After the winter we had this season, I was having my doubts we'd ever snap out of the deep freeze. Suddenly, it seemed like one weekend I was shoveling snow and the next my wife was telling me I needed to mow the lawn.

Since then, I've been trying to soak up all the sights and aromas of the season. Spring seems to give way to days of 100-plus temperatures without warning, so I'm literally taking time to stop and smell the flowers.

In doing this, I've become increasingly aware of just how important it is to get outside, especially with my children. When I was growing up in Chicago Heights, my friends and I would ride our bikes to nearby Commissioners Park to play as soon as winter weather broke.

The park featured a jungle gym, tennis courts, swings, slides and other playful attractions. It also had a giant spinning kite with two swings dangling from each side. Being young and indestructible, we never played on it the way it was meant, opting instead to tightly wrap one of the swings around the center pole to propel the kid on the other seat into the stratosphere. Scary and unsafe, but so much fun.

This was back in the stone ages when parents weren't petrified to let kids play out of their sight. In my neighborhood, we'd leave home in the early morning, not to return until we heard the booming voices of our mothers echoing across the land to beckon us home for dinner. We played in the dirt, caught lightning bugs in jars and climbed the tallest trees, all without fear of injury.

I hadn't realized just how much things had changed until recently when my 5-year-old son developed a severe case of "Super Mario-itice." Santa had brought the lad his own educational video game system for Christmas. He took to it like a fish to water, which suited us just fine since he was learning as he played.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be his gateway drug into the hard stuff - jumping on turtles and saving the princess. True, I myself have a hard time resisting the sweet siren song of the virtual land, but I don't want my kids turning into bleary-eyed zombies.

Last weekend when we had a window of nice weather between torrential rainstorms, I threw both kids into the car and drove to Rohrman Park in Schererville. When the car stopped, their eyes fixed on the playground. I'd barely gotten them out of their seats as their primal kid instincts kicked into gear, running as fast as their legs would take them to the brightly colored structure with bridges, slides and monkey bars.

There wasn't a spinning kite swing, but we had hours of fun no battery-powered game could hope to match.

- The writer's opinion are his own.