It’s August. The most intense month of the year for us. It’s the month where you finally squeeze in a few minutes for breakfast right before you collapse into bed — which is preferable to collapsing in the field, which has happened on occasion.

It’s the month when everything is happening all at once: wheat, hay, melons, garden — even babies: We hatched 14 ducklings, and the count on baby chicks is over 30. Our oldest spends a good portion of his day in the stack-truck, and even our littlest has begun his dream of baling hay. I alternate between the melon field and the swather, and my husband has the intense job of making sure that all the pieces and players keep moving around the game board we call farming.

While some people are cramming in the last of their summer vacations and gearing up for another school year, we are just trying to make it through the long hot days of August.

“What are you guys planning this weekend?” a friend asked recently.

Um, weekend? We don’t have those in August — those happen in January for farmers. But while we may not have “weekends,” we nearly always seem to find ways to make life entertaining — even during the brutal days of August.

We pretend to be famous ball players pitching cantaloupe; or pretend to serve elaborate meals, talking in silly accents while we eat yet another half a watermelon with a pocket knife for dinner — just like the last four nights; or we act like we’re Mario Andretti flying through the field, even though the front axles of the tractor have fallen off and we aren’t moving at all. We invent fun for ourselves every day — some days (especially in August) just take a little more imagination than others!

This last week, I got an email from a news publication I subscribe to that was filled with multiple links to articles listing activities for your child so they wouldn’t feel the summer boredom. I had to skim the articles just to make sure I had read the headlines correctly.

Summer boredom? Some days (especially in August) we feel bushed, burned out, and always busy … but bored? I skimmed the lists, and had two questions: Who has time to get bored in summer? And what kid needs their parents to help prevent boredom?

The lists were mildly interesting, but they didn’t hold a candle to the entertainment that my cousins and I would create when we were kids. The adults would nearly always give us a list of chores to do: washing the dishes, cleaning our room, or burning the trash — but as soon as the list was done (or as soon as we thought it was done enough that we could escape adult supervision) we were out to make important discoveries.

Each cousin’s house promoted different styles of play. At my house, we’d climb on top of the shop roof and play spy, or in the summer we’d squeeze through stacks of melon bins, pretending they were tunnels or houses. At one cousin’s house we’d shoot bottle rockets to chase off predators; at another cousin’s, we’d drag logs up the tree and build forts — or simply dig holes in their dirt pile.

Being “bored” was one of those things that just wasn’t allowed in our family. If someone did ever say “the ‘B’ word,” they were likely to be given a list of tasks that they were then expected to complete. “Oh, you’re bored? Well, the windows need washing, the rock garden needs weeded, the sheep pens need mucked out, the wood rack needs filled …”

We didn’t need our parents’ help to create entertainment. We could be Tarzan with just a tree and a piece of baler twine. Davy Crockett with just stick for a gun, and Mary Poppins with a big mustard weed that we’d twirl around like an umbrella.

I have watched my kids build rabbit traps with baler twine and apple crates, dig a pond for the ducks, chop grass with clippers that they “wove” into mats, and fasten ratchet straps to tree branches so they could lift boards better.

I deleted the emails. Farm kids don’t need lists — they just need a pile of dirt and a little imagination to keep the bad words out of their summer vocabulary.