If your lucky, summer for children can be a time where you have the freedom to explore your hobbies. Sometimes all that uninterrupted free time, time enough to be bored, is actually a good thing. Through that boredom, creativity can eventually flourish.

Aaron has used the time this past week to create his own art gallery.

He gets onto kids youtube, presses the microphone and says, “how to draw ….”

Here is his gallery of Clash of Clan Characters.And his gallery of sharks.For someone who can get so easily frustrated, it’s beautiful to see him following the instructions intently, patiently. To work long and hard at a huge project and see the delight on his face when it all comes together.

Adam celebrated Father’s day last weekend. Sorry, I’m a little behind on the blogs!

This year I trolled pinterest until I found these chalk drawing that I thought looked cool. I framed them and captioned them like this…

Afterwards, we headed to the beach.

We did our usual shell and rock collecting, sand and ball playing, picnic and ice cream eating, and lots of racing. Happy father’s day, Adam!

Ben’s school runs 11 months a year, but there is a week off between the regular session and summer sessions. It did not coincide with the other kids summer holiday, but they will all have the month of August off together. Which I plan to break my camera with so many fun and exciting pictures of summer enjoyment! I’ll try to just give you the best bits, though…

It was a lot nice to have the kids holidays separate, especially since Ben’s friend group has expanded. He had three play dates with three different kids during his week off.

One day we headed to the to the Museum of Science and Industry. We checked out the new Pixar exhibit. We also took in some free standing exhibits. Ben’s buddy is so bright it was a pleasure taking him to this place of learning. When one of the women at a free standing exhibit lit something on fire with butane, he said, “Is that on the periodic table?”

Another day we picked up a different buddy and headed out to the Morton Arboretum to go Troll hunting, another new exhibit that opened June 22.

We also spent a day with a third buddy at Maggie Daley Park playing in the playground, mini-golfing, and splashing in the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park.

They both won a free round of golf!

One day Adam moved some work around and took Ben to the Shedd Aquarium. He loves sharks.

Ben is pretending the shark is eating his arm.

It was a great week off for him. He really enjoyed it but I noticed there is no time for him to reflect on that now, as he is busy thinking about his upcoming 9th birthday…

Around the end of last year, I forced Adam to sit down and watch “Forks Over Knives” with me. It’s a documentary based on the book, “The China Study”. I think how it happened was that he asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, “For you to watch this movie.”

My sister sent me the book many years ago. Actually she sent it to Adam in response to hearing about his high cholesterol. But he never touched it so I picked it up and read it cover to cover.

It examines the link between animal products and cancer, cholesterol, and heart disease. It conclusions eating a 95% plant based diet is the healthiest diet for humans.

Adam has always had borderline high cholesterol, something he claims is hereditary. Still he was tired of every single doctor’s visit ending with a warning to lower his cholesterol levels or he would have to go on statins. After watching the movie he thought maybe he would give it a try.

So, for the next six months I prepared him three vegan meals a day. He very carefully kept under the 5% limit, only eating meat or dairy when social or work situations made it awkward not to.

Then, last week he had the test.

Before the diet, his total cholesterol was 230. After the diet it dropped to 220, his LDL (the bad stuff) only dropped by 2, and his HDL (the good stuff) dropped by 8.

It was an absolute failure.

We were both shocked.

Afterwards, he said to me, “You know, the only time I was able to get my cholesterol way down was when I was super skinny.”

Instantly I was transported back to Hong Kong, lying on my living room couch with a searing headache and dry mouth, next to my roommate, Fionnuala.

I asked her why I felt so bad. She told me it was because we mixed alcohol the night before. That was should never mix beer with vodka.

So the next time we were out, we stuck to beer. No mixing! But the next day, we were back on the couch feeling awful. Maybe it was the beer that did it?

The next time we just stuck to vodka. No luck, another nasty morning after.

Tequila? Wine? We ran the full gamut. Finally, after our extremely thorough research we came to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter what you drink, it’s how much you drink.

It’s quantity. Not quality.

And, seeing Adam’s results after drastically changing his diet, I was once again reminded of the lesson when it comes to food or alcohol intake. It’s quantity, not quality.

This week Adam happily slipped back into his carnivorous ways.