Easter without wifi. Four days nobody planned.

What I want to report is that the four days were transformative and my children emerged as screen-free enlightened beings. That's not what happened. The first day had some complaining. The second had an argument about who had taken whose turn at the one offline game on one tablet. The third day they found something to do that didn't involve screens, and they did it. The fourth day they did it again.

The thing they found was: the barn. My parents have an old stone barn attached to the house that has been in a state of being-almost-converted for about fifteen years. There are old tools in there, and a broken bicycle, and some paint in tins, and some lengths of wood, and approximately zero adult supervision once the initial safety briefing was done.

I want to be precise about the barn, because I don't want this to become an argument for barns. The barn was what was available. If there had been no barn, something else would have been available — the garden, the lane, the shed with tools that was too small to be a barn. The specific resource doesn't matter as much as the fact that there was a resource, and it wasn't a screen, and they found it.