books arrived in the mail, the ones we’d had made from our own holiday photos. I put them on the table one Sunday afternoon with a tin of pencils, mostly to buy myself twenty minutes to deal with the laundry.
The laundry did not get dealt with.
The best traditions aren’t the ones
you plan. They’re the ones you keep.
{Tweet that.}
Because I sat down. Just to see. My oldest was carefully shading the ferry we took across the harbour, and he wanted to tell me about the ferry, and about the boy he met on the ferry, and about the entirely theoretical dog he believes we should get who would enjoy ferries. My middle one was giving the beach umbrella stripes it never had in real life. My youngest was coloring my face green, which she maintains is a compliment.
Twenty minutes turned into an hour. Nobody asked for a screen. Nobody asked what was next. We just sat inside a week we’d already lived, and lived it again, slower this time.
Now it’s a thing. Sunday afternoons, the coloring table. Same tin of pencils, same books, same negotiation about who gets the good blue. Some weeks it lasts ten minutes; some weeks the light changes in the window before anyone looks up. I’ve stopped measuring.
What I love most is what happens around the coloring. The stories come out sideways, the way kids’ stories do. It turns out my oldest was nervous on the boat and didn’t tell me at the time. It turns out my middle one thinks the holiday was “the best week of my life so far,” a phrase I have written down somewhere safe. These are things you don’t get by asking “how was your day.” You get them at eye level, over a shared page, when everyone’s hands are busy and nobody’s being interviewed.
Traditions anchor kids. But I’ve learned they anchor parents more. The calendar will fill itself. It always does. The coloring table is where we empty it back out, one Sunday at a time.
Our family’s coloring books came from Outline Origins. You upload your holiday photos, and we turn them into a printed coloring book of your own memories. Fair warning: it may cost you your Sunday afternoons.
