It's time for a 90s summer!

Hey guys, it's Lindsey here! It's been awhile since I've been the one sharing anything, but I am so excited about this idea that I had to come blog about it!

You may have heard the concept of a 90s summer before, but just in case you haven't, let me give you the details of how ours is going to go.

First of all, let me explain that I do believe that no matter what decade you grew up in, once you become an adult you look back at that decade as the "good times" that kids today are missing out on. This may or may not be true for everyone, but generally, I do think the times were good purely because at the time you were a kid, dealing with kid problems.

My brother and I just shortly before the 90s!

However, in this day and age, I don't think that anyone would disagree that the technology today has created a different landscape for childhood and sometimes as a parent it can feel hard to combat the onslaught of summer becoming a time when all kids want to do is play on a tablet or smartphone all day long. It can be difficult, but I hope that this will help you plan your summer in a way that will give you and your children a special, memorable summer that you and your children will love.

In order to make this work, you need to have some buy in from your kids. When I brought this up to my daughter, I think the fact that I said that I too would be cutting out things in my life that didn't exist in the 90s (hello social medias) she was all in. Although as a mom I try really hard to seriously limit the time that I spend doom scrolling on the internet, the honest fact of the matter is, I, like many others, am not perfect at it. The idea of having her mom more present in her life (although, since I homeschool her I don't honestly know how much MORE present I could be, haha) really brought the buy in I felt we would need.

These are the agreements we've come to in order to have a summer time experience akin to what my childhood experience was growing up in the 1990s:

1. All social media is off limits, for me that means no Facebook or Instagram since those are the main two social media sites I am on.
2. No games on the tablet.
3. No binge watching TV shows. We don't pay for a cable service, we only have streaming, so this is where we had to get creative with making our 90s experience as realistic as possible. Even though we will still be using streaming platforms for any TV shows we watch, I am creating a "TV Guide" schedule (remember TV guides from the 90s?) and we can only watch one, maybe two episodes at a time (if it is a very special episode) and then the show will not be on again until next week. 
4. TV shows will be shows from the 90s or earlier. My mom asked me if I was doing this to make my daughter watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show and my answer was, "yes." A few other shows on my list are Boy Meets World, Family Matters, Full House, Happy Days (maybe just before the episode where the phrase "jumped the shark" came from), I Love Lucy, Little House on the Prairie, The Torkelsons, and , if you have other great ides of 90s TV shows (or older)appropriate for an 8 year old girl let me know, and also what platform I can find them on.
5. All movies will be ones we can watch on DVD. Unfortunately, we don't own a VHS player or any tapes, I'd love it if we did, but we have to go with DVDs for this one. I told her in the 90s you either watched (and recorded onto VHS) and movie on TV or you had it on VHS to watch, so we are going to stick with that, and watch movies from the 90s or earlier. 
6. Now the big goal of this 90s summer plan is that we aren't going to be inside sitting around watching TV and movies all the time, but those boundaries generally have to be set first in order to enable all the rest of the wonderful things that can happen. Think back to summers growing up in the 90s. My family always went camping, and always spent some time driving to California to spend a week, or two, or maybe even a month, with our family in the Fresno area. I want to make time for similar fun experiences and we are going to do some fun family trips such as that.
7. Although camping, traveling to visit family, and special day trips are a hallmark of a 90s summer time experience, there are also the fun day in/day out activities of a 90s summer. For example, every summer my mom would take us to the library to participate in the summer reading program. We'd get out paper charts, and check out books, and go back regularly to return and check out new books, as well as collect our summer reading prizes. You better believe I got that poster of the Phoenix Suns and then hung it up on my wall! Most libraries still have summer reading programs. If yours doesn't (and I'd seriously check because they probably do!) you could also check out Everyday Reading's Summer Reading Chart to create your own summer reading program (her chart is free to download!) Keep going to that library to get those books!
8. We are coming up with a summer craft project to work on. We got our daughter a sewing machine for Christmas, and she has been harassing me to get her sewing room all set up, which we are going to do this next week after we are done with school. She already started working on a skirt with my mom this past weekend. So we will definitely do some simple sewing projects, but I've also been thinking about working on a quilt with her. We will probably do a small baby quilt because, that's really the only thing I've ever done so it's a good place to start, and then maybe next year we will do a bigger one. What would be a great 90s summer project for you and your kids to work on? We will also be working in our garden, and doing some fun arts and crafts projects!
9. We are also going to make sure we plan some fun playdates with friends. We don't really live close enough to anyone her age for her to walk to a friends house, or have them walk here, but I want to hear her playing Barbies with her friends, or going swimming with her friends, or playing outside and drinking from the hose with her friends. All the things I did during the summer with my friends growing up in the 90s!

I hope that this list has given you some thought as to how to create a 90s summer. I also want to add that although we are going fully no tablet, and no social media, that may feel difficult and crazy, and maybe too much to some of you. Well, guess what, since this is a fun idea, you get to adjust it to you and your family! Maybe you want to have 90s mornings. Maybe you want 90s Mondays. Maybe you want 90s weekends. You do you, but I have created this printable list to get you started on ideas of things to do to help fill that doom scrolling time with some family fun instead. I have a feeling that you might find that once you've dedicated certain periods of time to doing something on this list, or any other ideas you come up with on your own, that all that technology stuff will find itself set aside more often than not.

​Above all, I hope that if you decide to do this 90s summer that you have a special experience building wonderful memories with your family!

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Activity Ideas for a 90s Summer
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