Wind sprints

These two photos

I've been going along with Si to do his wind sprints (which reminds me: Si has started working on track stuff again, in response to parental pressure to DO SOME KIND OF EXERCISE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD) and whatever we are doing must be working, because my legs are SORE. And I say this as a lifetime runner. A lifetime slow runner, but still. The two of us are improving.

pretty much sum him up right now. Especially if one involved guns and/or gaming.

It's been making me think about one of our perennial frets about Si - that he doesn't work at things - and trying to reconcile it with this idea that kids know how they themselves learn best and will show you (by learning that way) if you are willing to watch.

It's an idea about which I'm skeptical but which I can't seem to put down, especially since it hits a harmonic resonance in my own personal philosophy, which is that a kid's job is to grow up and a parent's job is to help them do that - to help them become the person they're supposed to be. Which, since none of us can see the future, involves a lot of observation. The watching, in this philosophy, is more critical than the shaping or correcting.

So when he wakes up at 7 a.m. and immediately, before breakfast, starts pinging around on his iphone game collection, is his future self crying out for discipline and correction, or should I observe this learning style objectively and let it go unremarked?

[Note: it did not go unremarked. I told him to turn the phone off. "No faaaair!"]

When I see on the class calendar that there's an algebra test coming up next week, should I say something, such as, for example, "Yes to the playdate but only after you've done some problem practice for your test," - or is that just indoctrinating him in the test-based education model, which will teach him to be helpless in the face of his learning needs unless he is preparing for a test?

[Note: I told him to practice for his algebra test. He doesn't have a study worksheet, so he went online and found practice problems in the subject area. Not a bad use of initiative and problem-solving skills, even if it is in service of doing really well on tests.]

It's a dilemma. He's smart. He's conscientious. He loves to be seen as smart and successful and wants, like most kids, to be rich (riiiiich!) And nine times out of ten he will shrug and give up when faced with a task requiring complex effort. He's designed to fall for get-rich-quick schemes, I sometimes think, and it seems criminal of me as a parent not to counteract this tendency - by proselytizing for the good old Protestant work ethic, by inculcating good study/ life habits, by limiting noneducational monitor time, by saying, as our personal daily mantra, "not until you've finished ___."

 Well, okay, fine, if you put it like that. However, other times I think what I'm really doing is wanting him to be a different sort of person: a quester and a researcher, a searcher after truth. I don't want him to just study for the test: I want him to ruminate on the meaning of the problems, and why we do math, and what is life all about, anyway? But he's really more of a life is good, let's finish this up and break out the beer kind of a guy. An efficient worker, one who, like myself, prizes his downtime, his home life, his quality of life (and thus the quality of his monitor graphics). He likes to bake, read quality escapist lit, pit his wits against the computer game and curl up by the fire: he's a hobbit, not a wizard. Is that so wrong?

No, of course not. Not wrong at all. Just...

...and here's where I start to see a problem in my approach. I've never been particularly interested in parenting books, but I'm suddenly checking them out in stacks, hoping to come up with a useful set of standardized rules that I can quick substitute in when my aspirational parent starts to say, well, shouldn't he be....?

Because the answer is no. He shouldn't be. He is who he is. And thank the stars above for my sweet, prickly, stubborn mid-size guy who only occasionally points his nerf gun at me and pretends to fire.

Last days of summer

Summer is such a schizophrenic time for me. On the one hand, I wake up at five thirty and run, shower and go to work, the same as I do every other frigging day of the year. On the other hand, the house is filled with long lazy days and unfulfilled desires and endless, endless fights over who gets to have a playdate or who is touching whose Legos. I get home and the heat and need to loaf hit me like a wave, but then there is no loafing, because however leisurely the kids might feel themselves, they don't really share that feeling with others, and monitoring them is a fulltime job and M has been up in his ears with it for the past nine hours and it's my turn now and also everyone is hunnnngrrry. So like every other mother on the planet I am looking forward with panting enthusiasm to the first day of school. I am also trying to wring every last drop of summer from this month. Thus this weekend I spent in a frenzy of yard work, and then took the kids (and my parents, who are visiting in order to help us with the last critical week before school starts) to do two installments of our summer Park Project.

The pavilion at Cheesman Park

The Park project is where we visit Denver parks, investigate their offerings, and fill out a little survey sheet.

Helen gave the fountains top marks but found the playground average at best.

The survey sheets are more to make it official than anything else (well, I think Silas secretly loves them. They fulfill his need for order). Otherwise we're just visiting parks and testing the playgrounds. These were our second and third parks; last time we went to Observatory Park, which still earns top marks from both kids (the observatory. Not many parks can boast a functional observatory, and the fact that it was closed on the day we visited probably made it even more desirable. The mysteries of the stars, etc., as opposed to the pain in the neck of peering through a telescope at tiny swimming pinpricks that, we're assured, are VERY IMPORTANT.)

Si tested the pavilion for scooter worthiness.
The playground was serviceable. Although less so for proto teens.

I'm hoping to visit at least one more park before the summer's really done (probably not before school starts, though, which means not before baseball and soccer start in earnest, so really, who am I kidding? Life, which has been pretending to be busy all summer, is about to crank into high gear.)

Smith Lake at Washington Park.

For me, the Park Project has been an excuse to visit places I've meant to go for three years and explore the city we sort of live in a little more. It's both satisfying and sad. I wish that I could have been doing this all summer, for one thing. And it makes me think of all the other things I wish I was doing with the kids, and how I desperately wish I could have the summers off, and how the kids are growing up and already Si is almost too old to be read aloud to (one of the main reasons I had kids, already phasing itself out! Why go on?). I get this rushing, panicky sense of needing to do it all now and maximize this day, this week, this time of their lives.

I have to forcibly sit down sometimes, and remember: in twenty years (in five years), the details won't matter. Their childhood will have become just that--the thing they have, imperfect, marked by expediency and what-we-happened-to-have-on-hand-at-the-time-ism--and it will be enough. Really. It will. Even if they don't learn Spanish.