I drove up to our local park one morning recently when my kids were all at school. This park with the playground tucked away in the back corner by the lake is where I spent countless hours with my children in what is slowly but surely starting to feel like a different lifetime.
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If you’re a parent who spends a lot of time online, it’s hard to escape the meme about making the most of the 18 summers you have with your children before they leave home.
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My 10-year-old son and I were playing two-square in our driveway after I picked him up from school. It was one of those hot, muggy Florida afternoons where it seems like everything is melting at least a little. Even the bright yellow chalk we used to outline the court felt a little squishy.
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When I was in my twenties and extremely bored, I came across a book by humorist Bill Bryson called A Walk in the Woods.
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When you’re a parent, you eventually find some sort of rhythm. It doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it probably takes years for almost everyone. The addition of another child at any point along the road typically requires a reset.
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Most weekdays now I drop my kids off at school around 7:30 in the morning while the light is soft and the Florida winter air feels expectant.
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First words. First steps. First birthdays. First days of school. It’s no secret that “firsts” dominate the lives of parents of young children. Heck, we buy whole books about them and then forget to fill in anything because who has time for recordkeeping when there are hours of doll videos on YouTube to watch?
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Sometimes we get so caught up in the daily minutiae of existing that it’s easy for the big milestones to sneak up on us.
Read MoreI’ve been doing a lot of driving lately. After more than a year spent within a very tight radius of our home, we began to venture out more about the time school started.
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It only took about two weeks of kindergarten for my daughter to master the fine art of persuasion.
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The past few weeks around these parts have been rough. Just a couple of months ago, there was hope that this school year would be better than last. Nope. It’s remarkably worse.
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My oldest son who is nine years old and just starting fourth grade entered quarantine four days after school started back.
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The first full week of school summer vacation kicked off with all three of my children attending tennis camp for four hours each day. This might not sound like much, but it was monumentally significant for me because it marked the first time in more than nine years of parenting that all my children were away at the same time.
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I picked up my first grader’s shoes one afternoon and sand spilled out of them all over the wood floors of our living room.
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One recent Saturday morning, I escaped the house with my 6-year-old son to pick up coffee from a drive thru. It was a bit more mundane than some of our weekend outings pre-2020, but grading on the pandemic curve, it was probably one of the most exciting things we did all month.
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It was a strange winter break in the Knott household for several reasons I can’t really get into on the internet. There was the pandemic, of course, that limited our normal holiday festivities, but more unexpected events made the two weeks off school even more unusual.
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There’s not a lot going on right now, but that doesn’t mean my family can’t still enjoy some of our favorite seasonal pastimes like trimming the Christmas tree, counting down to Santa’s arrival, and riding bikes around the neighborhood and loudly critiquing everyone’s decorating choices.
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Most of my time these days is spent trying to figure out how to pass the time.
The pandemic has never been worse, so I feel even more compelled to stay home. Taking the kids outside to parks or playgrounds feels like it should be relatively safe, but since at least half of the community where I live has never taken the virus seriously and still doesn’t, I never feel comfortable.
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I’ve resisted writing much of anything the past couple of months because I knew if I was going to write anything during this impossible time, it was probably going to be about distance learning. And who really wants to read one more word about that?
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One night recently during the stuffed animal puppet show my 6-year-old makes me do with him at bedtime several nights a week, I created a back story for one of his main stuffies — Rainbow Owl.
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