My Instagram account just got followed by a 12-year-old and his content is just what you’d expect. My 10-year-old is NOT getting on social media anytime in the foreseeable future.
Category Archives: parenthood
Feeling like a Couple
Aaron and I got some unexpected Quality Time yesterday evening when Connor got invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. It turned into a bonus Date Night, with dinner out, thrifting, and coffee… but with more quality time thrown in once we got home, since we didn’t feel obligated to stay out longer to get our money’s worth.
Continue readingBelt Promotion
We made it! Red-black belts for both of us.
Mr. Turner seems to think I’ll be testing for my black belt come June… we’ll see.
Connor is surprisingly motivated to prepare for his own black belt test. I suggested that we could practice together to ramp up to the 100 non-stop push-ups we’ll need to crank out, and he was totally on board. He even coaxed me to run a mile with him on Saturday afternoon, since that’s also part of the belt test.
I’m curious to see how long his motivation lasts. (Or my own.)
Grammy’s Mini-Me in Medina
Connor and I took a long weekend at the end of July to go visit my mom in Medina County, Ohio. Of course, I had to get a photo of my son in front of the iconic gazebo in Medina Square.
His Dad and I had collaborated to make him a mixtape (yes, an actual cassette tape that he played in an actual Sony Walkman) that included his favorite techno/electronic and video game music, and he listened to it nonstop. Hence the headphones.
I just got the film developed (yes, actual 35mm film) and was struck by how much my son looks like my mother.
Dear Connor: Year Nine-and-a-Half
I wouldn’t normally post a Dear Connor letter for your half-birthday… but I didn’t post one for your ninth birthday, and 2020 was definitely NOT a normal year, so I don’t want to just skip it.
I suspect that someday, when you’re older and you look back on being eight years old, Second Grade will seem like a big blur of video games and remote schooling, with the occasional, “Wait, that happened when I was eight, too?”
I can remember pretty clearly being eight and nine years old, and it’s weird thinking about how I perceived myself when I was your age, versus how I see you now. You have a lot of the same curiosity and know-it-all attitude as I did, but you’re way crazier and more outgoing.
In the fall, you took a test that qualified you for the gifted program at school. You said that the 90 minutes of testing was a “nightmare,” which amused the teacher who was administering the test. It was a standard, old-school Scantron multiple choice test… but you’re used to tests on the computer, and you’re NOT used to testing for a couple of hours straight.
Now that you’re in GATE, you wish you weren’t, and you want to quit. You see it as busywork that takes you away from the things you’d rather be doing, like being social with your classmates. Luckily, once you qualify, you’re never disqualified; even if we decide that the enrichment activities in the elementary grades aren’t for you, you’ll still be able to enroll in the accelerated classes later on — and that’s really what matters to me. I wish they offered accelerated classes in the elementary grades, like I had at your age, but the program is what it is.
You have a very defined hierarchy of Things You’d Rather Be Doing. Most of those involve television or video games. Eating is pretty far down the list, but riding bikes with Dad used to be on the list (until you wore out your training wheels).
Reading for pleasure is something you only do when you have no other options: before bed, or during your scheduled reading time in the afternoon. This is completely foreign to me, as I read voraciously when I was as a kid — to be fair, though, I did love going to my best friend’s house to play Atari, and I would have done more gaming if I’d had my own console.
I know I tell you this a lot, but I’m really proud of you. You’ve stuck with karate for 2½ years. You always want to make people laugh. You’re secure in who you are.
You’re still only 9½, of course, so you still have a lot of growing and maturing to do… but you’re pretty awesome, all things considered.
