No Time For Games

I have nothing against video games.  They are a good hobby and a fun way to pass the time.  What I do have a problem with is the video game habit.  I have known grown men and women who harbor such strong addictions to virtual reality that every other aspect of their lives suffer from neglect.   There is so much to see, do, and learn in life, I don't believe children can afford to spend very much time doing something so meaningless.  So at our house, we do not do video games.  There have been a few times where I have considered pulling out the old Nintendo and letting the kids try their hand at Duck Hunt or Super Mario Bros, but just as those thoughts would cross my mind one of them would bring me a book and ask to have it read to them.

To be short and to the point, there are too many other things we want our kids to do to have them spend their time playing video games.  Since we are fortunate enough to live in a house on my family's farm, my children have a few opportunities that other kids do not have.

One thing we like to do in the summer is trap gophers.  To our great fortune, there is a portion of the farm that is infested with them.  Two years ago, what started with me digging out one of my old gopher traps so I could show my boys what a gopher looks like in real life, quickly escalated into an all out war against those nasty little creatures.  After we learned that the irrigation company pays one dollar for every gopher tail you bring to them, we decided that would be a good way for the kids to earn some money.  We took all the traps we could find and started going out to the fields every night when I got home from work. They took turns cashing in the tails, 25 at a time.  By the end of the summer they had earned a combined total of  more than $300 dollars, and were well known by every employee at the irrigation district office.  By the time we stopped trapping last fall, the boys could identify fresh gopher mounds, dig the holes, and put the traps in the ground all by themselves.  

  

With the joys and triumphs of catching gophers, there also comes plenty of frustrations.  There were days when we would go out and find nothing but empty traps and plugged holes.  Sometimes we went to check the traps only to find they had been carried off by coyotes or neighbor dogs, never to be seen again.  According to the statistics I kept last year, our trapping success rate was only about 42%.  In the grand scheme of things, that stinks (but even 42% is higher than average for the type of traps we use).  The height of my frustration came when I was cleaning out a hole, getting ready to set the trap, and one of the little varmints bit my finger.  It wasn't a very big gopher, but it clamped its teeth down so hard they actually bit through my fingernail.  It hurt.  When we finally caught that one, we let the dog eat it.  

We have made a lot of memories trapping gophers, and more will be made as we start trapping again in the spring. Opportunities are everywhere for families to do fun activities and spend quality time together.  They don't have to be expensive.  Some of our most memorable experiences have come while doing activities that had little to no cost attached to them.