Just returned from my daughter’s elementary school graduation. Yea! No more elementary school for us. Now all we have to worry about is her adolescence.
Looks like the internets are still here …
What’s going on?
About The Author
Just returned from my daughter’s elementary school graduation. Yea! No more elementary school for us. Now all we have to worry about is her adolescence.
Looks like the internets are still here …
What’s going on?
Heh. Don’t worry about that adolescence thing – piece of cake. 🙂
Yeah Steven listen to SN. Adolescence is one of those plesant times for most parents.
Well it’s been a piece of cake with my son so far, but I have a feeling my daughte’s trip might not be so smooth.
What do you mean by that, huh!? Are you saying I’m a b*tch? I HATE YOU! You never listen to me! You always yell at me and tell me you hate my friends and I have to clean my stupid room! I can’t wait to get out of this stupid place!
Just thought I’d give you a taste.
Eerily accurate. Hay, are you really a 13 year old?
No, but I had one a couple of years back. Boys are way easier.
Don’t give up on your son. He might still come to the realization that the parents don’t know a damn thing, and he needs to educate them on how things really are.
Kids are funny that way. 🙂
After it was over, my son actually apologized to me for the year and a half of being Surly Guy! It was a wonderful and satisfying moment. 🙂
But I LOVED his grade school years.
I know what you mean. I loved going to ever play and school activity my girls had.
The only thing I would have changed was when my daughters was in the 1st and 2nd grade and eating lunch with them in the school cafeteria. Those little bitty chairs and tables just did get it.
He might still come to the realization that the parents don’t know a damn thing, and he needs to educate them on how things really are.
Me & Mrs. K.P. called our teenagers “hypocrisy detectors” because they’d call us on bullshit without fail. Funny thing, we turned out to be better people for it, too, LOL:
When my older son was 13 or 14, we were getting ready to start the classes prior to his confirmation (we were Catholic at the time) and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to defend/explain/teach a theology that I no longer found tenable myself. So he ended up in part triggering my midlife crisis/spiritual quest which was one of the best but most painful things that ever happened to me. So it’s hard to say who learned more while he was a teenager…
I think the key thing for surviving with a teenager is to not take yourself too seriously. They live to deflate pomposity. Make the best of that and it can be a very renewing time for parents as well.
They live to deflate pomposity.
I love this. So true.
Just keep this in mind:
There was more drama with The Girl in our family, but just as much intervention with the schools was needed for the recently graduated Boy of the family. BTW, said Boy is going to the Big H in September, so the intervention was worth it. Another BTW, the Girl is the communications director (COMM-D) for her daddy’s Texas House District campaign. He is running as a Dem, which is good for him, or The Girl would most definitely not be working on his campaign. Another BTW, she is a proud Sooner.
My Huffington Post “Contagious Festival” entry about the Californial election that can’t be certified needs a bit of a push to get it to the top 10 (it’s at #15 now).
Please spread this link around if you can. Thanks!
http://stopgeorge.cf.huffingtonpost.com/
Congratulations on your daughter growing up, too!
Just had ours here last Friday. I still bawl as if it was the kid’s first day at Kindeegarden 🙂
Congrats to you and your daughter.
Did they sing at graduation?
I know most of you have figured out that I’m a stoic, unemotional person. Therefore, this is an embarassing admission — I always cry when kids sing.
Me too. I thought I was the only one.
Yes they sang several songs and my daughter played xylophones during the some of the numbers.
Same with my daughter. She rotates between percussion and orchestral bells.
It’s enough to make you long for the terrible twos. Good luck — you’ll need every smidgen!
I’ll take a teenager over a colicky baby any day.
At least you can play “Ain’t it awful” and talk about the Bush administration with a teenager.
The only way we survived the nightly bouts of colic from 10 PM to 2 AM was for one of us to pace the floor with him while the other read “The Lord of the Rings” out loud so we’d have something to focus on other than the crying. Had our younger son been colicky we’d probably have moved on to “War and Peace,” LOL.
The best age, though, is when you can read them “Winnie the Pooh” and Beatrix Potter – those stories are a total hoot – much more so for the parents than the kids, I think (like those old Bugs Bunny cartoons that you revisit as an adult and realize “I had no idea all that political and social commentary was in there!”).
We were the kind of parents that saved every bit of “kid art” the boys ever brought home, all the book reports, tests, etc. By the time the older one graduated high school, we had boxes and boxes of the stuff. I sorted out the best of it, and scanned it all into the computer and burned it onto a CD, along with all the family photo album pictures. I gave it to him as a high school graduation present. (I have another copy in case he ever loses it, or if I need to blackmail him with it in the future.)
And it got rid of a fire hazard and freed up a closet as well! 😉
Our younger son is going into senior year of high school – I guess I better get started on his CD…
What a great idea! I have boxes and boxes of stuff too – couldn’t bear to throw it out.
Didn’t it take you forever to scan it all?
Didn’t it take you forever to scan it all?
Took most of a summer, a few nights a week, to do the whole thing. It was a lot of fun though; I had forgotten about a lot of the things in there, and it was bittersweet to go back and handle them all again for the last time.
If I found something really funny (some things related to Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles come to mind) I’d call Mrs. K.P. in and we’d have a good laugh and sometimes a cry.
My favorites are the crayon portraits of me when I was depressed. Talk about funny – a kindergarten portrait of me in my pajamas with dark circles under my eyes holding a cup of coffee. Actually, not that funny. 🙂
I love the CD idea, but am too incompetent with machines to do it. Our son’s high school requires an on-going portfolio project for the 4 years; which necessitated saving everything he produced, including quizzes, a life-sized human model with working innards and parts (think sponge kidneys with straws coming out of ’em), huge art projects with gew-gaws glued to ’em and painted violent colors taking up every piece of display space in the house (the kid thinks in Big), and add in that he seldom cleans his room, and you have a sort of R-E-L-I-E-F that he is going away to school. We still have the art, but after portfolio presentation, the human model and 6 packing boxes of papers is gone; willed to a rising junior whose mother is not happy with the gift. And after this blasted political campaign, I may get my house back into some semblance of order so I don’t brood at night wondering where something important I need for the next day’s work is – like the medical forms for college the doc will need, the bill for the campaign printing is, and the invitation to speak to that women’s group…
Toddlerhood seems so distant and peaceful to me now. The baby was usually dirty, but the house was fairly clean and uncluttered. What happened to me, I wonder.
At one point my son took an art class and discovered the dada art movement, which led to some really strange assemblages. Just recently I ran across one in the garage, something made out of window screening and various wires, protesting some form of oppression.
I have to keep reminding myself that I was once equally earnest, which must have been quite a trial for my working-class parents – who were too busy trying to pay the bills to have a political worldview that went beyond “stopping crime.” (They were Rizzo Democrats, a term readers from the Philadelphia area will recognize – the rest of you check out the link.)