Thoughts on the End of August
It’ll come as no surprise to people who know me personally that I can be … let’s call it cranky. Which is why those who know me are often tempted to tell me to just relax, just enjoy your time with your boys, just get into the relaxed rhythm of summer. Be like everyone else! Love summer more than any other time! But I don’t enjoy summer vacation quite that much, because my summers don’t often have that elusive “relaxed rhythm.” I don’t know if I can pin it on one particular phenomenon: Is it because I can’t afford to …Keep Reading
The Hard Lesson of the $5 Fries: Me, My Kid, and Envy
I talk a good game about how important it is to let kids feel disappointment, to experience failure. That’s how they learn important life lessons, how they grow stronger, how they develop skills to get along in a world that, come on, is not fair or, as kids would prefer it to be, “even.” In a New York Times Room for Debate feature the other day, I contributed an essay about this very subject. Life isn’t fair, kid. On the lighter side, I refer you to a five-second scene from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride: Still, …Keep Reading
Can School Start Now, Please?
Those of you who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve entered my usual, hair-tearing, mid-to-late-August, why-is-summer-vacation-so-long phase of the summer. We’ve actually had a nice summer this year, even given that last year included our Disney vacation and this year we’re not doing much in the way of leaving town. The boys spent their usual six weeks at the YMCA day camp, which sounds like a nice, long time, right? That’s because it is a nice long time, and after that, what more break do they need? A couple of weeks to just chill at home without …Keep Reading
Are Our Kids Bored By Playgrounds?
Last summer, we met our friends Sally and Mike and their kids in a nearby harbor town to let the kids play on a playground, walk around a bit, and get some dinner. Typical late-weekend-afternoon-in-the-summer stuff here on Long Island’s bucolic North Shore. I’d been to this town many times before, but not with my kids, so I didn’t remember the playground, and I figured it would look more or less like every playground I’ve seen in the last eight-and-three-quarter (almost!) years of being a parent. You know the kind. Carefully planned. Almost too carefully planned, really, with one …Keep Reading
Doing Disney with the Kids
So. We just got back from our first family vacation to Disney World, in Florida. OK, it was our first family vacation, full stop (at least, our first that didn’t involve visiting family members), so it was portentous in more than one aspect. But for sure, hitting Disney at this stage of the boys’ lives was, and is, huge. Huge. Family vacationing is not a lot of things, such as relaxing and rejuvenating. But it is one major thing, and that’s illuminating. Silly as this might sound, I know my boys better now than I did before we left, and …Keep Reading
Money Lessons for Little Folks
So, last weekend my family and I were up in the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, at a family-style resort we’ve been going to, on and off, my whole life (my dad used to go there as a teen, that’s how long we’ve been patrons of this particular spot). By “family” I mean a lot of us–my parents, my sister, her boyfriend, her kids, her boyfriend’s kid, my brother and his wife and new-ish baby, and me and my boys. I’ve written about this sort of vacation before, and I’ll write about the whole multi-generational family vacay again, I’m …Keep Reading
He is Me: Parenting The Kid Who’s the Most Like Me
My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation. Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom …Keep Reading
The Riedlbauer’s Effect: Our Low Vacation Expectations
For many Americans, and famously for much of Western Europe, August is vacation season. Everyone who’s anyone decamps for mountains, lakes, beaches, theme parks, the family cabin, the campground… you get the idea. We’re not going anywhere; in fact, we haven’t gone on vacation in any real sense (that is, for more than a few days; to somewhere that doesn’t involve visiting a relative; or to a place that has bought new sheets for the beds in the last four decades–more on that later) for, um, ever? I, personally, haven’t been on vacation For Real since my honeymoon. I’m not …Keep Reading
School’s Out For Summer… Why is That, Again?
The sign at the entrance to my son’s primary school reads, under the school’s name, “A First-Class Experience.” And it is, truly. So much so, that I wish he could stay there all year. And why not? I love school, and my son does, too — he just finished first grade, and this year we hit the sick-day jackpot, with a total of… wait for it… none. The only time Daniel missed school was the day I took him out to go to his cousin Tara’s graduation ceremony. Just recently, he actually did get sick, but returned to school the …Keep Reading
