The girls and I have spent the past week having water fights after dinner.

We don’t use the hose, instead filling up a bucket and splashing each other with water pumps (not pistols) until our supply runs dry.

It’s good old-fashioned fun that takes me back to my childhood when it was the norm to spend long, hot summers running under the sprinkler in the backyard in your undies.

Some nights my brothers and sisters and I would stay up until after dark, having the time of our lives with one sprinkler.

We would put it under the trampoline, in the days when kids weren’t wrapped in cotton wool and were allowed to have fun.

We would hang it over the swing set or spend hours dodging daisies and busy bees just to feel the cold water splash us time and again.

Water was a big part of our summers . . . and in some small way I’m trying to pass that on to my children, albeit with far less to play with.

Summer is a wonderful time for families.

The days are longer, and the warm evenings force you outdoors . . . no television or computer games, just being together and finding your own fun.

And in summer, that usually involves water.

It’s hard to tell the kids not to frolic in a bucket when its sweltering outside, particularly when you spent many summers drenching yourself at any given chance.

You want your own children to be allowed to play freely, and create their own memories of growing up with Australian summers . . . while still teaching them that a resource we took for granted is now a precious commodity.

But you don’t want to take away their fun in doing that.

As youngsters, we lived for summer and all the freedom that came with it; the holidays that seemed endless . . . the days that allowed us to spend hours at the local swimming pool, or ride pushbikes for miles with a piece of string and some fatty meat just to catch a handful of yabbies in a muddy dam.