Seeing This Through
Well, here is the hard part. The crunch time. I'm up late again posting. After everyone, including my wife, has gone to bed. After I should be in bed, and my body is begging me to go there. But I post, because I made a commitment to myself that I would post. One post every day for a month. A meaningless commitment, but one that I want to see through. Like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, although less grand. Seeing things through----it's something I try to teach my kids. And a lot of times trying to teach this lesson gets me that look like I'm just a grown-up and don't understand. And secretly I hope I do understand as much as I think I do.
We struck my wife's play tonight. Took the set down, put the costumes away. It went well. So many people have come up to me to tell my how impressed they were with my wife's performance. This was the first acting she's done in a while where she really had a chance to shine. The first time her children have seen her really act. She had her doubts, doubted herself and if she could pull this off, unsure of what she got herself into and if she could muster what it took to see it through. But she did see it through, and though the size of the audiences for our fledgling group are modest, they were appreciative. So much so that a woman who was at one of the shows with the smallest attendance took the time to write a letter to the editor of our local paper to say that she had a very enjoyable time and people should do themselves a favor and see this show. The audiences that next weekend did pick up, too.
My daughter is getting to the point where she can imagine the end result early into a process. She can plan things like shows and songs and dramatic readings and rehearse them without prompting because she knows the steps between idea and product, and the satisfaction of the end accomplishment motivates her. It's so neat to see her at this point, reminded of how far she's come by her brothers who are all at stages of still putting the pieces of experience together.
Robo is at the point where he is starting to accept guidance and see the ending when he begins. He was a good help with the leaves this weekend. He could keep going and know what it would take to finish a job properly. I could put him to work and walk away and he knew what to do, and had what it took to keep going---raking leaves into piles, and getting those piles into bags, and getting those full bags put away neatly so he could look back over that clean expanse of lawn with pride. And a deep sigh of relief that now the liberation was complete and he could run off with his friends finally.
That all doesn't probably sound so amazing, but it is significant to me seeing as just earlier this fall I was having to force him to not quit the football that he so badly wanted to start in the first place. He got a little frustrated when things weren't being coached quite the way he had imagined and so he dropped out. I had a talk with him because I didn't want him getting a reputation as the kid who never saw things through. I had just let him drop scouting several weeks before, and I didn't want this becoming a habit.
But now he's going above and beyond the expected. He's been practicing his drums far in excess of what anyone recommends, he teachers, his parents, his grandparents. He's pushing himself because he knows that there is something at the end of that rainbow. I've promised we'd look into getting him a full drum set if he could practice 100 hours, because at that point I'd know he was serious. And now he's pushing himself to meet that goal as soon as possible---that and looking forward to having enough skill to be a full on drum player himself.
His progress is also significant to me because I had his little brother helping me this weekend, reminding me of the difference that a few years can make. I had the Lemur doing the job of holding the leaf bags as I filled them, and to him this was an everlasting, ongoing dismal toil with no end in sight. He whined and fussed and complained the whole time like he hoped God should strike him dead right there rather than go on living the rest of his life in such a dismal predicament. Of course, it eventually did end (the job, not his life), but to him it probably seemed like an unexpected, Providental change of fortune rather than an eventual outcome.
I think he will soon begin to understand though. He's right at the brink, and I predict that understanding will come with his Spring dance concert. He's taking tap, as you might have read me mention, and he wanted to quit a few weeks ago. We told him that he could quit, if he still wanted to, after the Spring dance recital. But he had to continue lessons till then. He had told us was frustrated that he had gone to a number of lessons and still couldn't make the fast tappy sounds yet. It was still too slow. But he agreed to stay in till spring. I think that when he gets on stage and under the lights in the hall they rent each year, that he'll be struck by the performance bug and want to keep going because he'll know there is a payoff for his hard work.
His younger brother, however, is still mastering the more rudimentary concept of cause and effect. Little Bear has yet to learn that if he comes out in the yard and starts puncturing the leaf bags he finds there over and over with the tail of the ever present Godzilla action figure, that the end result is that his dad will flip out. He has yet to learn that no matter how satisfying the snap of plastic is each time it's pierced, avoiding his father's hissy fit is a much preferable eventuality.
Of course, when the father comes back out onto the lawn following the carrying of the screaming child into the house after snatching Godzilla out of the child's hands and shrieking at the child, the father might feel like he should himself revisit the whole cause and effect theory. That way, maybe the father wouldn't be standing there with a rake in his hand looking up and down the block at his neighbors, each on their lawn, hoping they didn't hear the commotion from his yard over the whine of their leaf blowers. They aren't looking at him, so maybe the didn't hear. But then again, they aren't looking at him, and maybe that says they did. He just puts his head down and goes back to raking, knowing that he'll probably never really know for sure.
We struck my wife's play tonight. Took the set down, put the costumes away. It went well. So many people have come up to me to tell my how impressed they were with my wife's performance. This was the first acting she's done in a while where she really had a chance to shine. The first time her children have seen her really act. She had her doubts, doubted herself and if she could pull this off, unsure of what she got herself into and if she could muster what it took to see it through. But she did see it through, and though the size of the audiences for our fledgling group are modest, they were appreciative. So much so that a woman who was at one of the shows with the smallest attendance took the time to write a letter to the editor of our local paper to say that she had a very enjoyable time and people should do themselves a favor and see this show. The audiences that next weekend did pick up, too.
My daughter is getting to the point where she can imagine the end result early into a process. She can plan things like shows and songs and dramatic readings and rehearse them without prompting because she knows the steps between idea and product, and the satisfaction of the end accomplishment motivates her. It's so neat to see her at this point, reminded of how far she's come by her brothers who are all at stages of still putting the pieces of experience together.
Robo is at the point where he is starting to accept guidance and see the ending when he begins. He was a good help with the leaves this weekend. He could keep going and know what it would take to finish a job properly. I could put him to work and walk away and he knew what to do, and had what it took to keep going---raking leaves into piles, and getting those piles into bags, and getting those full bags put away neatly so he could look back over that clean expanse of lawn with pride. And a deep sigh of relief that now the liberation was complete and he could run off with his friends finally.
That all doesn't probably sound so amazing, but it is significant to me seeing as just earlier this fall I was having to force him to not quit the football that he so badly wanted to start in the first place. He got a little frustrated when things weren't being coached quite the way he had imagined and so he dropped out. I had a talk with him because I didn't want him getting a reputation as the kid who never saw things through. I had just let him drop scouting several weeks before, and I didn't want this becoming a habit.
But now he's going above and beyond the expected. He's been practicing his drums far in excess of what anyone recommends, he teachers, his parents, his grandparents. He's pushing himself because he knows that there is something at the end of that rainbow. I've promised we'd look into getting him a full drum set if he could practice 100 hours, because at that point I'd know he was serious. And now he's pushing himself to meet that goal as soon as possible---that and looking forward to having enough skill to be a full on drum player himself.
His progress is also significant to me because I had his little brother helping me this weekend, reminding me of the difference that a few years can make. I had the Lemur doing the job of holding the leaf bags as I filled them, and to him this was an everlasting, ongoing dismal toil with no end in sight. He whined and fussed and complained the whole time like he hoped God should strike him dead right there rather than go on living the rest of his life in such a dismal predicament. Of course, it eventually did end (the job, not his life), but to him it probably seemed like an unexpected, Providental change of fortune rather than an eventual outcome.
I think he will soon begin to understand though. He's right at the brink, and I predict that understanding will come with his Spring dance concert. He's taking tap, as you might have read me mention, and he wanted to quit a few weeks ago. We told him that he could quit, if he still wanted to, after the Spring dance recital. But he had to continue lessons till then. He had told us was frustrated that he had gone to a number of lessons and still couldn't make the fast tappy sounds yet. It was still too slow. But he agreed to stay in till spring. I think that when he gets on stage and under the lights in the hall they rent each year, that he'll be struck by the performance bug and want to keep going because he'll know there is a payoff for his hard work.
His younger brother, however, is still mastering the more rudimentary concept of cause and effect. Little Bear has yet to learn that if he comes out in the yard and starts puncturing the leaf bags he finds there over and over with the tail of the ever present Godzilla action figure, that the end result is that his dad will flip out. He has yet to learn that no matter how satisfying the snap of plastic is each time it's pierced, avoiding his father's hissy fit is a much preferable eventuality.
Of course, when the father comes back out onto the lawn following the carrying of the screaming child into the house after snatching Godzilla out of the child's hands and shrieking at the child, the father might feel like he should himself revisit the whole cause and effect theory. That way, maybe the father wouldn't be standing there with a rake in his hand looking up and down the block at his neighbors, each on their lawn, hoping they didn't hear the commotion from his yard over the whine of their leaf blowers. They aren't looking at him, so maybe the didn't hear. But then again, they aren't looking at him, and maybe that says they did. He just puts his head down and goes back to raking, knowing that he'll probably never really know for sure.
posted by Will at 9:52 PM
1 Comments:
. . . your loss of sleep is our gain of a window into this cool way you are raising your kids . . . i appreciate the wisdom . . . and the reminder of the whole cause and effect thing :)
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