My husband was painting the back door and I was hanging around, bothering him and drinking an orange Ollipop.

“There’s a trend going around social media,” I told him. “Everyone is talking about bringing back nineties summers and wanting to give their kids a ‘nineties summer.’”

He hummed, probably struck speechless by my brilliance and definitely not annoyed that I was talking to him while he was trying to paint trim.

“What’s a nineties summer to you?” I asked.

“Blockbuster,” he answered immediately, not even pausing.

Nineties summers feel sun-bleached in my memory. They smell like sunscreen and hot concrete and the inside of my mom’s Honda Pilot. They taste like melted push-up popsicles (and the cardboard tube they came in), and Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas from summer reading programs. They sound like screen doors slamming and top 40 radio. I watched a lot of The Price is Right in the summers, eating peanut butter off a spoon. It was endless library books. Sprinklers. VHS tapes. Watching the newest kid movie that always came out in June, around my birthday. I have a particularly vivid memory of watching my brother jump into the public city pool while Tal Bachman’s song “She’s so high” played on the boombox that was definitely perched too close to the water’s edge.

A nineties summer was boredom in the best possible way. It seems like now, everyone is trying to recreate that feeling for their own kids. Less screen time, more freedom and simplicity. I get it. I really do. But I also wonder if every generation thinks their childhood summers were the last magical ones.

Because when I think about what my own children might remember someday, it probably won’t sound impressive either.

Library visits, church ice cream socials, vacation Bible school, swim lessons, Mama’s birthday at the lake, popsicles melting onto little hands, audiobooks, bare feet in the grass, running through the sprinkler (because there are ZERO affordable community pools where I live.) Nothing revolutionary, just childhood.

Maybe that’s the secret nobody tells us: the magic was never actually in Blockbuster. It was in being little, having long days and safe places and people who love you .The magic was in hearing “go play outside, here’s a lemonade,” and believing that summer might last forever.

Our kids don’t need a perfectly curated “nineties summer.” They don’t need us to recreate an aesthetic from our childhoods with matching vintage bicycles and carefully chosen popsicle brands.They just need summers that feel like home.

So buy the sidewalk chalk. Set up the sprinkler even if the yard turns muddy.
Keep popsicles in the freezer. (or get a popsicle cookbook from the library!)
Say yes to library trips.
Have people over for hot dogs on paper plates.
Teach them card games.
Watch movies together.
(On that note, don’t be afraid of screens, either — some of our memories are wrapped up in movie nights and video games and rented VHS tapes. Screens aren’t the enemy when they’re used intentionally and woven into real family life.)

Surprise them with a pajama snow cone run one Tuesday night. Light sparklers. Catch lightning bugs. Leave room for boredom. Leave room for magic, because childhood is built from ordinary things repeated over and over again until one day they become nostalgia. Someday, years from now, maybe they’ll look back wistfully and say things like:

“Remember library day?”
“Remember VBS songs in the car?”
“Remember when Mom always brought watermelon to the lake?”
“Remember movie nights in sleeping bags on the living room floor?”

And it will sound magical to them.

Just like Blockbuster sounds magical to us.