My son has been having some issues at preschool. Today, when I picked him up, I noticed the teacher trying to help him put on his jacket. He didn’t see me standing in the hall, but I saw him take his coat from his teacher’s hands, then throw it on the floor. When she tried to hand it to him a second time, he took the coat and threw it AT her.

Needless to say, he’s being punished today. Unfortunately, the only punishment that does any good is to take away his favorite toys and TV shows. I say unfortunately, because when I take away those things, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He will inevitably follow me around the house turning everything I do, into something a five year old WANTS to do. If I change the toilet paper or empty the trash, he’ll say, “I can do that”.

If I load the dishwasher, “I can do that”.

Fold the laundry, “I can do that”.

You name it, he can do it. And, usually he can. But, for certain it will take a thousand times as long.

Please don’t think I don’t want to engage my son. I adore him. We play a lot of games and have been working on a big jigsaw puzzle together. We do speech therapy, work on fine motor skills, and I read to him.

Nor is he a TV junkie. At the most, he’ll watch an hour of Little Einsteins each day. But that hour, that precious hour…it’s GONE.

Once in awhile, Mom needs a break. Or, at least a chance to steal away and do some laundry without it becoming The Laundry Game. I would like to change the bedding, and leave out the part where I have to construct a fort out of the flat sheet.

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My daughter was reading a book and asked, “Mom, what does the word er mean? This character says it all the time.”

I replied, “Well, it’s not really a word, but it’s used as a pause in conversation. Like, uh.”

“Oh. So should I replace all the er’s with uh’s?”

“No, they mean the same thing.”

“But, you said that er isn’t a word?”

“Neither is uh.”

Nothing like trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of the English language to your daughter, only to have her look at you like you’re speaking Greek.

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My eight year old daughter has been a crazy little writer lately. She has some 50 journals that she writes in constantly. Every day, every thing that happens to her gets put down in writing. I think she wants to grow up to be a blogger.

Since this is the week of Thanksgiving, I thought I would share something special from her. Here is a letter that my daughter wrote to God this morning.

Dear God,

Thank you so much for my wonderful family. Thanks for all my friends. Thanks for helping me live my life happily. Thank you for all my surroundings. Please help the sick heal. Please give the homeless people a home. Please give the hungry some food. Please help all the people in Iraq. Please help all the people in the book of intentions. Please let my family live a long healthy life. Help me be able to help people in need of my help. Please give me courage to help people at all times.

Love,

A

P.S. My Mom would like to thank you for letting the Buckeyes beat Michigan.

(Okay…she didn’t really write a P.S. But, I would’ve told her to, had I known she was writing God a letter.)

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I often find myself telling stories to my kids about my childhood, which always end with the saying, “But, don’t you ever do that.” Looking back, I don’t know how I made it to adulthood relatively unscathed.

Back in the day, we sure had a lot of fun. It seems to me, way more fun than our kids have these days. But, truth be known, I’m lucky to be alive.

There were the climbing races to the top of my neighbor’s maple tree…a good two-and-a-half-stories high. The perilous jump between a 2nd story roof to a bedroom window, which had nothing below it but ground. And, the one time in early Spring when my cousin and I tried to stand on floating blocks of ice that were breaking apart on the river. We were holding onto a railing near a boat pier, but the freezing water was deep enough to go over our heads. Brilliant.

We climbed high upon the steel beams at a construction site, and rode all over town–without helmets–on the handlebars of each other’s bikes. All while someone else was hitching a ride on the back of the “banana seat”.

We swung across a ravine on the end of a warped vine, and spent afternoons walking across the moss-covered tops of low-level dams. We dove into a quarry, rode our bikes on very busy streets, and never wore seat belts.

But, my personal favorite has to be our creation of “storm forts”, where we would sit outside with golf umbrellas fashioned into a stronghold against the wind and rain. I’m not sure where our parents were, as we sat there just asking for a bolt of lightening to hit us and our AM/FM radios.

I can not believe how downright stupid we were. Completely oblivious to the chances we were taking, and abundantly lucky that we weren’t hurt beyond a few scratches and dents. So, I tell those tales to my children with caution…and I TRY not to make it sound like it was a TON of fun.

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