In the day-in-the-life blogging mode, Saturday evening I chopped Lucien’s hair short so that he might feel summery cool for basketball camp this week.
I didn’t bring a camera to the train, but he boarded one and rode to his grandparents’ station. He’s going to play basketball on the Haverford College campus this week—and cook dinners with his grandmother most evenings, and go out to dinner with his other grandparents a couple of evenings.
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His siblings keep saying, “I miss Lulu.”
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His next-youngest brother had the giant pre-camp meltdown just a week before heading to overnight camp, summer number two. He knows he loved it. He remembers what he didn’t love. He’s nervous. He’s sad to leave us.
After a bunch of tears and talk, he said, “I know I’ll have a good time this summer but I’m not going back next summer.” And that’s when I knew we’d really gotten over the hump. At least, I hope so. I breathed just half a sigh of relief.
I’m going to start sending letters by midweek. That was one of the things keeping me awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the letters. Maybe, I breathed a mere quarter sigh of relief.
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The oldest brother mostly slept yesterday after wheezing kept him up Saturday night. There are a few settings for teenagers some days: sleep, grumbling, hunger, and chattiness. The cycle goes on repeat. Hunger and chattiness merged when he walked downtown with his parents to get a Goberry.
We had networking-worthy discussions about C3, a local arts-access organization and we got to hear fantastic music on the street and catch up with friends before we turned into pumpkins and had to face bedtime and anticipatory camp meltdown.
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The littlest was exhausted. Although this didn’t make going to sleep any easier, I had a great time watching her in the water at our friends’ house on the lake. Her pal had his own thing going by the water. The very elaborate worlds he creates in his mind at four remind me of a certain guy I know well now as a teen… at four, he lived in elaborate worlds of his own creation.
The way some kids dive into the physical and others dive—seemingly physically—into the imaginative is endlessly interesting to me, having had both kinds of kids now. Trying to figure out which things to push and which things to let slide is very confusing. What’s my role here anyway? Should I push friends/sports/cleaning/community service/instruments? As one friend said to me the other day, she realized that rather than pushing her kid to excel at something at age 14, she really saw that her kid was interested in trying many things. And that made her realize if you can’t try a bunch of new things as a teenager when can you? So, she decided to worry less, encourage exploration more. I think she’s wise.
This came up in the context of a discussion about homework. She and I discovered we are likeminded on this issue: against there being much.
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On that note, we begin a week with only three children under our roof. I’m curious to see how we do.
