In January, Z got an Individualized Education Program – a legal document specifying the special education services he’s entitled to. He is covered by federal law!! Go America! Go taxpayer dollars at work! Z needs help learning to write, because his handwriting is indecipherable even to adults trained in deciphering children’s handwriting, and he is slow to form sentences and translate his abundant and fantastical imagination and wealth of knowledge, real or fictitious, to the page.

It turns out you learn a lot about your kid when you go through the special education process. They (specialists, I really have no idea who they are) give your kid a bunch of tests (I really don’t know about what) and then they come up with a bunch of evaluations and conclude that your child fits into one of 13 state-mandated categories that necessitates extra help in school. Which, by the way, every kid should get.

Through this important process, you learn things like: your child has a “slow response time” when answering questions, can copy shapes onto a piece of paper, slides words across a page as he reads (whatever that means), recognizes sight words comparable to other kids in his age cohort, has above average verbal reasoning skills (wonder where he got that from), can hold the pencil with a quadropod grasp but can not stabilize his forearm and shoulder muscles while writing, is in the 16th percentile for forming his lowercase letters, and has difficulty shifting his ocular focus from one stationary object to another. Good to know. Also, he can identify that sweet and sour are both “tastes,” and he calls the nose and ear “structures on your body.”  The latter got him only partial credit on the cognitive reasoning test.

Wait, what? Personally, I think it should win him the Kid’s Award for Poet Laureate.

Through this process, we also learned – I mean we already knew, but now it is clinically confirmed – that Z is distractible, slow to follow directions, slow to process information and needs multiple reminders to follow classroom routines.

His desk is a mess, he’s the last kid to take his coat off in the morning and the first kid to lose his water bottle before lunchtime.

I used to think that one day Z would just wake up and realize that he had to get to school and put his coat on and get out the door like everyone else in the world. But now I’m starting to think that this will never happen.

Because of this: one day recently, one day when we need to fetch C at an appointed time from an appointed place, or they’ll start charging me more for whatever activity I already pay too much for, I’m reminding Z, then begging Z, to get ready to go.

Can you get your socks on? I ask Z. We need to pick up your brother. And we’re running late.

Please. Get. Your. Socks. On. I plead.

Please please, please, please, please, please put the socks on.

I hand him his socks. This will work.

He doesn’t even look at them. He is sitting on the bench, the bench T bought for the specific purpose of putting on socks and shoes, and he is holding the socks in his hand and he is not even looking at them or budging, or aware maybe that I have given him something that he is clutching in his hands.

It’s time to go, I say.

I don’t even think he knows that we’re going somewhere.

“Mom,” he finally says. “When the sun explodes, am I going to be alive?”

I don’t know, I say. But you will definitely not have your socks on.

Our household needs to take a stand on homework.

In September our principal announced a new school policy, which says that homework is not required because its usefulness for elementary kids is unproven, except for 4th graders and 5th graders because those kids will do homework in middle school because homework is a really important life skill at that age, and for the lower grades homework is optional except there will be a test on all the material covered in class and also for the kids who need extra help on a particular area of study the teacher will contact you to come up with a homework plan on a case-by-case basis.

I don’t like homework because the more I’ve read about child development, the more I’ve learned that kids really just need to play, and make things with Legos and blocks and sit on the couch and be bored. They don’t need homework; they need to do things like fight with each other because sibling rivalry helps kids learn about building productive relationships. And relationships are better indicators of long-term success than mastering spelling words. I think I read that somewhere.

Homework is most certainly not age appropriate for a first grader. Except my child is only six and already behind in school, he’s behind even before he’s begun. I am supposed to “support” him at home although “support” is definitely not another word for “homework.”

I am supposed to “support” him because his handwriting “needs work” is atrocious. The letter g, the letter p and the letter q are all indistinguishable in his penmanship, which looks like a honey badger overtook a lizard and together they produced a bunch of letters that occasionally converge somewhere near the demarcations of the 3-lined writing paper. I can support him by purchasing a handwriting book that has received 122 customer reviews on Amazon, not that I’m jealous, since a book I wrote for parents received a mere 13 customer reviews (can anyone help me out here?). But what none of the Q&As on Amazon told me (motherhood is reading Amazon Q&As) is I am ALSO required to sit side by side with my child and the handwriting book and demonstrate how to write the letter “s” and manage all subsequent productions of the letter “s.”

The other way to “support” him, but this is definitely not homework, is more time reading because he missed the reading level the New York City Department of Education deemed suitable for children who are exactly 55 days into 1st grade. And the best way to “provide that support” is to supply him with a list of books that match his Guided Reading Level, a system developed 20 years ago by two renowned reading experts that measures his mastery every step of the way. Differentiating one reading level from another does not seem completely arbitrary and inscrutable to a lay person. Conveniently the books from the trademarked guided reading level system are available from one of the world’s largest educational publishers whose flyers populate my kids’ backpacks every week and also my recycling bin. The solution here is to buy more of these books. Because I read that if kids haven’t mastered reading by third grade they are in danger of never mastering reading in their lifetime, so we have two years to do this or he’ll never experience the great joy of reading The Iliad over a long weekend in college.

We also need to think about the emotional toll homework inflicts on our household, especially to the fragile psyche of a 9-year-old who will ABSOLUTELY NOT LISTEN TO ME WHEN I TELL HIM HE NEEDS THREE EXAMPLES TO SUPPORT HIS MAIN IDEA and can we please learn that “tried” is not “tryed” and “we’re” is not that same is “were” or “where” and nor, for that matter, is “wher,” which is not even a word, and I super try not to yell about it but I did say this last week. The good news is I am a big fan of the vocabulary workbook the 4th grade uses, the same textbook my brothers used in the early 1980s, and I enjoy the time we’ve spent together as a family trying to come up with the sentences the 9-year-old will have to spit out on the weekly vocab test. For example, I coached him the other day: “you can’t say the ruins of Pompeii are quaint – it can’t just be old, it has to be old and weird, like, you know, things in Granny and Papa’s house.” I THOUGHT my crowning achievement in life was when I helped him with the word reject: “I’m not sure saying you ‘rejected’ your friend’s birthday party invitation shows you know the meaning of reject. A better sentence shows that you know rejects is a harsh no, like: ‘LeBron rejected his hometown of Cleveland when he decided to go to the Lakers.’” But then T told me that LeBron had already REJECTED Cleveland before when he went to Miami… but it would probably be a good sentence anyway. Can we at least agree on that and move on, as a family unit, to all the other vocab words of the week: phase, persuade, persist? Any ideas, anyone?

You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I like homework. It brings us together as a family.

I love camp visiting day.

It’s a Friday, and family day at Z’s camp, an all-outdoor day camp that feels about as rustic as you can get and still be in the big city. C went to this camp for three years too and he grew so much here. Can I tell you how much I love this camp?

But despite signing up Z for nearly five weeks of camp a million months ago when it was still snowing out, we were never sure if Z would be right for it. He’s not exactly the kid who loves everything. He’s shy and sometimes fearful and sensitive. He wanders through the jagged paths of his imagination, instead of walking in the straight lines of school.

But life is full of surprises and Z loves camp, too. He comes home singing Hebrew songs, English songs, re-creating skits, doing dance moves, chanting bus cheers. At night before bed he is still talking about camp.

It’s beautiful for visiting day, of course. We make prints on solar paper and roast a marshmallow and eat pizza lunch. Then he becomes despondent. Cranky. Mean. In the way only Z can be. I wish I could say I’m patient and forgiving, but in these moments I become just as bad as my kids. I’m just taller than them. For now. I’m not going to tell you all the mean things I say to him, because it’s my blog and I want you to like me.

I coax him into going to the amphitheater where the camp is having its Shabbat celebration. And then I see what his brooding and negativity is about. He was just so anxious to show me what he loves about this place. It’s all happening right here in this amphitheater.

When the music counselor shows up on stage with her guitar, Z relaxes. His sour look disappears. He’s smiling. He’s laughing. He’s singing. He puts his arm around me to sway with him. A bunch of kids run down from the wooden log benches to join the music teacher on stage. Then I tell Z he can, too. And he does. He’s up on stage. In front of like, hundreds of people, dancing, clapping, singing.

Z has found his people. They’re right here at camp.

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Then, a week later, we are in the car, speeding upstate to retrieve C from sleepaway camp, passing through the towns where city people vacation until the road narrows and we’re driving through majestic mountains and trees that would probably smell like sweet pines if the windows weren’t rolled up and the A/C blasting.

I have never been to this camp before. It is known to me only through a slideshow I saw nine months ago and C’s spotty letter correspondence over the last four weeks. We arrive at lunch time; the camp director pulls C out of the mess hall and there’s this tall, skinny kid who looks eerily like the tall, skinny kid who we last saw at home. We look at him; a double take. For a moment, he’s mine/not mine. His voice is familiar/unfamiliar.

He is so proud to show us around camp.  The cabin, the waterfront, the woodshop he’s come to love, the scruffy ballfields.  This has been his self-contained world, filled with tetherball and dirty socks and the chants of other boys. We visit the lodge, the main hub of the camp. We check the lost-and-found. We see the dining area. We peruse the walls of the lodge, filled with photos of hearty-looking boys who learned to sail and make campfires and swim. One of them probably served as secretary of state or something.

C’s camp is all about mastery, about teaching kids to set goals and achieve them. Climb a mountain. Tie a sailing knot. Fittingly, I missed an explanation of this philosophy at the camp’s get-to-know-you session. Because I also missed the life courses on mastery. If I have any life skills, I learned them accidentally. Except for driving a stick-shift. Now no one drives a stick shift anymore. But I never set a goal and then worked to achieve it. I never tried to master anything. I tie really bad knots.

But C is learning something different here. And we have arrived at the part of the lodge where we can see that. The kids’ milestones are posted on the lodge’s wall. There’s a handwritten list of all the boys in C’s age group lining one axis, and a list of activities on the other. Swimming, ping-pong, camping, sailing, baseball, soccer. Etc. There’s a “tracker” (beginning, I guess) status and a “pathfinder” (more kick-ass, I guess) status. Some of the celebrated achievements are probably pretty small – like playing in a non-competitive baseball team. I tell myself. But still. I’m kind of taken aback by this. Do we all need to be informed about these milestones? I’ve worked so hard to root out competition from my life and I am, personally, 100 percent better for this. (Side note: that’s why I’m an accidental stay at home mom instead of a bitter journalist in a teetering newsroom). But then again, maybe if someone had taught me to set a goal and achieve it, I would be able to do something. Like, a push-up.

Enough thinking about it. C is a pathfinder in swimming. And how amazing is that, really?

On the ride back home, I pull the annoying mom move where I tell the kids how lucky they are and thankful they should be for going to these two great camps.

I think we all need a little more camp in our lives.

I can’t remember why we signed up to do this.

We are in the parking lot of a private school campus, 25 miles from our house, surrounded by humming charter buses weighed down with duffel bags. We are not really looking at each other, just at our watches and our phones, as if they will give us guidance for what is coming next. It is 8:40 am, sunny and sweltering, and we hopscotch into the few tiny corners of shade until they disappear.

C leans against the stone wall of the school’s immaculately-kept athletic fields, stone cold silent.

He is about to get on one of those buses and disappear to a place we have never visited. A place that’s near a tiny dot on a map in a part of the state I have never been to.

Sleepover camp. Four weeks of it.

A soundtrack merging every John Denver/Peter Paul & Mary/James Taylor/Pete Seeger/Cat Stevens song I have ever heard is playing in my mind.

You are going to love it, we keep saying. You are going to make so many friends.

Or, maybe not, I think to myself. Is it OK to tell your child the maybe not part? I wonder to myself. Because I wish my parents had done that.

No, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. That’s not what parents are supposed to do.

You are going to have a great time, I tell him. You will love it.

Except if you don’t, I think to myself. Send me a secret code in a letter and I will pick you up, I think to myself.

You’re going to do great, I say.

Except you might never change your underwear, brush your teeth or eat a green vegetable, I think. And you will probably lose every piece of specialized gear I bought you. And I will remember that when I buy you the next expensive wicking shirt and name-brand rain jacket. Things I didn’t own until I was 30.

Why did we sign up to do this?

We actually paid to do this.

We paid to ship off our child, to live like children used to live, like we imagine they used to live, free from screens and devices, rambling in the great woods filled with ticks and poison ivy, romping through the fields and meadows and lakes with other children. To the simulacrum of life as we think it should be for our children. Even though we chose a very different life for them.

We signed up to exile ourselves from each other. To exile you to a place where you should belong, instead of this place, where children really don’t belong. Where we (I) carefully choreograph every aspect of your life.

It is 8:55. Last call for campers on the bus. These people know how to run a camp bus. Shut down those goodbyes.

C gets on the bus and sits next to the one kid he knows, a familiar face from school. We see them through the tinted windows, suddenly beginning to talk to each other. Then they are reaching up to the boy in the row in front. C is giving him some gum. A peace offering of sorts. They are starting to jabber on. I see the familiar horse play of kids on a bus. Suddenly I’m glad I can’t hear what they are saying. Why would I want to hear what they are saying? I am glad they are with each other. Going to a place they probably belong in more than this one.

T has been away since last Saturday and the whole week is centered on the technical aspects of parenting: making lunches, hurrying the kids out the door, doing the dishes, not really enjoying anything.

So on the list of things I actually want to do this week, C’s 6pm Thursday night baseball game at a faraway field affectionately called “The Dust Bowl,” comes in at dead last.

But he really wants to go. OK, fine.

We miss the warm up and we’re almost late to the game because Google maps sends us to the wrong part of the park, a long, skinny strip of greenery that straddles the center of Brooklyn’s Chinatown and is bisected by an expressway. Stuck in traffic after several wrong turns to get us on the right side of the expressway, I pause to consider the circumstances: we live in a city where it’s perfectly normal for available green space to adjoin a major expressway. Our society has advanced and this is what we have to show for it.

The league C plays in is about as non-competitive as they come at this age. Which is good; I am not cut out to attend cut-throat sporting events for children. And, let’s face it, neither is C. When your kid is not the kid slugging homers you spend a lot of time saying, it’s just about playing the game, it’s just about being part of a team, it’s just about getting out there; you say those things so many times, to yourself, to your kid, and to all the other parents on the team, who nod and say them back. And yet when your kid is up at bat you sometimes wish, that even though it’s just about getting out there, just about being a part of the team, sometimes, just every once in a while, it could also about getting a hit. Or standing still in the field and waiting for the ball to come.

C is playing 3rd base today (they don’t have set positions yet) and he is just killing it out there. He’s paying attention – a great start. He makes a good play, sending the ball to the second baseman for an out. And then, the other team starts stealing bases left and right. (Side note: I don’t think 9-year-olds in non-competitive baseball leagues should be stealing bases). The second baseman throws to C as a guy tries to steal the base, and the ball goes long and C scrambles to get it and then he TOTALLY RUNS AND TAGS THE KID OUT. Cheers! Victory! Wait. Hold on, everybody. The umpire comes over to say no, the kid stepped on the bag first. Which we just know isn’t true. We, the people of this hot sticky baseball game at the Dust Bowl, know that the kid for the light blue team is out. We know C tagged him out.

Sometimes C has a hard time controlling his anger; he can be the kind of kid who will fall apart on the field or even challenge the ump. In child development parlance he is “motivated by a deep sense of justice.” Also, he has a loud voice and he speaks as much like a lawyer as is humanly possible for a 9-year-old child. Seriously. There is an empty chair on a debate team waiting for him. But today C keeps his cool on the field and I’m so proud of him. When the inning is over he comes over to me and breaks into tears. I know how you feel, I tell him. Baseball is a series of unfair calls, I say.

C recovers and the game goes apace. He doesn’t get any hits but he has some nice swings and he gets walked, and it’s fine. It’s the final inning; our team is down by 4 runs; we’re not going to come back; no one seems to care that much. But the other team’s pitcher is throwing a lot of balls. Next thing you know, practically every kid on our team has been walked, and we’re creeping up on the other team. Then we’re down by 1 run. The pitcher, a meaty, athletic-looking kid, starts to wipe his eyes. Not sweat. Tears. He throws another walk, another kid from our team passes home plate, and the game is tied. Another guy walks, and we’re winning. The pitcher flails himself down on the mound. He starts weeping, moaning. Our team, at first jubilant, watches the pitcher prostrate on the ground, hitting the dirt in rage, and freezes.

On the way home C says he feels really bad for the other team. The ump made some bad calls, he says. They deserved to win, really, he says.

A lot about baseball is just sort of unfair, I say, but it’s still just fun to play the game, to get out there, and be a part of a team.

UPDATE: AFTER I WROTE THIS BLOG POST AND PROCRASTINATED POSTING IT, C PLAYED ANOTHER GAME AND GOT A REALLY EXCELLENT HIT!! IT’S ALL ABOUT GETTING OUT THERE!

C wants to be a scientist when he grows up. An astronaut.

He likes to talk about dwarf planets, the speed of light, black holes.

When he’s a grown up, he will spend six months of every year at the International Space Station and six months of the year on Earth, he warns us.

He is sad to announce that because of this grueling schedule, he may sometimes miss family events.

I understand.

So when the note goes out saying third graders can participate in this year’s school science fair, C is all over it. He and T devise an experiment about the bounceability (there’s a real word, but I can’t remember it) of different bouncy balls – how variables like mass and height affect the bounce. They spend the better part of a weekend in our basement measuring the bounces, creating graphs and writing a report. Lately C has been driving me bonkers with all his boundless and undirected energy, but this weekend he is at his very finest: focused, mission-driven, meticulous.

Every class has a chance to visit the science fair and after his day, he reports to me that his poster has not received any “compliments.” What’s a compliment? I ask. Little yellow sticky notes that kids put next to your poster saying “cool,” or “great job,” he says. He is matter-of-fact, but I can tell he is bothered, maybe fighting tears. We talk about the snow, football, what’s for dinner. T is on a work trip so I don’t have much energy to focus on anything for long.

On Friday I go to the school to see Z’s kindergarten dance performance, where he dances with gusto, attempting a plié, sneaking on the floor like a cat, twisting his body to make a shape he’s never made before – per the dance teacher’s instructions. When his teacher asks the class, “what’s an improvisation?” he raises his hand excitedly. (“It’s when we do the really cool stuff.”)

After, I wander into the multi-purpose room to see C’s crowning glory at the science fair. I come to a dead stop. He’s right. Other kids have piles, heaps, mounds of sticky notes of compliments (“I love it,” “awsum”), handwritten testaments to their scientific genius. And C has nothing. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. I peruse the fair, rows of tri-part posters about experiments with Coke and Mentos (do kids even eat Mentos any more?) and different states of matter. In the entire room of science fair posters and dioramas of jungles and tundras, his is the only project without a yellow sticky note proclaiming even a single “cool.” It is a black hole of compliments. A star caved in and did not allow the gravitational pull of compliments inside.

It is really sad.

I go home and stew. Do I meddle, or not meddle? I think back to my childhood: I hated when my parents meddled. I still remember the time in seventh grade, when there was the mock-Congress… and a certain other girl got to be the Congresswoman I wanted to be … and… I’ll spare you…

I can’t rescue my kids from the world, because they’re pretty privileged to begin with and it’s a cruel, mean place out there (good call on escaping to space six months each year). But this time seems different. Mostly, because I just feel really sad for my kid. And  because I assume there’s a responsible adult, or a dozen, in the room. After all, if kids are wandering around complimenting other kids an adult most certainly is coaching them, because in my experience children do not spontaneously regale each other with joyful-sounding yellow sticky notes.

I call T, and he says, “meddle.” I run into my neighbor, who says “meddle.”

They both make the point that other parents do much worse, which is a compelling argument when you are considering your own parenting tactics.

So I go back to school and present myself to the administrator I most know will exhibit compassion and plus, do something. I can’t believe this, but my throat starts to tighten up. I’m choking back tears: why can’t everyone just compliment each other all the time and why do we have to quantify our compliments, and, geez, why does this tiny injustice my child has suffered feel so emotional to me?

It will be fixed before tonight, she promises, when the parents and kids gather for the final science fair presentation.

Sure enough, C and T go to the science fair visit and C comes back exuberant. “I got a lot of compliments,” he says.

I bet, I say.

I’m glad I meddled, I tell T quietly. Yeah, he says, me too. Other parents do much worse, we agree.

Two truths from my life as an accidental stay at home mom: I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time, and I never put in enough hours with our PTA.

Now that the boys are at the same school, I’m occasionally wracked by the guilt that I’m not doing enough to help the school. Other moms (yes, mostly moms), commit half their lives to practically running the school. But I’m a bad PTA mom: I’m disorganized, overwhelmed, and forgetful; I can’t produce crafts or hang decorations or ask people for money; I’m uncomfortable publicly sharing my views on education; and I feel awkward socializing with the parents of kids my kids socialize with, or do not socialize with. Also, I’m still totally insecure about my fashion choices and I think fashion security is an essential prerequisite for PTA participation. Look at these moms, in their colorful leggings and Patagonia jackets and $200 shoes. I just can’t! … But the pangs of guilt tug at me every so often, so back in a moment of guilt-ridden-ness, months ago, I volunteered to help book some school assemblies. I mean, I can email. So this is something I might actually be able to accomplish.

The woman who’s heading the PTA enrichment committee – I feel so important being on a committee – wants to do an assembly with a troupe of Native American dancers. Who am I to say no?

It turns out that scheduling a school assembly, even with people who perform school assemblies for a living, is labor-intensive. I start emailing with the Native American dance group in December. We’ve emailed 27 times since then (Google’s tally). I’ve sent another 10+ emails to the PTA bigwigs and the principal and who knows who else. A school assembly has never been so planned since the advent of school assemblies. A few days before the assembly I send an email confirming with the dance group. On the morning of the assembly, I send another email confirming. Guys, the assembly is today. Can’t wait see you soon!!!

The dancers are supposed to arrive at the school at 12:15 and I’m at the school waiting for them. 12:15 comes and goes – no dancers. 12:20 comes and goes. 12:25 – still no dancers. Do you know where this is going? At 12:30, I call them.

“We had another assembly today?” the guy says. I don’t even know who this guy is, of course, since I’ve handled this whole thing with zero human interaction. “Yes, I emailed like 40 times, I sent a message today to confirm. Where are you?” Response: something about the Holland Tunnel. That means they are ALMOST IN ANOTHER STATE, and the assembly is supposed to start in 25 minutes. I’m yelling. I’m angry. I’m the proverbial bad cop, in last-decade’s jeans and boots. “This was in the school calendar! A message about the assembly went out in the backpacks of 550 kids! We can’t reschedule this! Our kids are really busy.” Taking tests and doing other things I can’t keep track of.

How can this have happened? My only contribution to the PTA all year, except for the loads of cash I’ve dropped at every fundraiser, squandered. The guy tells me there’s been a big calendar mix-up. A piece of technology did not sync with another piece of technology. He feels terrible. He claims another piece of technology says he can make it to the school by 1:00pm, five minutes after the assembly is scheduled to begin. This involves crossing a tunnel or a bridge, an expressway and a bunch of neighborhood streets. This is not happening.

Except at 1:03, the van pulls up. Two of the dancers are festooned in beautiful garb. The lead dancer changes in the principal’s office. NBD.

By 1:05, the troupe is on stage. These people are amazing. Their dancing is riveting. They engage the kids instantly. Every kid wants to get up on stage and dance; a million hands go up at the Q&A. The dancers talk about stereotypes, cultural appropriation, about Native American traditions, about how movies depict Native Americans, and also about their outfits (“don’t say ‘costumes,’ say ‘outfits’”), how they get their eagle feathers (when eagles die on power lines, the parks department calls the dance troupe members and they get to take home the dead eagle). I love this group. This is the best assembly in the history of our school assemblies.

Maybe next year I’ll book two of them.   

when you don’t plan, your children climb trees…

It’s mid-September and both kids finallllllyyyyy just completed their first full week of school. Summer break was filled with camp and vacation, and then, nearly 3 weeks of unstructured time back home with a broken car and no plans. Lessons learned from the No Plans Part of Summer Vacation:

–I have a mental health condition called “Chronic Always Annoyedness.” I am sure there’s a psychotherapist out there who diagnoses this. Because I have it. I think there are people who are simply more genetically predisposed to being annoyed by other people and I am one of those people, and my psychosis will affect my children for the rest of their lives. It’s one thing to be annoyed by your coworker who microwaves bacon in the office kitchen every day; it’s another to be annoyed by these collections of organisms you spawned. It is a cause for much self-reflection. Am I built to co-habitate with my own progeny? Because I have a hard time taking the spit bubbles; the squirming; the endless kicking on the post of the kitchen table, day after day; the public nose-picking; the outside voices always used in inside spaces; the non-flushing of the toilets. My solution, after many weeks spent with said progeny, was often rage. I need help.

–Plans vs No plans: No Plans Win. When I looked at the big gap in our schedule between vacation and school, I thought I would fill it by going on fun adventures around the city. I’ve heard about these people who cart their kids to museums and beaches and cultural attractions; I subscribe to their Instagram feeds. But partly out of laziness, partly out of design, and partly on account of the whole broken car situation, I discovered that sometimes it is best to do nothing. The kids seemed to have the most fun running around the park, building nests out of twigs, digging holes in the holes in the dirt. The solution to boredom with kids is not to make more plans, but to be happier with one’s lack of plans.

–Immersive childcare is immersive. You spend all day with the kids; then you want to talk about them. T works in an office all day, but when he leaves the office, he’s done, more or less.  But the more you spend around your kids, I think, the more you burrow into their idiosyncrasies, their phobias, their foibles, their strangely insightful little minds. Being around them for weeks on end did not want to make me be around them more, but it made me want to discuss them more than ever. I’m glad they’re back in school. Now I can focus endlessly on my other favorite subject: me.