When my son was young, there was a lot of talk, among the parents of young kids and the older parents of older kids who thought they remembered what we were going though, about how the kids grow up so fast. Also, there was a lot of talk, among those very same people, about how it seemed that whatever we were going through was never going to end. Sorta like the days were long and the years were short. Turns out a brief look around the internets reveals a simmering resentment towards that sentiment. As if whomever said the days are long and the years are short is missing the point, or just doesn't get what it's really like to be a parent. I, on the other hand, think that statement is pretty spot-on.
The days were long. Mostly because we were tired. We were tired because we didn't sleep. Because our son. We were tired because raising a small child is exhausting. Our son didn't like to be still. It takes a lot of energy to keep a kid in constant motion, while also not dropping him on his head. It's even harder when you haven't slept in months. Maybe I dropped him on his head once, it's hard to remember. Toss in a healthy dose of trying to entertain him, and changing his diaper, and trying to decipher his attempts to communicate with a vocabulary that consists primarily of grunts and screams and whines and a dazzling array of incredibly cute facial expressions. And lest we forget, this adorable little masterpiece of a human being just won't do what you want most of the time. It's exhausting.
Each step of the way, there are new challenges, Challenges for which we, as rookie parents, had no training, no practice, and essentially no clue. But we did the best we could. We still do. At thirteen, our son has little in common with the little guy that I could hold in one arm, with his head in my hand and his little butt in my elbow-pit. That little guy busted out of my wife at an astonishingly long 23 inches. When they measure babies, they talk not about height, but instead length. Presumably because those little dudes can't stand up. Most babies show up between 18 and 21 inches, according to a vague memory I have of something I read while doing the critically important research to determine whether or not my newborn son was, in fact, astonishingly long. That's what one of the nurses said - astonishingly long. Nowadays, that little fella is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5'9" long - longer than my wife, and almost as long as me.
I'm pretty much average. I'm about 5'10" and 165 pounds. When they design seats for airplanes, they design them for me. Which doesn't explain why I'm so freaking uncomfortable in them. I think I was pretty much average sized my whole life. My son, on the other hand, spent most of his youth in the 90+ percentile for height, with occasional visits to off-the-charts. Until he got to middle school, when all hell broke loose with the size-of-kids thing. When we take him to a middle school ultimate frisbee tournament, a prime venue in which to see hundreds of middle school kids from around Oregon, there is literally about a two-foot height difference between the tallest and the shortest kids. And sometimes those kids are covering each other on the field, which is what we in the sports world call a "mismatch."
I like to tell my son that frisbee is the one thing at which he is better than me. But recently I discovered I may be off by one (or possibly more, it’s hard to be sure). The New York Times puts out a daily puzzle called the spelling bee. I learned about from my cousin, who learned about it from another guy at work. They used to publish a similar version of the same puzzle on paper, but now you can do it online, with slightly different rules. It works like this: there are six letters in a circle around a 7th letter in the center, and you have to make words that are at least four letters long and contain the center letter at least once. That’s it. You can reuse letters, and there are no boggle-like touching rules. Every day, there’s at least one word that uses all seven letters, which they call a pangram. You get one point for a four-letter word, and a point-per-letter for longer words, with seven extra points for a pangram. And there’s a scoring guide that automatically tells you how you’re doing. It says stuff like “solid” or “nice.” Eventually, it says “great” or “amazing.” And if you get far enough, you’re a “genius” and it asks if you want to stop. If you keep going, I’m told you can get some kind of Queen Bee once you get all the words, but I’ve never seen it, and I consider it to be a fairly suspect rumor at this point. When my family started doing it, we all worked together, or else I worked on it throughout the day and then asked for help after dinner. We often got to genius before we gave up. But recently, we started each working on our own. And every day since we’ve done that, it goes like this: my son and I start in the morning, before work and school, and less than ten minutes later, after he’s complained a few times about how long it’s taking him, he hits genius without using any four-letter words. This morning, while I was getting “good” and “tong,” he was speeding ahead with “doughnut” and “outthought.” I don’t even know if outthought is a word, but if it is, he definitely did it to me on this one.