Last week we went on vacation, but it was a smaller vacation within a broader "vacation." I use quotes because it wasn't a real vacation. It just felt like one. The kids were still at camp this past week (S is getting them now as I type this), so, we were on our own, free to go about our schedules -- work, gym, errands, etc. -- at our own accord, and, I must say, it was pretty awesome. I love my boys and have literally zero regrets about becoming a father -- I don't even have the occasional kid-free daydream -- but a week off from having to plan everything I want to do around the schedules of two other people who can't drive and can't be home alone for extended periods of time? Yeah, I'll take that without compunction.
Actually, Lil' S1 can be home by himself, but we typically try to avoid the all-day nothing-planned summer days for him. For one thing, if I'm working home then he's just around, and it's distracting for me, even though he's not doing anything that has to do with me directly.* Like, when he pours himself some cereal for breakfast, I can I hear the bowls and silverware clanging, and I can tell he spilled some on the floor and didn't clean it up, and then he chews so noisily, because he's 12, and it makes it hard to concentrate on whatever it is I need to concentrate on at the moment. For another thing, he's not a great home-all-day-with-nothing-to-do kid, in the sense that he will just stare at his screens for hours on end. If we prod him to do other things -- call a friend, walk to the store, read a book -- he usually will, but we often can't/don't want to be on him to do things. That's the whole deal of it.
*S is sequestered in the basement, so she doesn't hear it. During the COVID lockdowns, I tried to work down there too, but she takes so many meetings that it's worse than being upstairs and possibly dealing with the kids.
On Tuesday, we went out for dinner and drinks with a group of other parents whose kids were also at camp (really fun, by the way), and we were talking about a common subject among Gen-X parents: How different parenting was when we were growing up. Particularly, we were lamenting the fact that we have to spend so much time, money, and energy finding summer camps for our children -- not overnight camp, which is it's own special thing, but the need-something-to-occupy-our-kids day camps they do the rest of the summer. When we were kids, we'd often just be home during the summer, and we had to figure it out ourselves. We might have a few activities here and there (I took drama and swim lessons every summer), but these all-day summer camps weren't the norm like they are today.
It's part of a bigger trend of parents becoming more involved in their children's lives. It's not really acceptable to let your child run free in "the wild" like it was forty years ago. Our neighbor won't let his son, who's going into sixth grade, leave our street on his bike without adult supervision, and he's a responsible kid, and we live in a decent neighborhood. I do think parents on the whole are overprotective now, and society would be better served if we all loosened up a bit, but there definitely are confounding factors. The aforementioned screens is a big one. If running free in the wild actually means watching YouTube shorts on your iPad, while you play on your iPhone all day, then it's not exactly preferable to the overly-structured alternative. It was a blessing in disguise that video games and other screens (basically just TV) weren't that good yet when I was a kid. Playing a season of Baseball Stars on Nintendo for the 100th time or watching another rerun of The Brady Bunch got old fast. We had to go outside and find other kids and be social due to sheer lack of alternatives. But there is no such thing as a lack of alternatives anymore, in this regard, and it seems as if that isn't a great thing.
Speaking of old video games, Lil' S1 has a Nintendo 3DS, and it has Punch-Out!! on it, and I've been playing it again. It's somewhat remarkable that the first time I played it in, like, 30 years, I was able to get all the way to Soda Popinski without being beaten. I still remember most the hacks and still have the muscle memory to implement them. Since then, I've beaten Soda Popinski (and the second Bald Bull and Don Flamenco), and I just beat Mr. Sandman last night, after many attempts, which means Super Macho Man is the only thing that stands between me and Mike Tyson (or "Mr. Dream" as he's called on this version). I've made it a goal to beat the game again. And I was thinking: playing video games like this as a child might actually have been greatly beneficial to me. The reason I say this is that the method that I use to advance in Punch-Out!! is the same one I've used to get good at everything I'm good at: Keep doing it over and over and over, even though you will fail and fail and fail. Don't get frustrated, and chances are eventually you will succeed. It's easy in theory, but it can be hard in practice because it sucks to fail repeatedly, and it takes time, and there is always something else you could be doing with that time (which is why, somewhat contradictorily, I'm a huge fan of quitting -- learning when to bail on something so that you can take up something else that might suit you better is a super valuable, underrated life skill). Maybe, instead of just playing a pointless video game, I was training myself to train, and this would help me immensely when pursuing more "important" things like mathematics.
Wait, did I just make the case for letting my kids play video games all summer? Actually, the truth is, I don't mind so much when the boys just play video games -- like, if they are just doing that one thing, playing one video game on the PS5, I kinda take that as a win. It's all the other garbage they do on screens -- the constantly being plugged in to a stream of bullshit, unhealthy stimuli -- that bothers me.
Alright, I gotta go, S is not that far away with the kids, and it won't be a good look if I'm blogging when they get home, given that she got up early by herself to get them, and I did nothing. Although, to be fair, I do things that she doesn't do. For example, cleaning out a grub-infested compost bin. We had a neighborhood kid bring in our trash bins from the curb while we were on vacation, and I think he moved our compost bin as well, but it hadn't been emptied yet (it gets picked up a few days after trash). So, it sat in the hot sun on our porch for over two weeks and was absolutely putrid when I opened it the other day for the first time since we got back. Despite being sealed, little worms and creepy-crawlies got in somehow (life finds a way!), and laid eggs, and it was like a biology experiment on decomposition when I opened it up -- pure nastiness.
And of course it was just assumed that I would be the one to handle it. The worst part is that they had laid eggs or something in the notches of the lid, and they were stuck on and wouldn't come off even after being blasted with a hose. I had to use an old toothbrush to scrub them off, but even that didn't completely work, so I had to use my fingernail and basically scrape these eggs -- or whatever they were -- out of the notches one by one. It was not the most pleasant activity I've even partaken in. Does this put me even with S? Maybe not, but if you ask people would you rather spend the morning picking up your kids from camp or cleaning up crusted maggot eggs with your bare hands, I suspect many would say the former.
Until next time...