Dispatch from the Empty Nest

Since I wondered what the empty nest was like before we arrived at one, I thought I would share some field observations.  On the first Sunday in January of this year, we officially transitioned from our "emptying nest" phase to the real deal.  

Our Timeline

• May 2024: Charlie graduated from Oberlin College with a creative writing degree
  
  
  
• June 2024: Teddy graduated from Allderdice High School
  
• Summer to September: all 4 at home; Charlie umpiring little league and ushering at PNC Park for the Pirates; Teddy working at a growing 3-d printing company close to our neighborhood
• End of September: Teddy enrolled at New England Institute of Technology in East Greenwich, RI for auto repair
• November: a brief job search landed Charlie in an administrative role at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center
• Also November: we took an "emptying nest" trip to the Bahamas, just the two of us.

• Christmas holidays: Teddy home for three weeks, working and hanging out with his high school sweetheart, whom he's still dating.  All four of us in the house.
• Sunday January 5, 2025: Charlie moves into a 1BR apartment a half-mile east of us the same day that Teddy returns to school (530 miles away) for the winter term.

All at once, after having everyone under one roof again for the holidays, my competent wife and I suddenly found ourselves the only permanent residents of our home.  The transition felt slow, slow, slow, FAST! One or more resident may, of course, return at some point.  For now, though, we've spent these months adjusting to the new normal.

Gratitude List

Two conditions make our transition to the empty nest easier than some.  I frame them in gratitude so that they (hopefully) don't come across as braggadocio.  Neither of these conditions is guaranteed as the nest empties.  First, we still like and love each other.  Like in the potentially-gross-out favorite person way.  That's huge.  Second, our sons are both happy and fulfilled in their lives.  We would support them if they weren't, but it's a great pleasure that they're both launching well.  They even protest a little when we pay for things before accepting our generosity and thanking us.  It's the sweetest.

Also, everyone's in relatively good health (especially since I'm off the crutches I relied on through two commencements last May and June).  We don't take this for granted either.

Expectation

I'm not sure what exactly I expected from this phase of life.  Maybe that the house would be too quiet or that the whole enterprise might feel bleak compared to family life.  I guess I felt vaguely anxious about it, not being the biggest fan of change in general. 

Reality

In reality, I notice the mundane more than the profound.  We get frequent touchpoints with Charlie since he lives close.  He still sits with us at church and comes over for Sunday supper.  One day, he helped me with a two-person yard project when Paige was busy.

Saving up Conversation Topics

With progeny of any age in the house, the family schedule put pressure on when we could actually discuss decisions or update each other on the people or events of the day.  Now, we find ourselves storing up things to talk about until it's a good time to talk.  We might cook together with the radio or a podcast on and then run down our list when we're seated, quietly, facing each other at the dinner table.  I literally keep a list on my phone and fight the urge to "download" from it at suboptimal times.

Cooking Less

We have practiced this adjustment before thanks to summer camp experiences (camper and staff) and then to Charlie going away to college.  Getting down to two mouths to feed, we can actually plan leftovers as a dinner again.  We can also cook certain meals without doubling the recipe.  Young men can, of course, eat on a plague-of-locusts level.  

When we make cookie dough, we bake maybe a half-dozen cookies, form the rest and freeze them.  Then we bake them off a half-dozen at a time in the toaster oven.  It's a kind of bliss.  Also, no one complains when dinner is vegetarian.

Purge Impulse

In the absence of dependents to see to, I find myself wanting to take care of the household.  In particular, I want any item we don't need anymore gone ASAP.  On Charlie's Sunday visits, we often have a little pile of things for him to take if he likes.  Since the pandemic, we've given a lot away using our neighborhood Buy Nothing group.  That trend continues.

Don't worry.  I'm not piling up the guys' personal effects from their bedrooms and carting them to Goodwill.  Just, you know, Marie Kondo-ing my own stuff.

Not Bored

I might have guessed that without school events or shopping emergencies or impromptu kitchen dance parties, "just" the two of us might get bored.  I was wrong.  For one thing, we have more freedom to say yes to things we like to do.  My competent wife sang in the choir for Holy Week, which involved several Lenten Thursday evenings at rehearsal.  I've attended many more Story Club story slams than I used to.  We can also say yes to spontaneous social opportunities more easily.

True confession: we went back to our kids' high school for the spring musical even though our guys don't qualify for the cast or crew anymore.  Who doesn't enjoy a high school musical. Don't answer that.

Sometimes, we take a walk before making dinner.  Pretty wild.

The fact that it's easier to take on projects around the house means I'm taking on more projects around the house.  Honestly, at stretches, I've wished for some of the quiet boredom I'd speculated about.

1:1 Ratio

One way in which we're now definitely spoiled: We never wait to use a bathroom.  There's one for each of us.  When we've had houseguests recently, I've found myself feeling suddenly curmudgeonly about having to share.

Conclusion

So that's it.  Nothing earth-shattering.  Mostly extremely present.  

I tried hard to welcome and see the good in each stage of our children's development into young men.  I'm trying to approach this new phase the same way.

Two Recent Milestones

After months of it seeming inevitable, somewhere between the New Year and St. Patrick's

After the second-tallest person in our family's
first soccer match.

Day, it happened: Charlie got taller than his mother.  They hung around at even height (or too close to call) for a while.  His Competent Mother seemed reluctant for this milestone to arrive. 

It's right, though, that children get taller than their parents.  It's one of those subtle signs of the health and prosperity that is easy to take for granted.  We got an objective measurement while at the home of friends who keep a t-square near their family measuring post in the kitchen.  Charlie is a half-inch taller than Paige, which makes him - as you can see - not much shorter than yours truly.  He's coming for me.

The second milestone we reached - again after a long period of waiting and observation - is Teddy moving out of a booster seat.  No photographic evidence to share, but he's finally tall enough that the seatbelt doesn't come across his neck in that very dangerous way.  He might have attained that height 3-4 months before we definitively tested; he's no slouch in the growth spurt department.

He'd gotten self-conscious about being a fourth-grader in a booster seat.  Sorry, kid.  Your parents love you and want to keep you safe.  No booster seats in the car feels momentous.  Heck, it's only been 13 1/2 years that we've had at least one version of a car seat in our car.  More than half our marriage.  More than three presidential terms.

A family at church that is not done making babies put out a call a week after we retired Teddy's seat to borrow a booster seat as their dominoes of booster-eligible kids just keep moving through the ranks.  Just like that, it went from in the car to out of the car to out of our house and our lives.  We told them to keep it.  We're not booster seat people anymore.

On Hanging Up Cleats

My 12-year-old's cleats are still in the entryway.  They've been there since last Tuesday

evening, when his little league team lost in the championship game of his in-house league's "World Series."  Since he doesn't play on the travel tournament team in the summer, his season is over.  We usually insist on the kids putting away shoes that they're not going to wear again soon; the entryway is too small for extra shoes.  I haven't told him to put his cleats away yet, though, because it feels really different to tell him that when it's almost certainly the last time.

We started pitching to him in our tiny backyard when he was two years old.  It started with a plastic bat and a big supermarket ball with Winnie the Pooh on it.  Because his mother and I both love baseball, there was no question that we'd try to share that love with him.  He loved hitting that ball in the yard, and he got better and better at it.  We went through a sequence of bats and smaller and smaller balls until he was drilling pint sized wiffle ball home runs over the hedge into the neighbors' equally tiny back yard.

Outside an Erie Seawolves (AA) game, age 3

After one season of tee ball (which felt like a regression after batting live pitches all that time), he joined our neighborhood youth league, progressing through three levels with rules that more and more match real baseball.  He's had better and worse seasons, finally settling in as a reliable fielder, mostly because he's always been a smart player who knew what to do based on the game situation.  He loves playing catcher, and that's an important position because kid pitches aren't super accurate, and baserunners can steal at his current level.  At the plate, he developed a fear of the ball around when he started facing kid pitchers, and it's dogged him.  One season, he accommodated it by dancing in the batter's box, his skinny butt bouncing around above springy knees.  This year, despite the fact that he was one of the oldest members of his team, he reverted to not swinging when he should and even diving out of the box.  All of this is to say that as much as he loves and knows baseball, he ended up being in the middle of the pack on his team in terms of overall contribution.

So he's decided that, unless something big changes, this is his last year playing baseball.  He'll return to his school volleyball team in the fall, and he's thinking about ultimate frisbee in high school.  He shoots a lot of hoops at recess.  But he's officially given up one career path - professional baseball player.

So his cleats are still in the entryway.  When I counted up the years, I realized he's played eight spring seasons, plus almost as many fall "developmental league" seasons.  He's only 12!  Collectively, our family has spent a significant amount of the last eight Aprils, Mays and Junes on the sidelines of his games.  When those cleats go away, it will feel like a chapter is closing.  And it will be.

Before the World Series, his team had to advance out of a best-of-three semifinal series.  They won the first game handily.  The second game was much tighter, and it got to be tied in extra innings (the seventh, since standard games are six innings).  Charlie's team - the home team - got two on with one out in the bottom of the seventh when Charlie came up to bat.  His confidence issues at the plate loomed.  The last thing I wanted to see was him looking at a called strike three with runners on first and second in that situation.  After a few pitches, he made contact and grounded a ball toward the second baseman.  It probably should have been an out, but he didn't field it cleanly, and it rolled under his glove.  The runner on second was fast, and he took off.  When the third base coach saw the ball behind the second-baseman, he sent the runner, and he scored.  Charlie had hit the walk-off series-clinching RBI single to send his team to the World Series.  There are no pictures or video of the event.  When they won, I saw Charlie run back from first base to get jumped on by his teammates, and I happened to be nearby down the third base line when he emerged from that celebration.  I don't need video; I will never forget the look of relief and satisfaction and excitement on his face.  Big-eyed, sweaty and thrilled.  He has always approached baseball from a team-first perspective - the loudest rooter-on of his teammates, playing wherever coaches told him to play, learning from his elders and encouraging younger players.  When the chips were down, he came through for his team, and they won, and helping the team meant the world to him.

A few days later, walking home after the World Series loss, Charlie laid his head on my shoulder and cried.  I asked him if he was sad because they lost or sad because baseball season was over.  He couldn't really answer.  I told him that losing is sad, and ending is sad.  Later on, he said wistfully "I didn't want another stinking runner-up trophy." (His team lost in game three of last year's World Series, too.)  

It's not just this season that's ending.  Maybe Charlie knew that and just couldn't articulate it.  We can't fight it.  Childhood must end.  Adolescence - with its leaps and storms - must commence.  Successful parenting prepares for departure.  But for now, as if a brake against the inevitable, his cleats are still in the entryway.

HHHHHH: A Measure of Improvement

This post might be better labeled "confession" than "hint."  Longtime readers will know that I am that rare person who uses his bread machine regularly, currently a Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme.  I still use a recipe from one of my Breadman machines, modfied only with a substitution of 3/4 cup of white whole wheat flour (WWW) for an equal amount of white flour.  No one in our family really likes traditional whole wheat flour, but this small substitution adds a little nutrition and actually lends some nice structure to the basic sandwich bread we use all the time.

I've used the same recipe for years and worked out the ratio of using 3/4 cup WWW in a total amount of 3 cups of flour as the maximum amount of WWW without making the yeast fight to rise the loaf reliably.  For years, when getting out my ingredients and measuring devices, I would get out a one cup measure, a 1/4 cup measure and a 3/4 cup measure.  Now that 3/4 cup measure came from a set we got at the King Arthur Flour store on a pilgrimage to Norwich, VT, a sacred place for bakers.  In addition to the traditional 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and 1 cup measures, our set includes a 2/3 cup and this 3/4 cup.  One doesn't know one needs those (or a 3/4 teaspoon) measure until one owns them.  Even owning this set for years, I left an opportunity for efficiency on the table (er...counter).  See, I would measure 2 cups of white with my 1 cup measure, then 1/4 cup of white, then 3/4 cup of WWW with that measure.  Any mathematicians shaking their heads yet?  

In the last few months, I figured out that I was replacing one part out of four with WWW.  That means I could do all my flour measuring with one measure - the 3/4.  Now, I fill that one three times with white flour and once with WWW.  There are multiple benefits:

• It's faster to use one measure than three for the actual measuring step.
• It keeps my counter cleaner to not put down two used measures (the other option of plunking them in the sink one by one always made me impatient).
• I wash one cup measure instead of three.

 The strongest hint in this post is to acquire more finely-graded cup measures like this awesome-if-not-cheap set.  The other one we love is a 1/8 cup measure from another set.  While one doesn't see 1/8 cup in recipes much, one sees 2 tablespoons often, and 2 T = 1/8 C.  Boom!  Then, once you've acquired them, pay more attention than I did and find ways to cut down on the number of measures you have to use.

(Soon-to-be) Missing Person?

Our family made royal with Christmas cracker crowns

Our older son is twelve right now.  Those who know him would describe him as sweet and smart and funny and knowledgeable and really, really engaged with whatever he's doing.  From following sports teams to playing sports and games to school and church groups, he places himself right in the middle of everything.  With peers, he's game for adventure and doing what interests others.  With younger kids, he's like a junior counselor.  In adult conversation, he's like that precocious youngster calling in to a talk radio show.  He, of course, has called in to sports talk radio, voicing opinions about the Pirates and Steelers. 

Two of his cousins are roughly a year older.  We benefit greatly as parents by having them preview coming stages; we're grateful to our siblings for that.  Our niece and nephew are fun and interesting kids, but still, when I get to observe them right now, I get scared.  They're not rebellious or disrespectful. (Perhaps their parents will disagree in the comments).  On recent visits, though, they've made themselves so absent from the family.  That's what scares me.  

At a family reunion last fall, I would wonder where Riley was when the adults and younger cousins clustered together.  Nearly always, she was in a corner of the basement with headphones in.  My parents report that she was napping through much of their Christmas visit, awakening only to play Ticket to Ride.  She so dominates every game of Ticket to Ride, actually, that one time they let her sleep through a game so someone else could win.  

On our beach vacation last summer, Trevor slept in very impressively.  He committed to a long morning in a way that required poking him with a stick around 11:30 just, you know, to make sure....   I saw the same thing happen for several years with our only child neighbor boy across the street.  We have summer happy hours, and when they first started, he would come with his parents.  Bit by bit, he would come with them and leave early, or he would "be coming over in a minute" when they arrived.  Eventually, he just didn't come.

I don't fault these young people, and I'll try not to fault Charlie when and if he follows in their footsteps.  I remember it.  In growing up, we can feel awfully different from how we felt just a short time before.  We can feel awfully different from those around us; no longer quite so keen to hang out with smaller kids but also nowhere near at home among adults either.  We need space to figure ourselves out on our own.  While I'll try not to fault Charlie, that can't change the fact that I'll grieve his absence.  In addition to loving the boy, I really like him, and I like his contributions to groups and events.  I'm going to miss him.

In the end, the adolescent's eventual launch likely explains the hermit hours.  In order to flee the nest, he must create a little space within it that he gets to occupy by himself.  Although I might wish for myself that Charlie will go on relating to us the exact same way, I have no right to wish that for his sake. 

I always tell parents of younger children that each phase of parenting has become my favorite phase.  The teenage years likely break that pattern, and they're bearing down on us like a freight train.  I'm actively savoring Charlie's continued sweetness, relative innocence, affection and involvement.  It feels tenuous and precarious, poised to vanish at any moment.  I take some solace in believing that it won't vanish all at once but rather ebb away in fits and starts.  But still, I expect and fear that we'll look up one day and register that these qualities have vanished altogether.

When envisioning that dark moment, I think again of the neighbor boy.  Now absent for real, off at his freshman year of college on the west coast.  It's true that he's gone, but I saw something wonderful happen before he left.  He came back.  In his final summer at home after high school, he brought his polite and interesting high school girlfriend to happy hour on the street.  They engaged in conversation with people years and decades older than themselves on a different footing than before he'd disappeared from our community life as a young teen.  Young adults in the true sense of the phrase.  I wish Charlie the child didn't have to start disappearing - literally - from the scene, but that may be the only honest path.  That will allow him to come back and then, both sadly and happily, to truly leave.

Making Allowances

About a year ago, we changed the boys' allowance scheme.  They'd been getting something on the order of a dollar or two a week.  At that rate, we had to keep small bills and change around, and it wasn't adding up to money they could actually use to buy things they want.  We heard about an allowance scheme from a family at church that has raised at least two out of three responsible now-grown daughters.  (We know the oldest and the youngest but haven't met the middle one.)  They gave their children their age in dollars twice a month.  That gives the disciplined child a shot at being able to save up for something relatively valuable and promises a definite $2 monthly raise raise every birthday.  
 
We also set up some categories in a Google spreadsheet to help them think about how all money is not the same and that we can parcel money into different funds for different uses.  We distinguished between:

• Spend - for purchasing anything from a snack to a toy, no strings attached.
• Save - to be used only for an item that the child added to a list of savings target items.
• Share - 10% for their tithe.
• Presents - with increased funds comes increased responsibility to spend their own money to buy birthday presents for immediate family members (in addition to the Christmas presents they've been buying for immediate family and whatever extended family with whom we spend Christmas).

Ideally, I would now report that the influx of income and the carefully-constructed Google spreadsheet have turned them into shrewd resource planners.  Unfortunately, that's not true. They spend their money like NBA rookies.  As soon as money piles up to the point that they could buy something, they buy anything.  At 7, Teddy is especially prone to looking around for something to buy rather than planning and executing a purchase.  One of my favorites in this vein, was a little spreader knife with a silver lobster handle that he bought at the Stonewall Kitchen headquarters store in Maine.  He saw it, fell in love with it, had money burning a hole in his pocket (because we were on vacation) and bought it.  He still uses it regularly.  Other purchases like toys sold at tourist site gift shops have thrilled me less; the latest was a stealth fighter plane at the Wright Brothers Memorial in North Carolina.  I'm not sure he's touched it since vacation.

Wright Brothers Memorial gift shop

Charlie has not been much better; his money just accumulates faster.  On a school trip to a roller rink/arcade, he spent all seven dollars he brought on a game machine dangling an iPad Air as the halo prize.  Needless to say, he came home with no tablet and no money.  His discipline has increased more just this summer after nearly a year of the new scheme.  When the Target Nerf gun aisle didn't offer the gun he'd been looking at online, he kept his powder dry and saved his money for another day.

They're not the only ones that have had to adjust their decision-making and behavior.  We visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame in November, and I encouraged the boys to bring their money.  Charlie was interested in a collection of Steeler items including a rubber smaller-than-regulation football.  Something about the items he chose seemed like a bad investment to me; I thought he could probably buy the same things in a store around home.  I talked him out of the items he'd chosen.  He switched to several packs of football cards.  It all happened kind of quickly.  Football cards were clearly more banal and boring than the Steeler logo merch he'd first picked.  But I'd already talked him out of those items, so I didn't want to talk him out of the football cards.  Oops.  If the money belongs to him, and the point is for him to learn which uses of money are satisfying and which ones feel like a ripoff, I should have let him buy the things that first appealed to him. 

And that's the whole idea of this thing - to allow the boys to make their own decisions with small but not tiny amounts of money so that as the amounts grow in their lifetime, they'll have a framework for evaluating their own financial decisions based on their priorities, not just shininess. 

Another upside is that when the kids want something that I don't want to spend my money on - say a soft pretzel at a sporting event - I just ask them if they have enough money for it.  With the steady income they now collect, they ought to.  That means I don't have to weigh whether I want to spend money on that or not.

I'm curious about how other parents set allowance amounts and what input you then provide on your children's spending.

Career Aspirations

The subject with his science fair project about
the impact of introducing drag on paper airplanes

Charlie (11) has long planned to be a professional athlete.  As solid as this plan sounds, we have been a little concerned that a child as, ahem, bulk-challenged as he is may not be NFL wide receiver material.  We've talked to him about having a backup plan, and to keep us quiet, he has settled on mechanical engineering.

Concurrently, he has angled for sports announcing jobs at school.  We were surprised at the very tail end of his fifth grade year to discover that he'd been standing up at morning assembly and giving a Pirates report for weeks, maybe since the season started in April of that year.  We don't know how it began; his principal happened to love him and to encourage bold students.  Now in sixth grade, he has become the backup announcements guy over the PA system in the morning.  When the assigned eighth grader cannot fulfill his duties, our guy makes the morning student announcements.  Naturally.  A sixth grader in a 400-student middle school.

Emboldened by his substitute spot, he pitched giving a Pirates update at his middle school.  His principal accepted his proposal, and he's chomping at the bit for the season to start so he can take to the airwaves.

The other day, he mentioned sports announcing as a fallback in case he's not drafted by the Steelers.  In ten years, I'll probably pull strongly for mechanical engineering, but from the safe vantage point of his (and my) relative youth, I love the idea.  He's particularly well-suited to it.  He loves sports and has narrated his way through his imaginary games for as long as we can remember.  He loves people and the storylines of teams and players.  He has a "Dad, remember the second spring training game we went to in 2007 when David Ortiz came to the plate..." kind of sports memory. He also reveres the history of sports.  For fun, he has watched DVDs of the Pirates 1971 and 1979 World Series games.  Ask him what the weather was like for game 2 in Baltimore in 1979; he might know. 

So, it's important for a young man to have choices.  So far, we have A) 6'1", 160 lb. wide receiver, B) sports announcer and C) mechanical engineer.

11 reasons I love and like my 7-year-old

I file this post under the good-gravy-the-start-of-the-school-year-is-busy-and-hard-to-

bedtime birthday cupcakes

adjust-to exception to the timely birthday post rules.  Also, for the math majors, I'm offering 11 reasons I love my 7-year-old because I offered that many when his brother turned 11, and my younger-sister wife felt that posting only 7 for Teddy would be unjust.

1. He hangs on me.  I confess that I only came to see this as a positive only after complaining about it.  Having a 50 pound human drape his weight on me while seated or standing doesn't always feel like an asset.  When I complained to Paige about it, however, after snapping at Teddy to get off me while typing, she said "but he's so bonded to you".  We had a lot of one-on-one time from late 2008 until he went to Kindergarten more than two years later, and it still shows.

2. He's a helper.  From an early age, Teddy's relished opportunities to help - mixing up ingredients, shopping, fetching stuff, carrying things.

3. He has an eagle eye.  It's probably most accurate to say that I admire this quality.  Teddy sees things other people just don't - mostly of the insect variety, but also coins on the ground and punchbuggies.

4. He has a strong, accurate arm.  From the time he could stand up (way before he could catch a ball), Teddy's been able to throw a ball a surprisingly long distance right to a spot.  It's wicked fun. 

5. He feels things so strongly.  Poor kid, he got this one from his dad.  Our main priority as his parents is helping him work with strong feelings - good and bad - and behave decently no matter what they are.  Happy Teddy, though, is incredible company.

6. He draws detailed pictures.  When Teddy undertakes to doodle, he draws complicated scenes with tons of things going on.  When asked, he can narrate the whole deal - e.g. "This guy dropped from the helicopter on his skateboard and went down the ramp and then did a flip off of here and grabbed the club and hit the dragon on the head."

7. Possibly related to his eagle eye, Teddy is very observant.  He's a professional noticer of things, people and patterns and he makes connections between the things that he observes.

8. He is so cute.  He's shed his baby fat, but he still has those big moony eyes and kissable cheeks.

9. He has a younger brother's bulldog spirit.  One of our big challenges as parents of two physical boys is keeping them from fighting, but when I'm not worried about safety or hurt feelings, I admire Teddy's tenacity in taking on his younger brother at every possible competition.  I first saw it when he was about 4 and tackling his 8-year-old brother with surprising ferocity.

10. His tastes are very predictable.  The palate has expanded since this chart, but Teddy's still very easy to menu-plan for: pretzels, provolone, bananas and apple juice satisfy most of his appetites.  It will be satisfying when he gets more adventurous in his tastes, but it's logistically easy to stock a Teddy-friendly pantry.

11.  He believes deeply.  Teddy prays with a sincerity and familiarity with which we should all approach God.

11 Reasons I Love and Like my 11-year-old

A happy boy and his birthday tacos.

1. He still thinks I'm funny.  Not all the time, but sometimes, he can't help but laugh at my jokes.
2. He works hard.  He does his homework and practices his trumpet and takes baseball coaching by actually changing his stance/swing/throwing.  He can start a task and stick with it until it's done.
3. He's so sweet with smaller kids.  He showers most of that sweetness on his brother, but he loves all babies, and he loves leading younger kids in games and adventures.
4. He has few secrets (I think).  I'll just choose to believe this one for as long as I can.
5. He's affectionate with everyone in his family.  He may be more shy than he used to about showing affection to his parents in public, but he loves our nuclear family and his extended family, and he's quick with a hug, a back scratch, a pat or a tug.
6. You know where you stand with him.  He's a straight shooter.  I think his honesty comes from how confident and sure of himself he is - more qualities that will stand him in good stead.
7. He's so game and enthusiastic.  He jumps in with two feet and likes going new places and learning new things.
8. He's a big sports fan.  I'd love him regardless, but it makes it easier that we share that.  One particular thing about his sports fandom is how quickly he forms a loyalty to a team he's rooting for.  We went to one baseball game in Korea, and he's a huge Doosan Bears fan.  He's always loved Robert Morris basketball, and he likes the major league teams for which his little league teams are named.  He never watches a game without choosing a team to root for by some criteria and then sticking to that.  He loves wins and takes losses hard and knows his stuff.  We found out at the end of fifth grade that he'd been giving Monday morning Pirates updates at his school's morning assembly for two months.
9. His new friend receptors are always open.  He only has friends and friends he hasn't met yet.  We worried not at all about leaving him at a summer camp where he knew zero campers and zero counselors.  He jumped right in, and we figured he'd be mayor by the end of the week.  (Turns out, that camp doesn't have a mayor.  But if it did...)
10. He takes serious things seriously: schoolwork, injustice, his faith.
11. He's so cute.  Awkward phase shmawkward phase.  Unless it's still coming, which it probably is.  But even then, this kid will still be cute.

With love for my Charlie Barley.

An Epiphany about Fifth Grade Graduation

When I first became aware of candidate Obama, one thing that caught my attention was his stance that schools - especially urban schools - should stop holding eighth grade graduation ceremonies.  He said that finishing eighth grade is not a meaningful accomplishment in a country where the real baseline credential for success for almost everyone is a college degree (a subject for another post).  I agreed with this anti-eighth-grade graduation stance and - by extension - saw fifth grade graduation as simply ridiculous.  


Now that I have a fifth grader in a big urban school district, I'm starting to see that ritual a little differently.  Although I moved around a lot growing up, I always attended suburban school districts.  The feeder pattern in most small suburban districts has multiple elementary schools converging into one middle school.  So, it's a new school with new classmates in sixth grade, but the students with whom you've shared your K-5 years are still there on the bus and in classes.

When the subject of middle school came up during a recent haircut, Charlie told the barber that he wasn't that happy about leaving his elementary school.  After all, as he said, he's "spent half his life at that elementary school."  The transition to middle school in a city district like Pittsburgh's differs from the suburbs because Charlie's class at his magnet elementary school will split up for different neighborhood and magnet middle schools.  The crowd at his middle school will have lots of unfamiliar faces and maybe only 15% of his current classmates.  Some of his buds are headed off to 6-12 schools, where if all goes well, they'll stay until (real) graduation.  On the other hand, he may reunite with some of his grade school chums when he gets to high school, having not seen them through the middle school years.

All of that is a long way to say that fifth grade graduation this spring won't be about Charlie and his classmates accomplishing some serious academic milestone.  It will, however, be a chance for the kids and parents to gather in this unique community one last time before it scatters to the four winds.  It will be a chance to mark the end of a happy part of childhood in a group that will never be reconstituted.  What this transition/farewell really calls for - if it weren't creepier than a graduation - is a fifth grade prom.

Sunday Haiku: Planning Ahead

My midlife crisis

car will be a black Volvo

P Eighteen Hundred.

Mourning the One-on-One

Crazy Hat Day at school 2012

January marks Teddy's fifth month of Kindergarten.  That also means it's been five months since he and I regularly had one-on-one time two days a week.  More than that, actually, because other than a few weeks of Charlie-only summer camp last summer, Charlie was with us on those days as well.  I've noticed lately that my unique relationship with Teddy has changed significantly in these months.  

Because of all the time we spent together from the time he was two until he went to Kindergarten, I was really Teddy's go-to parent.  Bumps, scrapes and emotional bruises tended to send him looking for Daddy.  I also knew more about what he'd done during the day and even understood him better when he talked than his mother did.  We had our routines: the places we'd go together and the way we'd accomplish tasks.

It's different now.  I still enjoy the part-time stay-at-home dad advantage over his mother in the amount of time I get to spend with him, but I spend no more time with him than I do with his brother.  Although he still leans to me a little more for emotional and problem-solving support, I've seen that unique position erode a little bit.  This development isn't bad; it's just new.  Noticing when my relationships with the boys change helps me to slow down and try to appreciate whatever stage we're in.  Knowing that the current m.o. will morph and or end soon increases my affection for it.

Sunday Haiku: Cats, Cradles and So Forth

One day, he'll ask for
the keys. For now, I'm just glad
he buckles himself.