I better get this out there before my brother does. This is me when I was about 12. It says more than a million words, so I'll just let it go.
This in the hands of my kids could be deadly.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Catching up
I've been a fickle blogger of late - only writing bits and pieces as I felt like it or as the mood hit. It's not that I've not been writing -- it's just that I've not been blogging. I think I said once before in this blog that sometimes it is not that you don't have anything to say, it's that you have too much.
We took our daughter to tour her very first campus visit. Again I underestimated the emotional whallop this would take on me. Like her dad, Ellen is a great student who leans towards disciplines such as science and math. As we toured the bio chem department Ellen and Dan were completely engrossed and acted as if they understood all the five-syllable words that the professor was telling them. As for myself, I got that same twitchy, nervous feeling that I often had in my chem labs in college. Give me an essay exam any day over numbers or chemical strings.
There are moments as a parent that you get caught up short, that you realize that your job is nearing completion and that while you know you have had some influence in your kid's life, you also know that they are who they are by some ingenious mix of DNA and divine hand. And you marvel at that thought, at how this person can be so much a part of you and yet so much their own person. As I watched Ellen begin her own journey towards her new life I was struck with just how much she has it together and I had to wonder, "how the heck did that happen?"
I called an old friend this past week who also has kids leaving for college. She was the one who gave me some good advice once. When we were getting ready for Ellen to be born, I worried that I could not love another kid as much as I did our first. I asked her, "can you love two kids the same?" And she said, "Of course not. You love them differently." At the time I don't think I understood what she was saying. Now, 18 plus years later, I think I am beginning to understand.
We took our daughter to tour her very first campus visit. Again I underestimated the emotional whallop this would take on me. Like her dad, Ellen is a great student who leans towards disciplines such as science and math. As we toured the bio chem department Ellen and Dan were completely engrossed and acted as if they understood all the five-syllable words that the professor was telling them. As for myself, I got that same twitchy, nervous feeling that I often had in my chem labs in college. Give me an essay exam any day over numbers or chemical strings.
There are moments as a parent that you get caught up short, that you realize that your job is nearing completion and that while you know you have had some influence in your kid's life, you also know that they are who they are by some ingenious mix of DNA and divine hand. And you marvel at that thought, at how this person can be so much a part of you and yet so much their own person. As I watched Ellen begin her own journey towards her new life I was struck with just how much she has it together and I had to wonder, "how the heck did that happen?"
I called an old friend this past week who also has kids leaving for college. She was the one who gave me some good advice once. When we were getting ready for Ellen to be born, I worried that I could not love another kid as much as I did our first. I asked her, "can you love two kids the same?" And she said, "Of course not. You love them differently." At the time I don't think I understood what she was saying. Now, 18 plus years later, I think I am beginning to understand.
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