I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Last weekend, we skipped an appointment that we’d made for Detective Munch. And we won’t be rescheduling it any time soon.
Don’t worry. He’s all caught up on his vaccinations. He was supposed to take a test that would determine whether he’s “gifted and talented”. We opted out, for a variety of reasons.
For example, right now he’s sucking on a comb.
I’m not a gamer. I never have gamed. And neither has my son.
There’s no Playstation in my house, no Xbox, no Wii. My son’s exposure to video games has been limited to the handful of times we’ve stumbled across an old arcade machine and I’ve tried to teach him how to play Pac-Man. He hasn’t been all that into it. (Probably because he’s TERRIBLE. You have to AVOID the ghosts, genius!)
But if his interest in the gaming devices his cousins were playing over the holidays was any indication, that’s about to change. Which means I’m going to have to shell out for a system.
Or am I? I recently got a new piece of hardware that is saving my ass. And my wallet. For now.
Later today, I’ll be attending my first parent-teacher conference.
As a kid, parent-teacher conference day was nerve-wracking. (“What is the teacher going to say about me? Am I going to get in trouble?”) Now that I’m the parent, it will be interesting to experience it from the other side. Or it will be when it matters. Right now, I don’t think it does.
Detective Munch is four. He’s in preschool. Unless he’s biting other children or spending all class in the corner doing science experiments, I don’t think there will be any major developments.
But there is one thing I’m dying to learn.
Read more about All I Want From The Parent-Teacher Conference …
My son hasn’t seen Star Wars yet!
But thanks to its pop culture ubiquity, he definitely knows about it. Whether or not the kids themselves have seen the movies, my son’s preschool classmates wear shirts emblazoned with the different characters, Detective Munch himself has a toy light-saber, and he’s already announced that he wants to be Darth Vader for next Halloween. (He’s also announced that he wants to be Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Batman, and the Joker, so let’s give it some time before we buy the next costume.) Sight unseen!
Recently he even asked me if he could watch it “someday,” a question I could barely even answer due to my enormous grin.
Like every dad whose childhood was shaped by the original trilogy, I am dying to show it to my son. But I’m exercising restraint. Because Mom and Buried.
With apologies to Tom Petty, the waiting actually ain’t so bad. It’s the separating that’s the hardest part. Especially when it comes to dropping my kid off at school.
He’s only four years old, so I’m not talking about sending him off to college, or even to the military academy he’ll definitely be attending if he doesn’t shape up! I’m talking about sending him to pre-kindergaten. Where he eats paste for six hours.
If he can’t figure out how to handle that, I’m going to start eating paste. After my nervous breakdown.