You Don’t Trail Blaze as a Parent

Some more thoughts on parenting and life today. Up this time? All the time I’ve been a parent, I’ve viewed myself as a sort of guide who can show my kids the ropes. I’ve lived more than 42 years, after all. It’s easy to think that I’ve encountered pretty much any situation they might come across, and so as a parent my job would be to accompany them along that trip to adulthood, pointing out all the pitfalls I’d found along the way. I’d already been through all that rough ground and blazed a trail for my kids. All they’d need to do is follow in my footsteps.

But now that I’ve been parenting for a while (and have not one but two teenagers), I’ve come to realize more and more that the hard-earned path I created for myself that I was so proud of all these years isn’t really worth a whole lot to my children. It’s not because they want to ignore it or refuse to listen to me, but it’s because the path I made is now over 25 years out of date. The terrain has changed since then. There are different threats. Other pitfalls. My kids are making their way through unknown jungle, and while I can possibly help them by suggesting things that worked for my way back when, those suggestions might or might not be of any real value.

Here I’ve been thinking all this time that I had made this helpful map with tons of annotations and warning marks, and now that my kids are old enough to really use it, I’ve discovered the map’s out of date and of an entirely different mountain. So the more I try to insist that my kids take this switchback or cross the river at that point, the more they’re probably going to struggle. Those switchbacks and river crossings might have worked well for me, but they don’t go to the same place anymore, and they might well end up being deadends.

At the same time, I’ve learned that my kids aren’t in this completely alone. At least the younger ones aren’t. We’re in this as a family. Tomas (the oldest child) ends up encountering a lot of things for the first time that Denisa and I as parents just haven’t come across. Daniela (coming next) can and has benefitted from her parents having already come across some of those new obstacles that Tomas encountered. So in many ways, parents can’t trail blaze, but older siblings can. Not completely, but at least enough to give everyone a general idea of some of the latest things to watch out for along the way.

There are other maps out there to consult. Other parents who might have already faced some of this new terrain with their children. Other children who have reached the latest mountaintop. But it’s important to remember that for all of the explorers out there, there’s an infinite number of paths and destinations, and what may be complete paradise for one person might be boring to another.

Sometimes I wish everything were as simple as I assumed it would be when I didn’t know anything about what I was talking about. Maybe one day I’ll figure out that’s pretty much never the case . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Driver’s Ed at Last

Tomas is coming up on his seventeenth birthday, but COVID derailed his driving plans until just last night. He had been planning on signing up for driver’s ed right about when COVID struck, and then . . . 2020 happened. He got on the waiting list for the program, and they just barely caught up with him.

It’s interesting to see how Maine approaches driver’s ed differently than Pennsylvania, where I got my license. He has to get ready for a written exam at the beginning of May. Once he’s passed that and taken the driving course as well as had some online instruction, he’ll have 6 months to get 70 hours of driving practice in with his parents. (10 hours of that has to be at night.) Then he’ll be eligible to take the road test. So the earliest he’ll be able to have his license at this point is the beginning of November.

It’s been so long ago that I got my license that I’ve forgotten a lot of what I had to do. I remember going to a driver’s ed course at the middle school, but as I recall, that was mainly because if you did that, then you qualified for reduced insurance rates? Something like that. I remember practicing driving with my mom and about giving her a heart attack multiple times, but I’m almost sure I didn’t do anywhere near 70 hours of practice before I went in for my road test. (I passed that my first time. The trickiest part was parallel parking, but I somehow fumbled my way through it.)

I also found out yesterday about these miraculous apps you can have installed on your kids’ phones. They’ll track how fast they’re actually going when they’re driving. That might strike some people as a bit too Orwellian, but I remember driving at 16, and I remember some of the idiotic things I did. Driving too fast was definitely one of them. Fast enough that I remember thinking, “This is way too fast. I shouldn’t do this again.” If a sixteen year old brain can recognize that, you can only imagine how fast I was going. At night. On narrow Pennsylvania roads.

Ugh.

So we’ll almost definitely be getting that app for Tomas’s phone once he can drive.

In any case, it’s exciting to see him get to this point. Having another driver in the house will make a lot of things much, much easier, even if we’re not planning on getting a third car. (Because expensive, and also because by the time he’s actually driving, he’ll have less than a year before he’s off. Any other parents out there have any tips on what to do to prepare for a new driver?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Spending Time with the Kids

I believe one of the best ways you can show someone you care about them is by spending time with them doing things they’d like to do. And on that theory, I’ve had a goal to spend time with each of my kids doing activities of their choosing.

This is a great goal on the surface for a number of obvious reasons, but I’ve found it’s also a very difficult goal to actually keep going. For one thing, I have three children and only one me. It’s true that Denisa also spends time with the kids doing a variety of things (skiing, taking them to practices, etc.), but for this goal, I really wanted it to be me spending personal time with them. In my head, this would be something I did every day, even though I recognize that getting this done every day is just not going to realistically happen. Take yesterday: I was out the door at 7:20, and when I came home at 4:20, the kids were all gone skiing with Denisa. I had a Stake Presidency meeting at 5:30 that ran straight into a Stake Council meeting at 7:00, and I wasn’t done until 8:45. The kids didn’t get back from skiing and youth activities until 8:00 or so, which means that I saw them all for a grand total of about 15 minutes the entire day.

But I still keep the goal at a “daily” level because I know from experience how goals tend to go for me. Look at it this way: by having the goal as a daily goal, if I miss once or twice, I still do things with my kids multiple times a week. If, on the other hand, I make it a “once a week” goal, and I miss once or twice, then suddenly I’m down to only having done something with them a couple of times that month. This is definitely one area where I feel it’s better to set an unattainable goal and still constantly strive to achieve it.

(Side note: I suppose I could add a “Spend time with Denisa” goal, but she and I spend time together every day out of sheer habit at this point. It’s very rare that we don’t both sit down to talk or watch a TV episode or part of a movie each night. It’s just the unspoken rule of how our house runs. So I suppose I have an unwritten goal to make sure that never changes, but in practice, it’s not a goal I feel like I have to expend any energy toward reaching. Spending time with the kids, on the other hand, seems to be trickier for me. Too many moving parts to keep track of, I suppose, so I need to have that goal there to remind me.)

In practice, what does this look like? It varies for each kid. MC is on a big Minecraft kick right now, so I sit down and play Minecraft with her for a half hour or so each day. More, if I have time. We happily go about digging for diamonds or building rooms in our survival mode world. (No monsters on as of yet, because MC isn’t a fan of blowing up by Creepers.) Tomas and I play a variety of games. Often it’s Magic, though recently we’ve been playing a lot of Gloomhaven. He’s much busier than MC, however, so I typically only get to play with him twice a week, give or take. On the other hand, it’s usually for a couple of hours at a stretch, so maybe that offsets it some.

For Daniela, it’s been trickier finding something for us to do together. We’ve done some drawing activities, and we’ve read books together, but it’s been hard to find something that’s easily replicable. Playing Minecraft is something I can do without really having to think too much, so I can do it even after a long day at work. Reading out loud, drawing, and the like are more mentally challenging for me, and so I’ve found we start off strong and then end up slipping off into doing nothing again. Our new goal at the moment is to watch all of X-Files together. I’ve wanted to revisit the series for quite some time, so we’ll see if that works well. (DC is getting busier, so this might be difficult.)

Anyway. This isn’t really intended as a bragging post. I’m far from perfect when it comes to this. But I share it more as a way to show something I’d like to do so that when my kids are grown, I can look back and remember the times we spent together and know that I put in a good effort to make time for them. Having a close family is something I’ve always enjoyed, and this is one way I’m trying to reach that bigger goal.

What do you do to find time for your family?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Daddy Daughter Dance: 2020 Edition

Another year, another Daddy Daughter Dance. This time around, MC was sick, so she was unable to come with Daniela and me. (She was pretty down about it until I reassured her that I’d take her out on a Daddy Daughter Date once she got better. That cheered her right up.)

Things have changed quite a bit since our first Daddy Daughter Dance back in . . . 2013. For one thing, Daniela is 5’9″ now, give or take. So when she and I were dancing, I didn’t have to look down hardly at all, which sounds great, until you remember the majority of the daughters at the dance were much, much shorter. Many of them were running around the floor as fast as they could, doing who-knew-what. I kept on forgetting to watch out for them, and there were some near misses several times. Thankfully, no one got trampled.

Daniela and I had a contest this time to see who recognized more songs. I was convinced from earlier years that they hardly played any songs I knew. Maybe it had been confirmation bias, though, because we ended this year tied 10-10. A lot of songs we both knew (What Does the Fox Say), some only I knew (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun), and some Daniela knew (I don’t know their names. Still.) We grabbed a glow stick for MC so that she didn’t feel too left out.

We went out to dinner with a group before, as is tradition. (Though the number of daddies has dwindled over the years as daughters grow up or they move away. We still had four of us this time, though, so it was a sizable group.) It was fun watching the others try to guess which grade Daniela was in. Most votes were for eighth grade, with some doubtful ninths and sevenths.

She’s in sixth.

We both ended up getting Mac and Cheese, which seemed somehow appropriate, since not too many years ago, Daniela would have been all over the mac and cheese. This time it was off the adult menu, however. Pretty tasty stuff. Daniela had hers with crunchy chicken, and I went with pulled pork.

I asked her if any of her friends were already dating. She said yes they were, though she didn’t understand why. “They’re only in sixth grade. Why bother?” A girl after my own heart.

Not sure how many more Daddy Daughter Dances I have in my future, but I would imagine quite a few. MC is only 6, after all. Maybe that gets me something like 8-10 to go? Though some of the older girls still like going for the pre-dinner, then cutting out before the dance. I can’t really blame them. The vast majority of the girls at the dance look like they’re under 10.

For now, I just enjoy having a tradition with my daughters to go do something fun. Even if the dance music was insanely loud. (Next year I might have to bring ear plugs . . . )

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Finally a Subject I’m Qualified to Tutor

There have been many different school projects and assignments I’ve been called upon to help teach over the years. I’ve helped make castles and collages. I’ve done more algebra than I ever thought I’d need to again. I’ve spent hours going over how to organize and prioritize. And each time I’ve done any of these things, I’ve done it willingly and cheerfully, often sitting down with the material a few minutes before I was called on to tutor the subject. If there’s one thing 13 years of grade school and 8 years of college have taught me, it’s how to consume information and give it back in a way that will fit the mold of what’s being asked.

But none of these assignments have ever really played to my strengths. Not my true strengths, at any rate. In many ways, I’ve felt like Inigo Montoya, fencing away with my left hand and doing a more than adequate job, but never really allowed to shine and put my full educational prowess to use.

Not until last week, at least.

Tomas is in 10th grade honors English now, and I discovered a bit late in the game that he had been assigned to write essentially a five paragraph essay on The Lord of the Flies. I read over what he had written, and as soon as I did, I broke out in a smile and switch my sword to the right hand.

Finally, all those years of learning and teaching and writing could be put to use! If you want to use something a bit more sinister than Princess Bride, it also felt kind of like the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, bragging about just what the Death Star was capable of.

Of course, it was on The Lord of the Flies, which was a hole in my educational upbringing. I’ve never read the book. (I know. I’m a terrible person.) But that just made things more exciting. I quickly brought myself up to speed on the main events of the novel. Enough so that I knew generally what we were dealing with and what questions to ask Tomas to turn him to the text looking for evidence to support his claims.

The biggest trick was to make sure I wasn’t just writing the paper. I already know I can write a solid five paragraph essay. The goal is to teach Tomas how to do the same thing. In this case, he’d already picked out the arguments he wanted to make and the examples he wanted to use. I just had to find a way to tie those arguments together into a concrete thesis statement and go over the importance of well-crafted topic sentences. That might not sound like fun to you, but compared to trying to wrack my brain to remember how to apply the quadratic formula the right way?

This was a walk in the park.

It felt even better when he got his grade back and had significantly improved it. A definite #parentingwin moment.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.