7 Going on Unstoppable: What I’ve Actually Been Doing With My Niece This Summer (No Pinterest Perfection Required)
My sister went back to part-time admin work this June, which means I’ve got my 7-year-old niece Lila every single Wednesday from 9am to 5pm. I was equal parts excited and terrified when they asked. Lila’s always been quiet—shy enough that she’ll hide behind her mom’s leg when the cashier says hello at the grocery store, even though she’s the silliest person I know when it’s just us. My sister offhand mentioned a while back that her teacher said she never raises her hand even when she definitely knows the answer, so I got it into my head that I should be doing “confidence building activities” with her. I typed that exact phrase into Google the night before my first Wednesday, and y’all. All the results were insane. Learn to rock climb together! Do a kid-led TED Talk for the family! Start a small garden business selling tomatoes to the neighbors! I don’t even know how to grow tomatoes. I can barely keep my succulent alive. I wanted something that didn’t require a bunch of gear or a big performance, y’know?
First week I tried the whole vision board thing, because that sounded low-stakes. I got old magazines from the library, bought a pack of glitter glue, the whole nine yards. Lila cut out one picture of a sloth and one picture of a giant blue raspberry lollipop, glued them to the poster board, and announced she was done. Ten minutes into the activity, and that was it. She sat swinging her legs asking when we could get popsicles. I sat there staring at the half-empty poster board, thinking I’d messed up. Was that not enough? Should I push her to add more things about her goals? Then I realized she doesn’t have goals beyond “get popsicle” and “pet the neighbor’s dog.” Who am I to force five-year goal setting on a seven-year-old?
It wasn’t until the second week that we stumbled into the thing she begs to do every Wednesday now, completely by accident. We were walking past the community art studio, and they had a pile of leftover canvas scraps by the trash can, free for anyone to take. We grabbed three, went to the picnic table at the park, and I joked that we should have a contest for the worst painting ever. At first she blinked at me like I’d grown a second head. “You can paint bad on purpose?” she said. I painted a cat with 12 legs, one eye, and neon green ears. She laughed so hard she snort-laughed, got melted ice cream down her shirt that she’d already eaten, and got to work. Her masterpiece was a unicorn that barfed rainbows, its head so lopsided it looked more like a mashed potato than a unicorn. We judged it, and I told her hers was way worse than mine, so she won. We taped it to my fridge when we got back. That night she dictated a photo caption to me to send to her mom, and later my sister told me Lila said “bad art is way better than good art because no one can tell you you did it wrong.” Turns out she’d been scared to paint in art class at school because she messed up a tree once and the kid next to her laughed. I didn’t even plan that. That was just a dumb joke I made, and it fixed a little thing for her.
After bad art, we always go on a walk around the neighborhood where we make up backstories for every house. That’s another unplanned thing. I started it when we kept passing weird porch decorations and I got bored. I said the house with the pink flamingo lawn ornament belonged to a retired pirate who buried treasure in her backyard. Lila took over from there—added that the pirate has a pet parrot that only eats cheese puffs, and she gives treasure to kids who bring her stray bottle caps. I don’t interrupt her, even when the story gets really off track. Once I tried to add a detail and she told me “Auntie, that’s not what happens, let me tell it.” So I shut up and let her tell it. The other week, we were at family dinner, and she just volunteered the whole story about the pirate and the cheese puffs, talked for like five minutes straight in front of all of us. She never does that. She usually just picks at her fries and doesn’t say anything when people ask her what she’s been up to.
I messed up too, of course. Last month I saw the coffee shop downtown does a kids’ open mic every Saturday, and I thought oh, that would be good for her confidence! I asked her if she wanted to go recite one of the silly poems she writes. She went completely quiet, shook her head so hard her pigtails flew, and said “No. I don’t want to.” I almost said “Oh come on, it’ll be fun! You’re so good at your poems!” But then I remembered I hate public speaking. I get shaky just presenting at work meetings. Why would I force her to do something that scares her just to “build confidence”? So I said okay, we’ll get brownies to go and go home and watch Bluey instead. That’s okay, right? Confidence isn’t forcing you to do stuff you hate. It’s knowing you can say no and people will still listen.
We tried baking chocolate chip cookies once too, and she spilled the entire 5-pound bag of flour all over my kitchen floor. I panicked for half a second, then she started grabbing handfuls of flour and throwing them at my beagle, who rolled around in it like it was catnip. We spent 45 minutes cleaning up, the cookies were half raw in the middle and way too salty, but she wrapped three of them up in a napkin to bring home to her mom, bragging the whole way that she made them all by herself. I didn’t tell her they were messed up. They were hers.
The other day she brought her Pokemon cards over. I don’t know anything about Pokemon. I can’t tell a Pikachu from a Bulbasaur, honestly. She kept trying to teach me how to play, and I kept mixing up the attack types. I kept saying “sorry, I’m so bad at this, you want to do something else?” and she said “No, I’m teaching you. Just wait, I’ll go slow.” So she spent 20 minutes explaining every single rule, every card, every little detail, and I just let her. At the end she leaned back and said “See? I’m good at teaching.” And I said “You are. You explain things way better than my college professors.” She just glowed.
I still don’t know if I’m doing this right. Next week I have her for two whole days because my sister and her husband are going to a wedding. I bought extra cheese puffs and extra flour, just in case. I don’t have a list of perfect activities. Most of what we do is just messing up, half the time we end the day with ice cream on our clothes and crumbs in the couch. But Lila told me last week she’s gonna try out for the school play, even though she’s scared. I don’t know if that’s because of the bad art contests or the story walks or just because someone lets her be the boss for a few hours every week. I don’t need it to be some big life-changing thing. I just need her to know that it’s okay to be messy, it’s okay to say no, and that whatever she does is good enough, even when it’s bad. That’s probably enough, right?
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