Tag: Growing Up

  • ODDS and ENDS: Recovery, Tottenham’s Next Season, and This Year

    (The future is in your lap…)

    Today is the first day that I feel 100% normal. Yesterday was like 95%, and I think that had to do with the side effects of the medication I was on. Yeah, Covid sucks, and I am glad that I had avoided it for four years. I am also aware that I had a very mild case, as I would say that it felt more like I had a bad cold than anything else. Also, the being exhausted all the time made me feel like I have lost a week of my life; I just couldn’t stop sleeping, which wasn’t as pleasurable as I had hoped. I just felt lazy. Now that I am back, I have the desire to exceptionally over exert myself to compensate for my “time off.”

    Tottenham Hotspur will not play in the Champions League next season, but they will qualify for the one of the two other European football tournaments. With Spurs final game against already relegated Sheffield, odds are that Tottenham are Europa League bound. This is an improvement over last season, but I can’t shake the feeling that the team choked during the second half of the season. Ah… next season. And there is a European Cup this Summer!

    Does it feel like this year has flown by for anyone else? Swear to God, it feels like we were just wrapping up New Years like a month ago. I know that I wrote a blog about how we had planned our Summer already, and just the other day, the kid’s school sent out the academic calendar for 24/25, and it’s like Fall is basically here already. I got an email last week about getting ready for the Great Pumpkin Blaze for Halloween. But with all of this, it dawned on me that kid will leave for college in 9 years, which means we are halfway through our time with her. Nine years of being a parent has flown by, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I wish it would slow down just a little bit. Perhaps I am to blame, as I forget that most of what I busy myself with really doesn’t matter.

  • Hurting the Toy’s Feelings

    Yesterday, on the way home from picking my kid up from school, she told me that she wanted to update her room. The issue, from her perspective, was that her room looked to “little kid,” and she wanted her room to look “older.”

    I did let her know that I understood that she was getting older, and her room needed to reflect that. Unfortunately, if she was looking for us to buy her a new bedroom set, that wasn’t happening anytime soon, but I would be willing to help her clean and reorganize her room to reflect what she was desiring it to look like.

    That was acceptable to her, and we started working on it as soon as she was done with her homework.

    To be honest, we were just shuffling stuff around – putting that under her bed, putting this on her shelf. Occasionally, she’d throw something away, but it was rare. I found so many candy wrappers. Clearly, she been squirreling away a large amount of candy.

    The biggest shock of the afternoon was that she wanted to box up her dolls, doll clothes and accessories, and put them away, up on the shelf. I knew this day was coming, but I didn’t think it would be today. At some point we all put our toys down, not to pick them up again with the intention of playing with them. I don’t know when it happened to me, but I know that by the time I was in junior high, it was sports and video games – no pretending with toys anymore.

    But the kid did ask me if this was going to hurt the dolls feelings, that she was putting them away up on the shelf. I was like, no, they’re always here when you need them.

  • Rockin’ Out in the Car

    You know how much Taylor Swift I listened to this weekend? And this has nothing to do with the Kansas City/Baltimore game on Sunday. I was the “Dad Taxi” and, oh, did I get my own version of The Eras Tour in the car. Yes, two Tween-girls were eating candy, chatting non-stop between singing Taylor songs, and it was like I wasn’t even there.

    And I couldn’t have been happier.

    I had no idea what to expect when I found out the kid was going to be a girl all those years ago. I had two older brothers, so my childhood was nothing but boy things. I can admit I was nervous about raising a girl, but not afraid to do it. I just knew that I was going to enter a place of parenting that I had no frame of reference, and that’s not bad – it’s just a challenge.

    I know that I only have a few years left of her openly acting like she likes me. I know what will come next and that’s okay. I want her to be her own person, and she has to pull away from me to accomplish that. It’s not like she’s going away, but if she’s just a little bit like the adolescent that I was, then she will be in her room all the time, listening to really “deep” music, and no one will be able to understand her. (I was pretty pretentious and obnoxious all at the same time.) But if she’s also like me, she’ll come to the other side of it, and will still talk to me. I got closer to my parents the older I got.

    But for now, I got be witness her getting excited about music and being with her friends. Maybe I did eavesdrop, but it was surprisingly reassuring to hear her voice her opinions and make some pretty funny jokes. Watching the kid grow up.

  • GOURDS!

    I bought gourds this morning at Trader Joe’s. You know, the Fall/Autumn/Halloween gourds that come out on October 1st, and are sold through Thanksgiving. Well, it was two tiny pumpkins and a gourd to be exact, but as I get deeper into the season, I will buy more of these. I wouldn’t call it a weakness, but it is the one seasonal decoration that I indulge.

    Soon, most likely this weekend, we’ll go to our storage space and get the box of Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations to put up. Most of what is in there are silly, kid-like things to put up. Also in that box, there is a collection of dollar store small glittery pumpkins. Soon our kitchen table will be a collection of both real and fake gourds. You know, how the Pilgrims intended.

    When the kid was little, two or three, she would paint the white pumpkins to add to the decorations. I don’t think she does that anymore. And I start to wonder how long we’ll keep decorating the apartment with these cartoonish and child-like decorations?

    My parents kept reusing all the old holiday decorations until I went away to college. With me, the final child was out of the house, so my mom decided that it was time to have more grown up decorations for all the holidays. Gone were the doe-eyed cats and bats, to be replaced with wreaths of fake orange leaves and gourds. (But her gourds were plastic and ceramic.) Christmas even got more mature with an all-white lights on an all-white tree. You get the idea…

    I have a feeling we’ll do the same thing when our kid heads out of here, to college or where ever.

    But I like my gourds.

  • The Kid has Learned Well

    Last week, I mentioned that the kid was off from school for her “Mid-Winter Break.” I do not know of a single parent in the City that finds this “break” enjoyable. It is a week of scrambling to find things for the kid to do, so she doesn’t sit in front of a screen the whole time. I think I did an okay job last week. She surely didn’t have less screen time, but she didn’t have more.

    I mean, I’m not an idiot here. I do understand that I am receiving a wonderful gift, which is getting to spend time with my kid, at an age where she still likes and respects me. (The clock is ticking until that goes away…) She is forming her own opinions on music, and movies, and books she wants to read. She is just now taking the first steps in trying to figure out the world around her, and where she fits in. Being a witness to that is a great fringe benefit of being a parent.

    The kid did pepper me with lots of questions last week about growing up in Texas during the 90’s, in the suburbs, where it was warm or hot all the time. Describing growing up outside of Dallas is a fascinating and odd tale that my daughter, with her urban New York City upbringing, has a hard time wrapping her head around. Of all the things I have told her, she finds it amazing that the D/FW area will totally shut down at the first sight of snow; Not a blizzard, or sub-freezing temperatures, but just the tiniest of snowflakes falling would wreck North Texas.

    I think my story telling had an effect on her, as this morning, when getting ready for school, she told me she wanted to dress like a “90’s kid.” I was puzzled, so I asked her what a “90’s kid” looks like? I was told “90’s kids” wear; light blue jeans, All-Star shoes, baggy long sleeve tee-shirts, and listen to cd’s.

    She wasn’t wrong.

    And I also find it rather amazing that my daughter so succinctly summed up a very formative decade of my life. The only way she could have been more on the money is if she wanted a pack of clove cigarettes and a beat-up paperback copy of Naked Lunch to read.