How can you not have fun at a water park?
Really??? What is not to love?
Slippery slides inducing heart-pounding laughter and amusement? 118 degree weather to make you sweat just standing still that you actually embrace crashing from the slide into the freezing cold water? And family to make the memory with?
Enter my 15 year old son.
Great kid.
Just vocally exploding with seeing and sharing about everything wrong with anything placed in front of him.
I love that I’ve raised him to know who he is, what he likes and that he is direct, has thoughts/feelings and is able to express his thoughts/feelings. But I do not like that he does this after I’ve spent a small fortune getting his butt into a water park.
This week in Phoenix, it was so hot we fried an egg on the hotel sidewalk just to see what happens. I bought tickets to the local water park figuring why fight it, let’s go play in it!
Even before we left the hotel my stay-inside-and-lay-on-the-bed-with-my-iphone-doing-anything-but-talking-to-my-family 15 year old boy said, “ugh…it’s too hot to go to the water park.”
We arrived, found a spot we could all convene back to and I set them loose to play. Within 13.3 seconds….what started off as annoying soon became the bait my 8-12 year old nephews chomped on to join my teen in the negative bowl of “This place sucks.”
“It smells funny…”
“The food looks disgusting…”
“People are so fat here…”
Not sure what the size of others has to do with personal enjoyment. But when you are a teen that wants out and needs backing, anything to poke fun at is fair game.
Within 20 minutes, the nephews were on the negative train. “Aunt Laurie, when are we going home?”
Ugh.
After living with him for all of their lives, my other two children were used to Negative-Boy and were devastated when they saw us packing up complaining, “What? Why are we gong?”
My fair-play husband said, “We are a team, if the majority wants to go, we have to go…”
The travel-happy-have-fun-being-anywhere 11 and 8 year olds cried, “But we’ve only gone down two slides…”
There wasn’t a response, just slow movement to the exit…making for sad, sad children (and mom).
Thoughts ran through my head of what to say and how to stop this: “Just leave us and come back later”, “What is wrong with you???”
The last thought was mean and I knew it. Yet after biting into a chicken finger that tasted like it was from the reject pile at Chicken Kingdom…I was okay that we are leaving and headed to the hotel pool where a Pina Colada would be in my hands soon.
I guess the only thing I learned from this is when my teen starts complaining, leave him home. It’s only 3 short years till college anyway…will I soon miss that angst?
No…my 11 year old is female and that teen-type comes with a new set of challenges!
Ahhhhh.