I Love My Boy

Thing Two had an hour and a half of soccer practice, two hours of Confirmation class, and an hour of goalie training consecutively today.  Allowing for the necessary drive time in between those scattered map points, he and I left the house at 12:40 and will probably get home about 8:45 tonight.

I hate this crazy freaking schedule, I really do. And I’m just the driver; I can’t even imagine how he feels about it, although I have to say that he has been a real trouper today.  Luckily (for a variety of reasons) the Confirmation class is only one Sunday a month, not every Sunday like the soccer.

I spend a lot of time in the car in general with day-to-day stuff, but since family logistics dictate that I’m usually the parent who does the road trips with Thing One, he and I have also covered a lot of ground together.  I can think of at least seven multi-hundred mile soccer trips with him in the past couple of years.  I wouldn’t trade those for gold, believe it or not. The best conversations I have with him take place while we are sitting side-by-side in the car.  Thing Two not being quite as verbal or expressive as his brother, we tend to bond over music in the car rather than talking.  I was thinking about that on the way to goalie training, and reflecting that I’ll still take the one on one time with either of my sons whenever and however I can get it, whether or not it involves deep conversations.

And then a song came on the radio, and he commented that the singer used to be in the band Linkin Park.  Immediately followed by asking me why the former lead singer of that band would’ve committed suicide.  Screech, halt, back up the bus. What was I saying about not having deep conversations with him in the car???  Scratch that.

Oh, and speaking of him not being my talker, the woman running the CCD program asked him to read the closing prayer tonight, one he’d never seen before, from the microphone in front of a room full of people.   He read it so beautifully I almost cried.  Although he’s only 13, he has a deep voice already, and had to bend down a little bit from his 5’11” height to reach the microphone.  He has new glasses, ones that look better on his face, and he’s grown out his crew cut enough so that now you can see the dark curls against his pale skin. I know I’m prejudiced, but he is a handsome child, and he’s growing up so fast I almost can’t stand it.

You Know You Live In The Country When...

...you leave your freshly-taken-down (formerly) live Christmas tree in your front yard by the driveway for your friend’s kid, who will come by with his pickup truck to collect it because his family’s goats love to eat them!  Definitely an eco-friendly way of getting rid of a Christmas tree.

Happy New Year, everyone!!  Good luck remembering to write “2019” on your forms and checks.  :)

Blessings

Yeah, I know I’ve been quiet again.  Christmas is a tough time of year for me.  By this point in the holiday season (this year not excluded) I’m generally more like the Grinch than any of the other characters from Christmas movies.  There are just too many “extra” things to do at this time of year...shopping and baking and decorating and wrapping and cards, oh my.  Might be different if any of the regular things that need to get done would conveniently go away in December to make way for the seasonal stuff, but no...somehow lunches and dinners and laundry and cooking and errands and child transport to sporting events still need to happen, just with all the other stuff added in as well.  It gets overwhelming.  I suspect that just about every adult who is primarily responsible in his or her household for making the holiday “magic” happen feels the same way.  I was having lunch with my husband at our favorite Thai place one day this week (he was off from work) and a friend walked in.  We chatted with her for a few minutes, and while we were talking the song, “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” started playing in the restaurant.  My friend looked me straight in the eyes and said, “No, it isn’t.”  At least it isn’t just me.  She says she’s way more partial to Thanksgiving.

Anyway, Thing One has one of his college ID soccer camps tomorrow.  (I.e., camps for high schoolers who want to play college soccer, run by college coaches.)  Because it is the better part of three hours from home and starts at 8AM, we decided to drive up today and stay overnight.  It is now 8PM, and I’m sitting in the hotel room thinking about what went *right* today.

*Petunia and I had fun decorating Christmas cookies before Thing One and I left home.

*There was a huge wreck on the major highway between home and here that caused us to be about an hour later than intended getting up here, but since we left early, it didn’t matter.

*We weren’t IN the wreck.

*Even with the delay, we had time to walk around the (gorgeous) major well-known university near here, and the kid let me take several pics of him there without grumbling, even though he did tell me at one point that I reminded him of a Japanese tourist!  It will not surprise anyone that he also insisted that I drive him to this university’s (separate) soccer facility as well so that he could check that out too.

*Most importantly, my son is a really good kid, and I enjoy his company.  This one on one time is priceless, and the opportunity for it is dwindling.  He’s already 15 and a sophomore.  I cherish every minute I get, so I really don’t mind going on the road trips with him even if it does mean driving for hours each way and/or watching soccer in heat/snow/rain/gale force winds etc!  Tonight, as we sat in a Greek diner eating burgers and discussing why hominids arose in Africa and not anywhere else on earth (don’t ask me why, he brought up that topic!) I was struck by how fortunate a woman I am.

I just need to remind myself of that fact daily from now until the 26th!

Don't Forget To Stop And Eat The Roses

Gary Larson's Far Side comic has always been one of my favorites, right up there with Dilbert.  This may be one of my favorite Far Side strips of all time.

My brother has been on a tough road lately.  About a year ago, a dear friend of his from college committed suicide.  Then, a few weeks ago, another dear friend died of cancer only a few months after being diagnosed.  Bearing in mind that my brother is only 41, he's having a hard time coming to grips with, as he put it, being old enough that these kinds of things happen to your friends.

He has always been a seize-the-moment kind of guy, and I know that these recent events are likely to push him even further in that direction.  You just never know what's going to happen tomorrow, after all.  I've always been more of a planner and a delayed-gratification kinda gal myself, but what's hitting me these days is how little time (relatively speaking) I have left with my kids at home.  Thing One in particular, who is already halfway through his sophomore year, taking the PSAT and thinking about colleges.  That whole days are long, years are short thing again.  We need to work on making more memories with them while they are home: life can't always be about soccer practice.  Time to eat some roses.

Another Cross-Cultural Moment

Thing One's high school soccer team this year included (very unusually) not one, but TWO German exchange students.  One sophomore from Hamburg, one junior from Hannover.  Given how much I have said over the years about the rural nature of this area, you can likely imagine the culture shock that two boys from city-center Germany are having here.  The one, who happens to be living with the family of a friend of mine, at least has three host siblings, and their house is in a neighborhood.  The other is living on a sheep farm with no other kids!  Apparently these kids were assigned to families all over the country by their exchange program and where they ended up was to some extent a matter of luck.

Karl, the kid from Hannover, ended up in carpools with me frequently because his host mother, the mother of another player from the team and I are all friends and live in the same area.  We joke that we carpool in self-defense, since between us we have nine very active children between the ages of 11 and 17!  Karl is a really nice kid, and although his English is heavily accented, it 's excellent.  In all the hours he's spent in my car overall, we've only run into one standard English word he couldn't remember, and as a consequence Thing One and I now know that the German word for "kite" literally translates as "air dragon."  

Not surprisingly, though, we do have the odd communication breakdown when figurative speech and slang get involved.  Having studied two foreign languages in school myself, both Chinese and German, I have been on the other end of that many times.  Sometimes you just have to know what something means, because it doesn't translate literally.  My high school Mandarin teacher explained to us once that if someone calls you a rotten turtle egg, it is the rough equivalent of being called an SOB in English.  Who knew?  I remember at one point having to explain the meaning of the word "hick" to Karl, and when somebody told him to put the biscuit in the basket (meaning to shoot the soccer ball into the goal) he was totally befuddled.  Unsurprisingly.  

So, with this as background, you can understand why I was a bit taken aback at the grocery store yesterday.  All I wanted to do was buy the kid a 17th birthday card, but I hadn't realized until then just how many teen-appropriate birthday cards rely on either figures of speech or language-based puns for their humor!   I took pictures of a few examples.  Pictures 1-2 and 4-5 are the front and inside views of the same cards, FYI.  

 

You couldn't blame the kid for looking at any one of these and going, "Huh??"  I finally found another one with humor that would translate across the language divide and bought that instead.

I'm glad he's here.  I'm deeply impressed that he had the nerve to leave everything familiar to him and expand his horizons, and I'm grateful that my son has learned something about Germany from him and also made a good friend in the process.  It's a step toward making the big world a tiny bit smaller, for both of them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Wishing you a happy day with your friends and loved ones.  

 

Not A Good Run

I told you about the former classmate of Thing One's who went missing recently but was found.  Another kid of roughly the same age from around here has been AWOL for a week or so now, apparently because he had a fight with his parents about his grades and took off.  Then, just yesterday, Thing One might have saved a third kid's life.

I was in the kitchen baking with Petunia when he yelled down from his room, "Mom, I need you to come look at this right now."  Something in his tone had me running up the stairs almost before he finished the sentence.  He told me to sit down and handed me his phone, which was displaying an Instagram post.  As soon as I read it I understood why he was concerned: the kid in question had written something that legitimately sounded suicidal.  Among other things, he wrote, "See you all on the other side when you get there."  We immediately reached out to the high school (for help identifying the kid since it was an IG account under an alias), and the vice principal called the police.  They actually came to the house to talk to us, although all we could do was show them the account and the post.  Thing One sent the kid a direct (private) message too, asking him to please talk to someone trustworthy before he did anything he couldn't walk back.

I'm really proud of Thing One.  Apparently, of all the followers this kid has on Instagram, he was the only one worried enough to talk to an adult after seeing the post.  I'm incredibly happy that the high school and police department acted so quickly.  I hope the kid is okay.  And I can't even fathom what would make a high school sophomore decide that life isn't worth living.  Reading back through his post history on my son's account, I can only guess that depression is involved, but what the hell do I know.  Hug your teenagers, folks.

The Spirit of Halloween

They found that boy, by the way.  Thank goodness.

Thing Two has soccer practice on Thursday nights.  Last night, his coach sent him over to goalie training, which is at the back of the large field complex.  There was another team practicing between where I was standing and the field where the goalies were working out, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention to them until the coach of that team started dropping pinnies on the ground in front of me.

Thing Two is one of those specks in the background.

Pinnies are the mesh 'vests' that coaches have players put on over their regular shirts when they are separating a team into smaller groups by color, by the way.

The coach arranged the pinnies as you see in the picture.  Then he handed a couple of bags of Halloween candy to his assistant and told him to place the candy under the pinnies, Easter-egg-hunt style.  Except, and this is the part that threw me, he told the guy to put a lot of candy under some pinnies, one piece under others and none at all under the rest.  I had to ask why, since it seemed like that would be a recipe for disaster.

The coach told me that he wanted to see how well his boys would share with each other, as a measure of character and team spirit.  We left before their practice was over, but I hope they made their coach proud.