Let me count the ways to keep boys busy on holidays...

On Friday our boys began a 75 day summer holiday (US=vacation). That's a long time with three energetic boys in a small Japanese house with no backyard!

But we have plans. Lord willing...

40 of those days will be spent in (or getting to and from) Australia
10 of those days we'll have one or the other of our older two at camps
7 of those days we'll be camping ourselves (four of these days overlap with boys at summer camps)

Don't worry about the maths, but that leaves a lot of days still to keep boys busy.

Today we unwittingly scheduled an unusual piece of entertainment. We babysat for a friend. Her 10 month old boy came and spent a few hours with us. I don't know who was more entertained, our guest or my boys!

We collected him from his apartment late morning and walked down to the close-by river. Close to us is a flat place for playing. All four boys had fun and they didn't really want to go home for lunch.

Over lunch they were so entertained by our guest's eating habits (fistfuls of Cheerios and shoved in mouth, then tip the plate over and reach for my sandwich) that I had trouble getting my boys to concentrate long enough to spread their bread with peanut butter and eat it. After lunch they retreated to the lounge room and entertained our guest with various toys, as well as an impromptu puppet show. This turned into their own wrestling game and other big-boy games that were fun to watch, but a bit dangerous for our crawling guest.

Nonetheless a fun time was had all round and his mum tells me she got a lot done (she's the Production Editor of our magazine and is currently working on putting the Summer Issue into Magazine format, as well as moving house in under two weeks). From my part it was lovely to see the way my boys looked after a little boy and how much enjoyment they got from serving someone else.

And guess what? We've volunteered to do it all again tomorrow. I wonder if it will go just as well?

By the way, I'm not yet ready to rent my boys out as babysitters, they really needed an adult present to fill in the gaps in their attention to the baby!