Kids

I’ve got three topics I want to blog about, but who knows what we’ll get covered before I get bored. Parenting, Wall-E the movie, and politics. Somehow they are all interrelated to me right now, but here goes nothing.

For those of you who know Seamus this may not come as a surprise, but he is not a very athletic kid. The truth is he has my genetic make-up, not the athletic skills of his mother’s family. He’s kind of slow, not the most coordinated and at this point in his life not overly interested in sports. Sure I ride and race bikes all the time, but the honest truth is I’m not very athletic either. Welcome to the reality that nature plays a huge part in ones life Seamus.

So anyway the other day at the summer camp he is going to they had the Olympics. Not surprising Seamus didn’t do well compared to other kids, someone called him a loser and last night he was saying “I’m going to Loserville tomorrow”. As a parent this is a pretty tough thing to hear and try to tell a 7 year old he is not a loser just because of where he finished in a race. I’m not going to lie to him either and say it doesn’t matter, or we’re all winners (I hate teams/organizations where everyone is a winner/MVP), but I also don’t want my son thinking he is a loser. At 7 my son will go to a zoo and sketch animals in a notebook, capturing details most people would miss. He spends hours building and creating items he’s seen at museums or read about and has now started cooking dinners. Trying to draw a connection between these activities and not being a loser is nearly impossible in the mind of a 7 year old.

I also tried to explain that while I don’t win bike races and frequently finish near the back I don’t consider myself a loser, nor do most of the people I race against. At the last race I did the first person to come up to me was the winner of the race, asking me how I felt, how I did etc. He came up to me before Ade and Seamus. I tried to tell Seamus that a true winner doesn’t make fun of anybody who competes, anybody who is trying as really anybody but the winner is a loser.

Put Seamus in a cook-off against those kids he’ll add some cumin, cayenne pepper and a little cilantro and out-cook most of those kid’s mothers. Does that make them losers? Well no it just means they have a different area of talent.

Signing up to be a parent is tough. Dealing with my kid thinking he is a loser sucks, just because he runs a little slower. Some of the happiest memories I’ll ever have will be of Seamus on a chair adding spices to a meal and testing the flavor, sticking his big toes and thumbs up when the flavor is just right, giving the meal four thumbs up. Now I just need to figure out how to convince Seamus that his cooking makes him a winner.