Fifty-Two on Friday [4] Simple

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ~ Confucius

Welcome to the fourth installment of “Fifty-Two on Friday” and this was for me, personally, the hardest one to date. The theme was “simple”. Sounds easy enough, right? Maybe for others, but not for me. My friend Jules told me to stop analyzing the word so much and just shoot. I do tend to overthink things, lol. My daughter is almost 7 years old and she has hinted at wanting a Nintendo DS Lite for quite some time now.  I said “no” to her at Christmas and the conversation hasn’t come up again.  Video games, DVD players in the car, television…  I feel like it robs them of their imagination.  We don’t have video games and my mini-van does not have a DVD player, so it was the television set that was concerning me.  Making dinner was much easier while the children were watching a show, rather than having them pull at my leg and ask me a million different questions.  However, it started getting out of hand, so my husband and I made a rule in our house to curb their television time.  The children are not allowed to watch tv on a school day, but they each get to watch one program on the weekend (minus our Sabbath, which is Friday evening to Saturday evening).  So, on school days, the kids just end up playing silly games very similar to what I used to play as a child.  They would play with sticks like they did in this post, or make up games to play with Daddy like in this post, or get some chalk and play hop scotch. Doesn’t hop scotch just take you back to your childhood? I used to play hopscotch, jacks, freeze tag, jump rope, hide-n-seek with the neighborhood kids every single afternoon.  We (my sister & I) didn’t even have adult supervision?!!  Can you imagine that now?  We would just play with our friend until our mother called us in for dinner. I often miss those times.  So, when my children play hopscotch, it gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling and takes me back to those days, when life was much simpler.

Don’t forget to go through the circle and be amazed at what the other 19 photographers came up for this week’s theme.  You can start by visiting  Maureen Wilson | Mccomb Mississippi photographer and see her take on “simple”!