Archive for the ‘School Days’ Category

Bernadine and Nick with his columns.

It was like stepping into an oasis, where the children sit quietly and make art, while outside, soccer players clock each other inside my car.

Why didn’t I pick art? (more…)

I wrote this piece two years ago for Good Housekeeping.com, and darn it if it doesn’t still apply. I like when that happens:

I was in an airport when I realized how good my mother had been at raising me. I was 23 and traveling alone on business for the first time, and I had to find my way off the plane, over to the baggage claim and then to the local transportation area. I was going to hail a taxi, but I figured out that the shuttle bus stopped at my hotel, and the ride was free. I took the bus, got to my hotel and made it to my meeting on time. But if my mother hadn’t taught me not only the basics of air travel but also a few character-building lessons, I’d have wandered aimlessly around the Cleveland Airport in despair. Now my son’s third grade teacher wants me to give him the same gift.

Some of the children at the altar were having none of it.

“It’s so much easier being a kid,” the priest insisted.

“Nooooo,” protested a few of the children who had assembled near the altar before their weekly children’s mass at our church yesterday morning.

“If you turn around, I’ll bet you’ll find a lot of people who disagree,” he said. The kids turned around, and the grown-ups sitting in the pews laughed. (more…)

It seems like yesterday he was a trick or treater in the Halloween parade. At least, I think that's him.

When I was 14, I gave my mother hell. For an entire year, I moped, I sulked, I whined and then I bought a Walkman (remember those?) and listened to REO Speedwagon (remember them?) while I stared out the car window without a word.

My brother did no such thing when he was a teenager. Instead, he slept, mainly because he grew eight inches in one year until he reached his final destination of 6 foot 2. (Not coincidentally, I didn’t provoke him as much after that.)

My firstborn is just 24 hours into his teen years and there’s no telling which way he’ll go. He’s much more like his uncle was at 13 than I was, so my money is on the sleeping thing. I’m actually hoping this is so, because there are many more ways teens can cause their parents grief these days. And though my son is a good kid and I’m confident that all the parenting my husband and I have done to date will help us all through the next seven years, it’s going to be harder to continue to be his filter than it was for my parents to be mine.  Why? Because of the 3 Reasons Parenting Teens in the 21st Century Makes Me Want to Scream: (more…)

He was good back then. Still is.

I was hoping that nobody at the middle school would realize that I was spying on my son. I’d just followed the junior kindergarten bus to school, and I was hiding next door at the middle school, watching my first-born, Nicholas, get off the bus.

Loser.

I didn’t want to be a helicopter mom, but if you knew how much hand-wringing I’d gone through before making the decision to put my son into junior kindergarten, our school system’s program for children who aren’t quite ready for the rigors of a competitive kindergarten (a.k.a. boys), you’d understand. He was the oldest kid in the program and, according to the principal, he really only needed half-a-year, but there was no such thing. As a result, the decision was much harder than I’d anticipated. (more…)

Dear Teacher,

If you’d been raised where I was, when I was, you’d understand. It’s not personal. It’s Springsteen. (more…)

There’s nothing about this in back-to-school guides: What happens when you only have 1 when you need 2?

Case in point:

At some point during a camping trip this past spring, my Boy Scout got hot. So, he unzipped the bottom part of the legs of his official Boy Scouts pants, thereby turning them into shorts.

Both bottoms of the pants miraculously made it home and into the wash, where one was promptly lost. And yet, he has two legs, and winter is coming.

Personally, I believe these types of pants should be outlawed  — at least in children’s sizes or until my son does all his own laundry.

Shortly after soccer season ended in the spring, my other son put his green soccer socks into the wash, where one was promptly lost. Which makes me wonder: Why not two? Why do we always lose one?

Anyhow, I’ve given up on finding the matching sock and have ordered another pair, which I hope very much will arrive prior to his first game in two weeks because Sports Authority doesn’t sell green soccer socks. Blue, white, black and red, yes. But not green.

And yet, it should come as no surprise that I am in this predicament. After all, I can’t find the match to this sock, which was a gift from the nice folks at the off-Broadway play “Secrets of a Soccer Mom,” where I’d signed books. If I can lose one very large, very royal blue sock with jumbo lettering that brings to mind the famous “Hollywood” sign, how can I be trusted with a much smaller green sock and the bottom of boys pants?

And where is that in the back-to-school guides? Nowhere, just like our missing items.

My son is eating Haagen Dazs and watching Speed Racer episodes. The boy knows how to do a sick day. Good thing, too, because he’s in for a whole bunch of sick days this week.

He’s home this week on “bed rest” (a.k.a. playing his Nintendo DS on the couch in yesterday’s sweats), because he suffered an eye injury at his soccer game on Sunday. Apparently, the eyeball cannot kick a soccer ball, even when an opposing player tries to see if yours can.

So far, he hasn’t complained that he’s bored. But then, he’s got Haagen Dazs and Speed Racer. How can you get bored with that? Or with hours and hours of Pokemon battles? And with half the kids out of school with influenza and nothing but rain, rain, rain, rain around here, he knows he’s not missing much, anyhow.

Adults could learn a lot from my son. When we grown-ups take “sick days,” all too often we spend them checking e-mail, catching up on laundry and generally doing all the stuff we normally do, only more slowly and with wads of tissues in our pockets.

But the next time you’re sick, stock up on the ice cream (dark chocolate covered vanilla bean pops) and the Speed Racer (or more likely, Tivoed Real Housewives of New Jersey) episodes, and do what my son is doing: Take a sick day. A real sick day. It just might make you feel better.

The school bus was eerily empty this morning. I like to think that it’s because everyone decided to drive their kids to school this morning during the thunderstorm, but I know better. It’s because we’re all playing a new game: “Are You Sicker than a 5th Grader?”

With 20% of kids out sick from school yesterday, I can only imagine that after a weekend of soccer and baseball games, barbecues, birthday parties and picnics, that number has risen today. Take your pick:

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