My son Max is 8 years old. He loves to go to school because there are always things for him to do. It is a very structured environment, which he needs. His anxiety levels skyrocket if nothing is scheduled for him. When that happens his disorders activate; he has odd, bipolar disorder, pdd/nos, and adhd.

Weekends can be tough because we don’t always have something for him to do. Max has a lot of energy so it can take him minutes or even seconds to get through the things he thinks of doing. Then he spends a lot of time moping around the house getting very bored and very miserable. Being at home is not a very happy time for him.

This passed Sunday turned out to be a very exciting day. I have rarely seen him so happy. It started out as a pretty standard weekend day. He woke up at 5 in the morning and went through his morning wildness before his medications started working. But it seemed that he got bored very quickly this morning.

“What are we going to do today?”

“Where are we going to go?”

“Who can I play with?”

And he was starting to whine and hound us; a typical weekend day.

At 7 o’clock I called him over. “Max, I’m going raspberry picking, are you coming with me?” “I dunno.” “Well, I’ll be in the car. If you want to come then join me.” Guess what, he went with me. He wasn’t sure he wanted to; he dragged his feet getting out there; but he went.

It was only 7:15 when we arrived at the farm. As I pulled into the parking lot his anxiety kicked in. “It’s too early. It is still closed.” I reassured him that it had been open for 15 minutes already. After all, I told him, it is a farm; they’ve probably been working since 5 o’clock. And it was. We went into the store and were directed to the raspberries a quarter of a mile walk in back of the fields.

When we got there we bought a little bucket from a girl in a hut. She then pointed out the best pickings for us. Max was a little tentative at first pulling the juicy red raspberries off of the bushes but he soon got into the swing of things and started filling the bucket. Of course, he had to try a couple as we went along. We also found some black raspberries which topped off the pail nicely.

When we were done we spent some time in the farm playground and visited their petting zoo. After that we each had one of their apple cider donuts while watching the geese splash in the pond.

You would think that after all of this it would be lunch time. Hardly, it’s only 8:30. From here we did some hiking. There is a hill close to our house in the middle of a forest. It is very steep and it’s a lot of exercise getting to the top. Max ran most of the way; I was crawling by the end. It took a half hour to get to the top and then back to the car.

From here we decided to get some breakfast at a restaurant on the grounds of a small airport near us. Max had sausage and some apple juice. It was a beautiful day so we got to see a lot of planes flying.

We got home at 10 o’clock. This worked out for us because, what we hadn’t told Max, we were leaving to go to a barbeque at 10:30. While we were away my wife had spent the morning putting together the food we were bringing and packing other essentials. We arrived at the party at 11:30. Our hosts own a house on a lake in New Hampshire. Max’s eyes lit up when he saw it and he immediately went from the car to the water.

I won’t spend a lot of time writing about everything Max did today but he swam for a long time. He then went out on both a pedal boat and a kayak several times during the afternoon. He also paddled around this side of the lake on a rubber tire. There were three girls his age at the party and they joined in everything he was doing. The one thing they didn’t want any part of were the large spiders he found underneath a floating dock. And he ate hotdogs, corn chips, brownies, and cookies; anyone that knows him will be surprised to hear this. He doesn’t usually eat very much and rarely touches sweets.

We had planned on leaving the party at 3 but Max was having so much fun that we ended up staying until 8 o’clock. And after this long day he slept the hour home and I carried him to bed.

As I said earlier, this was a very exciting day for him. He didn’t have any time to even think about being miserable. It was wonderful to see. Most parents don’t like to see their kids unhappy; our kid may be unhappier than most of them. He doesn’t have too many friends; the ones he has don’t want to see him often because of the way he acts. His dad is in his 50s and has multiple sclerosis so he doesn’t have a lot of energy to do things with him. He is very anxious and it bothers him that he has to take medications for each of his problems.

Today was an amazing day for him; he fell asleep excited. This is the kind of day my wife and I treasure. Hmmm, I wonder if we can have a couple more of these before the end of the summer.