Turkeyful

Here's what we did on Thanksgiving:

Then we took the bus to the ski area and messed around on the carpet of snow they had laid down at great expense to themselves and the environment. You'll note the sum total of the natural snow in the Winter Park region there in the photo behind Helen:

Then we came back to the rented condo and had Target's Thanksgiving in a box. This is much better than it sounds and we just had the last of the turkey leftovers last night, in soup.

We added a new twist to our three-year-old tradition this year, in that we invited some of the relatives we started the tradition to get away from. One of the many things I am thankful for this year is that it was fine. We completely avoided any discussion of politics, healthcare, child rearing - or, well, anything else. Things got a little testy in the kitchen, but that was mostly due to the lack of elbow room. I stayed gracious (no, really!) and M. only had to do that "calm it down" hand motion at me once during the whole three days.

It was good, and I really am thankful for so much. I'd list it all except that I have limited gigabytes and also I am a little superstitious about laying out all my goods online for the fates to take.

Completely throwaway side note: I found one of our photo albums face down in Si's "man cave" in the basement, and when I went to pick it up, tsking to myself, I noticed that it just happened to be open to a page with a photo of two friends of mine from a visit to a natural hot springs many years ago. Many, many years ago, back in the days when young women went au naturel in this situation. I did a few rapid calculations - man cave; recent playdate with a new friend from middle school; rather eye-popping photo - and made the very prudent decision to remove it. Then I reconsidered: I like having this photo scattered in among all our sober wedding photos and random "watch me stand on one foot beside the pickup" photos. Once we, too, were careless and carefree and wild and fun and this is what we did.

However, after sleeping on it, I decided that my first impulse was the correct one.

I also am a little nervous, because that photo - of two women I've completely lost touch with and am unlikely to ever see again - had a companion photo, one that features a person that Si and his friend might recognize even though it was taken 20 years ago. And I have NO idea where that photo has got to.

Hmm.

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.

Life with an Eight-Year-Old

We celebrated the birthday of this guy over the weekend:















The party was at ten in the morning, and he was hoping to wake up at nine so he wouldn't have to wait more than about ten minutes between his wake-up routine (dragging himself to the couch, complaining that he's not hungry, reluctantly eating a bowl of Kix before starting on the morning's business of bossing around Helen) and the arrival of the first guests. Of course this didn't happen and by 8:02 he was flopping about on various chairs wondering WHEN the party would START.

But start the party did, and it was remarkably pleasant. We even led everybody down to the park at the bottom of the street for a game of baseball, and yes, it was a bit chaotic, reining in eight eight year olds and a four-year-old helper (still weepy at being locked first out of the treehouse and then out of Si's room)--two of the boys wanted to take the Long Way, one needed me to carry a complicated piece of home carpentry that he'd whipped up during the free play of the first hour of the party (!), another found a crawdad claw that had to be kept track of--but also, I'm kind of shocked to say, fun. Walking along with two of the cheerfulest little boys on the planet (I took the Long Way too), one of them trying to make sure I knew where the Family Fun Center was and how to get there (just in case, you know), the other telling me about his recent trip to Philadelphia--I can't think of many better ways to spend a pleasant weekend morning.

Because this is the thing about eight year olds, I'm learning: they are pleasant company. They can make themselves juice and sandwiches. They are starting to appreciate humor, even that which does not involve poop, knock knock jokes, or cartoon characters slipping on banana peels (not that any of these forms of humor are NEGLECTED, you understand). They can go off by themselves. They can process. Excitement doesn't totally unhinge them. They can have a birthday party, three fun-size snickers bars and a slice of cake in the morning and still be able to play peacefully with their new toys until bedtime. They remember to add "I had a really fun time at your house!" when writing to grandparents to ask for more stuff.

Thank goodness. We're entering the sweet spot (which will last until he's approximately 12 and then end abruptly, I'm fully aware) (although I'm still hoping this won't happen to us and he'll be a CHEERFUL and PLEASANT teenager) (ha ha ha ha).

The secret to sons

The secret to sons: it's something I haven't learned yet. Or perhaps there isn't one, anymore than there's some mysterious secret to raising daughters, or chickens. Everyone is just muddling along like I am, frustrated and delighted in equal measure.

I come from a long line of daughters. I have one sibling, a sister. My dad's only sibling was a sister; so was my mom's. My mom's sister never married, and my other aunt married someone we will generously call "unsuitable" and who left the family before I turned eight. My best friend from preschool through high school had one sibling, a sister (friends with my sister! Couple-friends lottery! For my parents, that is). My best friend from third grade through high school had two siblings, both sisters. My life experience was girls girls girls, is what I am saying, and although I had a healthy appreciation for boys, especially after I turned fifteen or so, I don't have much first hand experience about what they're like in childhood.

Now it sounds like I'm going into some long tirade about how boys are alien species and I Just Don't Understand and Girls Are So Much Easier and PLEASE. Girls are kids, boys are kids, basically they have similar dreams and motivations ("It snowed so much the schools closed? But Ch^ck E Ch@@se didn't? So we got to go to Ch^ck E Ch@@se ALL DAY?"). Plus I'm not sure how much I ought to rely on my own experience of childhood when trying to parent my kids; this gets dangerously close to trying to somehow parent myself, instead of paying attention to the kids who actually exist in front of me right now.

However, when Helen comes to me crying, I find that I often instinctively know what her problem is. She's lonely! Her feelings are hurt! She got caught up in imagining the terrible things that could happen to her and the people she loves and she's scared! Likewise, and more usefully, when she's acting bratty or mean I can also more or less picture what's going through her head, and speak to that.

When Silas comes to me crying--or, since he doesn't cry much anymore, when he is droopy and dispirited--sometimes I have NO CLUE. And since kids are kids, and don't often articulate their griefs very well, he has NO CLUE either, and we sit there, head to head, at an impasse. Until his droopiness turns into irritability, he starts acting like Bratty Mcbratterson, and I lose my temper. Right there is the behavioral equation that wrecks our relationship eighty percent of the time.

I'm trying to do better, though. For starters: I'm trying to appreciate my son for who he IS, not what I want him to be (or what I'm desperately hoping he's not going to be, which is a related but separate problem).