I usually write serious parenting blogs. This is not one of them. Instead, I want to reflect on a few learnings as a father of boys.
The first was that my wife and I were in for trouble. When our oldest son was two, we had to take him to the emergency room. A teenaged boy, his family, and a few friends were near us in the waiting area; the boy's head was bandaged. After he was taken back, various friends gradually joined the group in the waiting area and asked what had happened.
The answer: The teenager had split his head open diving into the shallow end of the pool from the roof. The friend response was always, "Cool!"
I turned to my wife Sara and said, "We're in for a lot of trouble!"
Luckily, our ER visits were minimized, though I took the same son to the ER eight years later for fracturing his shoulder while wrestling. Yeah, dads are just big boys.
That's why I understood a scene we witnessed while camping when our two sons were in preschool. Sitting at our campsite overlooking an open field, my wife watched silently for thirty minutes while a few elementary boys repeated the same procedure endlessly. They would throw a large styrofoam airplane. It would always break apart while landing, they would fix it, then they would throw it again. Suddenly Sara blurted out, "What's the point? They've done the same thing for a half-hour!" Being a large boy myself, I said, "That's the point. You fly it, you break it, you fix it. A perfect toy for boys."
Sara later knew she was indeed a boy mom at a first grade party planning meeting. She suggested a gummy worm cake with "dirt" (crushed cookie) icing. The girl moms all went, "Yuck!" and outvoted her.
Although I could manage boys, I did worry after they visited my friend who had two teenaged boys. My sons noticed a big hole in the wall in their entertainment room. It turns out the boys were wrestling (sound familiar?) and the older threw the younger through the wall. My sons thought that was very cool; I did not. We had a stern discussion that there would be no such incident in our house, and thankfully, through all the years, there never was.
Boys combine trouble and fun. Just try to minimize the ER visits.
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