Some kids like to play video games on play dates, others like to kick the soccer ball around. But it turns out my middle kid enjoys a good game of chess and practicing phrases from other languages. “Really,” I asked, after he returned from a good friend’s house. “You played chess and practiced learning Russian?” He looked at me as if this was simply par for the course among fifth-graders. Each of my three sons has a distinct personality. The oldest is your typical hardworking and eager-to-please kid, the youngest has an iron will and things come easily to him. But my middle kid was …
Between folding his undershirts, sorting his socks, and lining up his chapstick in order of favorites, he is the most orderly person in our house. Nobody knows where he gets it from, since my husband and I, and his two brothers, are all challenged when it comes to being, um, neat. But this particular third grader lines up his shoes each night, hangs up jackets without being reminded and was once caught clipping his soccer shorts onto pants hangers. So what’s the problem, you might ask? Isn’t it great having a kid who would be perfect as a professional organizer one day? Well, there’s nothing…
On one end of Westville Avenue in West Caldwell is the preschool my son attended, at the other end is the high school he will enter this fall. Yet the distance between feels more like a lifetime than a couple of miles. It seems like yesterday my son was wearing his Pokemon backpack and learning how to use scissors. Now, he’s taller than me and wears size 10 shoes. That should have been a clue that he was growing up, yet I was still caught off-guard when I was invited recently to parent’s night for incoming high school freshmen. All of the parents looked like deer caught in headlights. We didn…
