Tag: Kids

  • Getting Back to It, Again

    So, I’ve been doing this stay-at-home-dad thing for the past five years, and I keep thinking that when school starts back up for the kid, I will instantly fall right back into my reading/writing routine. I can excuse the first year, because it was the first year and I didn’t know any better. But the past four… Yeah, I know better, but I still won’t believe it.

    The issue that I have is a very basic human issue; I get knocked out of my pattern, and it is difficult to restart the healthy habits that I had.

    See, From January to June, we have a solid work/school schedule for everyone in the house. It’s a routine that we all can get behind and live within. And then Summer Vacation comes, and it blows everything up, and we’re all floundering, and waking up at different times every day. It’s just a wonder chaos, but its chaos compared for the first half of the year. I don’t accomplish a whole lot over Summer, but it is summer, and with a kid around, things do get lazy.

    Then the school year starts up, with the new routine, and schedule. There are clearly some kinks in the system as we get rolling, but the schedule works itself out, and we all fall into place, right?

    No, because the old habit got broken, and we have to reestablish a new habit. And that takes time. As it does every year. Every year it is the same thing; gotta work at getting back into the groove.

    But I keep thinking that “this year will be different.” That this year I will fall right back into doing all the stuff I want and need to do. There’s this huge stack of books I need to read, and I think that I will get right to it… but the reality is that at first I have to work at it – force myself to sit down and start reading. And then there all these emails of stories and flash pieces that I need to respond to… but again, I have to force myself to just set aside fifteen minutes to just get started. And don’t get started on the other creative writing projects that I have – some of which are stuck in the nightmare land of “Unfinished Outline.”

    I do know how this ends. It ends with the new habit being established. The work is completed. That feeling of accomplishment returns. It just takes a little effort every day. And sometimes I have to write a pep talk blog post to get me back to work.

  • Middle School (Unedited)

    The kid started middle school. There has been a great deal of upheaval and change in our little apartment, not to mention the world. I am happy that the kid is growing up, and she is very excited about staring middle school, and leaving elementary behind. For her, she likes a challenge, and going new places and meeting new people, and middle school is that. Her only complaint has been that she wants to get at the learning and new classes, and the first day is just dull; learning the rules, and where things are.

    I will tip my cap to my kid; she is so much braver that I was at her age.

    I was terrified to go to middle school. Everything that everyone had told me was that the 9th graders ate the seventh graders alive. There was nothing in middle school I was looking forward to. It was all awkward and mean and rough, and embarrassing, and every school nightmare I ever had wrapped up into one.

    The funny thing was that the night before middle school started, my kid had trouble sleeping. She had butterflies in her stomach. Though she was excited about starting middle school, there was still a little nervousness to it. As I was talking to her, trying to help her relax and sleep, she asked me if middle school will be the worst time of her life, because me and her mother had told her some stories of how difficult it was. That and she’s seen enough tween TV and movies that have also painted middle school as a grinder box crucible of adolescence.

    I was prepared to attempt to paint the rosiest of pictures for her that it was this fun place, and only a few bad things happened to me, but that would have been a lie. And then it struck me; there was a silver lining. I told her that middle school was where I discovered theatre and performing. It was the place that where I first started reading great books, books that open your mind, and help you start to see the world in new and fresh ways. But most importantly, middle school was where I made some of the first truly great friends of my life. People I bonded with over books and movies and music. People I that are still in my life today, who I can’t fathom not being intertwined with to this day. I told her that middle school was the start of the process that made me the adult who I am today. The person I am proud to be.

    Don’t know if it did the trick, but she eventually got to sleep.

    And maybe I’m getting old and looking for silver linings in awful memories, or maybe those sharp edges and rounding off as the years go by.

    Nope. Middle school was the worst. I just had the best friends imaginable, which is how I survived.

  • Just Some Paint (Unedited)

    Just Some Paint (Unedited)

    The livingroom painting project is done!

    Well… like 80% done, as I still have to paint the ceiling, but that’s for next weekend, and that’s easy.

    So… We’re done!

    It took a little time, as I did start this whole project right before the kid went away to camp. I did that to kill time, and also try to teach her a life skill; how to paint a wall. I mean, at some point she will live someplace that she’ll want to make her own, and though painting isn’t a difficult skill to learn, I would like her to have in her head that this is something she can do.

    Anyway… digressing here…

    The point is that we took our time, but the wife and I painted the livingroom. Not only that, we cleaned everything out. Really got into all the nooks and crannies of the apartment and cleaned. And then the wife had an idea to sand and paint out TV stand, which turned out great. (She has a little more to go on it, but it looks great. Might share a picture of it when it’s done.) But the best part of all of this is that at the end of Sunday night, we were tired, but not exhausted, and we had the self-satisfied feeling of accomplishing something important.

    The last time we painted the livingroom was right before the kid was born. I guess it was called the “Nesting Phase,” but either way, it was fun to get the apartment ready for the kid. Even the wife’s sister came in town to help us get the whole place ready. It’s a fun memory.

    This time around, it felt like we were putting the last few years behind us. There are still ghosts of Covid around our home. This we hung on the walls, or furniture we tried to repurposed to make working from home functional, or home school at least viable. Books came off the shelves and were cleaned, and a new sense of order and comfort began to take root. It was renewing our commitment to make this little Harlem apartment our home for the next decade or more.

    It was just a little paint. Just a little time. Some sweat and listening to my wife’s playlists.

  • Summer Camp and Growing Up

    The wife and I got back from dropping the kid off at her all girls Summer camp. It’s a sleep away camp and she loves it. I can honestly say that she looks forward to it all year. When she gets home from camp, we get a month, or maybe two, before she starts talking about how she can’t wait to go back.

    This year, unlike the previous two, the kid wanted me and the wife to come into camp, so she could show us around, and this way, we’d know what she was experiencing, and put a place to the locations she had told us about. You see, the two previous summers, the kid has wanted to go into camp alone, and do it all by herself. We were and still are, all for her independence and if this is the healthy way that she starts to break away from us, we’re all for it. Still hurts a little – we want her to still need us, but the right thing is that she needs to become her own person, independent of us.

    So, this year when she wanted us to come in, we were a tad taken aback. We weren’t going to say no to this invitation, but still a little surprised that the third year in, now she wanted us to see it.

    Growing up in Texas, I barely knew anyone who went to a sleep away Summer camp. There were Boy Scout and Girl Scout camps, but those usually took place over a three-day weekend, and were about getting badges and stuff. Sleep away camp was about having fun, or at least that’s what TV and movies made it look like. Besides, sleep away camp seemed to be something that only happened in the Northeast. Down in Texas, we spent three months sleeping in, watching tv, riding bikes through the neighborhood, and playing until dinner time. Oh, and trying to stay out of trouble.

    So, I was curious what camp is like.

    And what I learned from my daughter was nothing. I could see it dawn on her as we parked the car and started to cross over the river to get to the camp that she had made a mistake bringing us. She got all tense, wouldn’t talk (and our kid loves to talk), and when we did ask her a question, she would only give us one-word answers. She wasn’t behaving like herself. When we got to her tent, a group of her friends came running up to her, and they all started hugging, laughing, and talking about what they had been up to – the kid returned to her normal self. She is a good kid and pulled away from her friends to show us her tent and we helped set up her bed, but the wife and I could feel her was desperate to get back to her friends. So, we gave her a hug and a kiss, told her to have fun, and watched her run off to her friends.

    I still have no idea what the camp is like.

    Which isn’t true, as the councilors and the staff were great and did show us around, and made us feel very welcome. But I didn’t get to see the camp from the kid’s perspective.

    And as the wife and I drove back to New York, I told my her my theory why it was a mistake to bring us into camp. See, I get that kids want to share stuff with their parents, and our kid is no different. But that camp, for the past two years, had just been hers. We had dropped her off, and she crossed that river by herself, and everything we knew about camp, she had to tell us. We stayed on one side, and she got to go to the other. It was her private place that only she knew about, that she had experienced alone – it was her thing, not ours. I think she had her first realization that in life there are some things you don’t want to share. That you want to keep all for yourself.

    That’s true for me. There are things that I have experienced that are mine. That I hold onto and I cherish. They’re not nefarious experiences; they’re just mine, and they make me happy.

    The kid is beginning to build those memories for herself now. Which is good. She’s growing up.

  • Earworm Wednesday: The Countdown was never Final

    My kid has been humming this for three days.

    THREE DAYS!!!

    And you know the part that she’s been humming.

    Totally stuck in my head…