Jonah is twelve and a half. Nearly thirteen. His body is slowly twisting into a new form. Look at him one way and he's still the baby that couldn't wait to start walking. Always in motion. Look at him in another way and you can see his neck thickening up and smell the B.O. from the soccer field. He still has my voice; people get us mixed up on the phone. But that won't last much longer.
We have entered into a new stage of parenting. I can sit him down and give him certain life lessons. He takes them seriously. He's still not enough of a teenager to eye roll, but old enough to retain my words of wisdom. So, we have our chats.
When he forgot his French notebook and couldn't study for a test, we talked about how mistakes should be embraced as opportunities to learn. How can we come up with a new system for organizing our work?
This morning, I added two more pearls to his repertoire.
1. Always check to see if there is enough toilet paper, before you sit on the bowl.
2. If you use the last square, be a good citizen and get two new rolls from the hall closet for the next bathroom visitor. Pay it forward, man.
Apt. 11d 
My big and oft-repeated “Life Lessons” speech involves Accidents. Where one girl is crying “She hurt me!” and the other is screaming “It was an accident!” The short version is “You are old enough to not be hurting people by accident.” This always shocks them, because they had long assumed that “It was an accident,” if true, qualified as a valid excuse.
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As an evil conservative, one of the basic lessons I try to get across is “If you want XYZ, you’d better figure out how you are going to pay for it.”
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“If you want XYZ, you’d better figure out how you are going to pay for it.”
Does that make me an evil conservative?
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Yeah. I think I’m an evil conservative too.
Except when the Raggirls wanted a Wii, I made them save their own money for months, and they all pooled it together, and then the bought it collectively and shared it equally.
It’s like creamy Communism on the inside with a crunchy Capitalistic shell!
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“Does that make me an evil conservative?”
Heck, yeah.
“Except when the Raggirls wanted a Wii, I made them save their own money for months, and they all pooled it together, and then the bought it collectively and shared it equally.”
I get concerned when my kids pool money, because there may have been some arm-twisting that I didn’t see, so I always inquire to make sure that the younger child is actually excited about the purchase.
Another life lesson is “Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency on my part.” I haven’t had to use that one very often, fortunately, but it has application for things like last-minute announcements of school projects and tests.
A few years back, my whole family realized with dismay that one of my 20-something relatives had (in the course of a very comfortable childhood) never assimilated basic concepts like 1) you’ve got to work and support yourself 2) if you want something (like education or trips abroad), you need to pay for it 3) you’ve got to pay back the money that you borrow. Now, this wasn’t a bad kid (she’s actually a very sweet, idealistic kid), it’s just that what with the usual upper-upper-middle class childhood of music and sports and trips to do good deeds, followed by a divorce that everybody tried to cushion her from the financial effects of, there just hadn’t been a lot of reality in her life. The good news is that she made a more or less complete recovery in a year or two.
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An added benefit of “If you want XYZ, you’d better figure out how you are going to pay for it” is that it has miraculous results on children’s computation ability.
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We had a toilet-related life lesson this morning. “If you wake up with abdominal pains, try sitting on the toilet for a bit before complaining so much.”
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How about, “If you keep the toilet paper under the sink, you can get it even if you find out you’re out while on the toilet”? (If you don’t have a sink you can put it under, this can be adopted to some other holding-device in the bathroom. You still have to adjust #2 above for a new package of toilet paper from the larger supply, if necessary.)
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That photo of Jonah is something to behold. Do you have a giraffe or two somewhere in the family tree?
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