Tag: Parents

  • Moving Stuff Around

    After Thanksgiving, like the day after, is when we put up our Christmas decorations. And to be honest, we never had a good place to put our tree. The curse of a small NYC apartment: There is a never a good place for anything.

    But this year, the wife came up with a good idea, which was to move our lounge-sofa away from our windows, and place the tree there. The tree looked nice in that location, and with all the other decoration we put up, it looked very festive, but cluttered – a Christmas explosion.

    Anyway, I mentioned before that we take everything down after New Year’s, but with the holiday on a Monday, and everyone back to life on Tuesday, we didn’t get around to cleaning up until this weekend. It took all day Saturday, but we got it done. Life had returned to normal, but we decided not to move the sofa back. We were tired, and ready to relax.

    And something amazing happened.

    The new placement of the sofa has changed the whole mood and flow of our apartment. You could logically assume that we were just reacting to something being “new” and in time it will wear off. But I have to admit, for the past two days our home has felt different, more home like, peaceful, calmer even.

    Is it possible that the placement of the sofa was holding us back? Does anyone remember Feng Shui? That was a pop-culture thing, right? Was that real or something made up to sell sofas?

    The funny thing is that I remember being a kid and my parents would do something like this very randomly, like every few years; that they would get a bug in their ear and just start rearranging the furniture in the home, and then talk about how much better everything felt.

    So, I have discovered another way that I am slowly becoming my parents. Not that I mind.

    No… Maybe the better way to think about this is that I am coming to a better understanding of who my parents were.

  • Lack of Sleep

    Oh, lord in heaven… we did not sleep last night in our home.

    The kid had sleeping issues, and it was difficult for her to fall asleep. Every half hour she was up, and it went on until 1am. This doesn’t happen very often, as the kid is a great sleeper. She always has been. Even as a baby, once you put her down, she was out. In fact, we stopped telling other parents about how well our daughter slept because we could just feel the red-hot hatred and contempt that would get shot at us from our sleep deprived friends.

    But this was hard. I think a little of it had to do with the Sunday Night Blues, and not wanting to go to school after a fun weekend. Also, I think she got a little too wound up after dinner with TV, and video games. Normally we turn screens off a half hour before bed, but we slipped up as parents. And once the kid starts having difficulty sleeping, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. She gets so worked up that she’s not falling asleep right away that she starts worrying that she’ll never fall asleep.

    What we were left with was a family all worn out in the morning, but we powered through it.

    For me and the wife, who seemed to have lived most of our life without enough sleep, it just felt par for the course.

    But, oh, the kid… poor kid. This was a special kind of awful that she wasn’t sure how to deal with. She was quiet, this morning, but she got up, ate breakfast, and got ready. We left on time, and made it to school early, in fact. But, it was her being quiet the whole time which was the tell that she was not having any of this.

    I wish I could tell her that life as a grown up isn’t normally like this, but this is what life as a grown up is like. You never get enough sleep.

    And when you do sleep, you wake up early for no reason at all.

  • The Scourge of Dads Who Rap

    This morning as I was walking my daughter to school, she started talking to me about what she considers her “look.” You know, the fashion and style the uniquely defines who she is. Right now, that would be carpenter pants, tee-shirts, and over-sized cardigan sweaters. (Let’s go 90’s!) Then I told her that I used to dress sort of the same way back in high school. And to a degree, my go to look is still jeans, tee-shirts and a sweater.

    I became curious, so I asked if I had a “look” that was apparent?

    I was told that I dress like a dad.

    Is that cool? I followed.

    No.

    Is it embarrassing?

    Not really.

    Is it as embarrassing as a dad rap?

    She grew puzzled. What’s a dad rap?

    You don’t know what a dad rap is?!?!? I was honestly shocked that this had not entered on the radar of my kids life.

    For those of you who don’t know, this is the best example of “Dad Rap” I know of:

    Yes, back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, us kids were subjected to the scourge of dads trying to rap. Just as in the clip, dads would turn the baseball caps around, do weird things with their hands, and always, and I mean ALWAYS, use the “I’m (dad’s name) and I’m here to say…” line.

    I guess it was always meant as a joke by dads. The cringe factor, and trying to embarrass your kids. But it happened so often. Like, at school, PTA meetings, at church, at friend’s houses, little league games; anywhere there was a dad and a group of kids, a dad rap was bound to show up.

    And the other thing that The Simpsons gets 100% Right, are the kids begging for Homer to stop and promise never to do that again. I think the only thing missing would have been a kid angrily reminding their dad that they’re not cool.

    I was lucky enough that my dad never did anything like this. (No, his song that he’d sing to embarrass us was “Doo Wah Diddy.”) But even though he didn’t rap, I do remember thinking as I watched Kevin’s dad rap about putting hotdogs on the grill, that I would never dad rap in front of my kid, let alone their friends.

    So, as we walked to school, I tried to explain to my kid what dads rapping was, why kids hated it, and how it was so awful and embarrassing. I wasn’t doing that great of a job, because, devilishly, she asked me to do a dad rap, so she could know for sure what it was like.

    So I did it. I did the “I’m Matt Groff, and I’m here to say…” line. Followed with, “I love my daughter in a major way.” I turned my ballcap around. I did weird had gestures.

    It did make the kid laugh.

    But she made me promise never to do that again.

  • You’re Embarrassing Me!

    My kid finds me embarrassing. This isn’t some shock or revelation, or even a surprise. All kids find their parents embarrassing at some point, right? It just comes with the territory. With my kid starting at a new school, she has found me more embarrassing than usual of late. I am a silly person, I admit that, but I also know that the kid is trying to fit in, and what she wants is for there to be nothing, and I mean NOTHING, to disrupt or rock that boat. I get it, and I have been on my better behavior to just be normal.

    But I would also like to point out that even my “normal” behavior has been deemed embarrassing. So, this appears to be a no-win situation, because as I have mentioned above, all kids find their parent embarrassing.

    In my time, it was my mother who put a “Jesus Loves You” bumper sticker on the back of her poo brown Chevet. I mean, it was bad enough she drove a shit colored Chevet, but reminding everyone that Jesus in fact did love them was a bridge too far for me. It was junior high, and as soon as I got out of that car, all the kids at school would begin to yell at me “Jesus Loves You!” There were a few creative bullies out there who would add “Satan Loves You, Too!”

    But I started thinking this morning, being that I am now on Team Parent, that there is nothing wrong with me, so why should I have to change? If I am being my true authentic self, then there is no reason for me to adjust my behavior. I’m not the problem here. I’m just me and the kid is just going to have to come to terms with that.

    And yet this feels like the wrong attitude to have in this situation…

  • School Days

    As we get closer to the end of Summer, all of my focus begins to move towards getting the kid ready for school. For the past few years, she attended a local neighborhood public school, and even though we loved our school, the wife and I decided that our daughter needed to attend a different school that would better meet her needs.

    I say all of this because today was Orientation Day for the new school, and we were up and out, bright and early, on this late Summer morning.

    I clearly love my kid very much, but one of the things I am most proud about her is that she is unafraid to try new things. When I was her age, anything that changed my predictable pattern scared the shit out of me, and is still an issue I deal with today. But not my kid – she sees the new school as a chance to make new friends, try new things, learn new stuff – it’s all exciting to her.

    As with this Orientation, the kids went in one direction to find their classrooms and meet their teachers, and the parents went to the auditorium to get a Power Point presentation. (I don’t mean to sound like I am mocking, I’m not. It was a well-done presentation.) But we still had to sit and wait, as there were a good number of new parents and kids to this school, and processing all of us wasn’t a quick or easy task.

    I sat in the middle back of the auditorium, and I have always sat in the middle back in any theatre or auditorium I have even had the chance to select my seat. I’m pretty sure I started doing this in high school, nearly thirty years ago. I had read once that seat selection says something about you psychological make up.

    Not sure I believe it, but let’s say it’s true. So, the type A’s sit on the front row, and the bad kids are in the back. The people who don’t want to be noticed sit in the middle, and the people who don’t want to be there sit on the isle. (I think my selection says that I want to be “bad” but also not get noticed.) According to this group of parents – almost everyone didn’t want to be noticed, a handful were type A, not that many people on the isles, and I didn’t look behind me, so I don’t know how many “bad kids” were there.

    What I did see was a very diverse crowd of parents. None of us looked the same, and we all did look rather tired for being up that early. It’s one of the aspects of living in NYC that I enjoy, and I know will benefit my kid, which is that she has and will continue to go to school with kids that different from her, and they all will help each other broaden their horizons. Also, this was a room full of dedicated parents, which is something that we all had in common – we want what’s best for our kids.