When I was a kid, my mom used to load my brother and me into the car and take us to Bronte Creek Provincial Park. The pool there was and still is massive. Not a regular pool, this giant one that started like the shore and got deeper the closer you walked to the middle, maybe fifty meters across. She'd pack a lunch, we'd swim for hours, and then she'd take us to pick apples. Cheap, simple, whole day gone.

Brant Conservation Area has the same kind of pool, so I take Kiki a couple times every summer. This time I brought both kids and no wife, because she was working and I wasn't about to waste the day indoors. So I packed snacks, towels and swimming stuff and hit the road.

RiRi loved it because nobody made her do anything. There's no edge to jump off, you just walk in, so she set her own pace and crept a little deeper. I tried to carry her into the deep end and float her. She hated it. Back to shore we went.

The moment I keep thinking about came from the lifeguard. She walked over and told me Kiki needed a lifejacket. Kiki hates lifejackets, because to him it's a public announcement that he can't swim. Except he can. Three years of lessons. He flunked the deep water test last summer, but it's 2026 now. So when she said lifejacket, I said he knows how to swim. She said he'd have to prove it. I didn't think twice. I called Kiki over and “show her you know how to swim.”

He came back five minutes later walking two inches taller. All those Sunday morning swim lessons came down to one question, “can you swim when you need to?” The answer is finally yes.

Then RiRi wouldn't go near the splash pad until Kiki grabbed her arm and dragged her straight through it. She spent the rest of the afternoon running back and forth across it like the whole thing was her idea.

Then we drove home in a car that was, finally, silent.

The convenient thing about a place like this is that they are open 11am-730pm Monday-Saturday all summer. Here is the link to their site https://www.grandriver.ca/outdoor-recreation/conservation-areas/brant/

Kiki's getting into music. The only thing in my car is a decade-old hip-hop compilation CD, and out of the whole thing there are exactly two songs I can play with him in it. "Mama Said Knock You Out" by LL Cool J and "Hip Hop Hooray" by Naughty by Nature. He also went through a hard Michael Jackson phase, and eventually asked me for a CD player so he could run his own music instead of asking me every time.

Before I got around to it, Grandma beat me to it and got him a Walkman. I had two cassettes sitting in my office drawer, the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack and MJ's Dangerous, $2 each from a used music store. That's what sent us back to The Odd Spot last week, where we grabbed three more: Thriller, Janet Jackson's Control, and Another Bad Creation.

Here's what I actually like about it. Hand Kiki Spotify and he'd find stuff that isn't for a child in about four minutes. Hand him Thriller and he can run it into the ground all day. He picks his own music, I stop being the DJ, and nobody's online to do it.

If your kid's getting into music and you're not ready to hand over a streaming account, this is the move.