How old are your kids?
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- August
- 21
Thursday morning we will set off on a family trip to Niagara Falls, then Toronto and on the way back, Ithaca. The last stop serves two purposes: to explore the Finger Lakes and to visit Binghamton University, known for many years as SUNY Binghamton.
My oldest son, 17, is entering his senior year in high school and it’s time to check out yet another college. Binghamton, the college’s brochure crows, is “the premier public university in the Northeast.” OK, now how do I convince him to go there and how do we get him in. (Just kidding. I know, I’m supposed to let him decide.)Â
Now this brings us to the title of this post. My oldest son cannot be 17. As best I can figure it, he is about 12. And my youngest son, who everyone including the calendar says is 12, can’t be more than seven, OK, maybe eight. I’m not talking about maturity or intelligence; I’m referring to kids-age-in-parents’-brain time, the time scale that moves along at a more reasonable pace.Â
As best as I can tell, someone or some group is tampering with time. I suspect they are slipping anywhere from five to 10 seconds out of every minute – at least double that at night, which explains why I’m always tired.
At the risk of sounding a lot like my parents, their friends and my adult relatives when I was growing up - this parent thing is going way too fast. So how old are your kids, and how old should they be?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:14 pm by Len Maniace.
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12+,11,8+
how old should they be???? hmm thats a tough one. Because I know in my Brain. I am not 43 but 22.
Hey Steve,
In my brain I’m about 28, though my body often says otherwise.
Len,
dont you hate when that happens?
;-]
why do I keep saying that same thing, over and over – my son’s 26th birthday is Friday and I told him yesterday I remember his birth day like it was yesterday – how come I can’t remember what happened yesterday?????????
Gina,
We’re like old computers with too small a memory. We have to delete the old stuff before we can store any new data. But at least we’re still running.
I know exactly what you mean, Len! My boys are 13 and nearly 9, or so their birth certificates say. But in my head? They can’t be more than 8 and 4.
They’ve been away for the past two weeks, and while my husband and I have had some fun evenings out, I’m MORE than ready for them to come back. I feel as if they’ve aged even faster while they were away, so they’ll probably seem 16 and 12 when I pick them up on Sunday.
Gayle,
I had thought about giving them anti-growth hormones, but that would only prevent them from being taller than me. (And I’ve already missed my chance with the older guy).
Len
It happens even when your children are tiny. Just two weeks ago, we started using a booster seat instead of our high chair for Pumpkin and I keep having cognitive dissonance seeing her at the dinner table with us. It seems impossible that she is 2. She’s 8 months old in my mind, maybe 11 months, tops.
Julie,
I found that time seemed to slow down for the first six months, maybe a year of my oldest child. But arouhnd 1 1/2 it started moving pretty fast. I wonder if anyone else had that experience that the first 6 to 12 months of your first child seemed slower than you were used to.
I wonder if that’s because new parents don’t get a lot of sleep. LOL.
Len
Julie,
I can imagine that seen, the baby pulled right up to the table, no longer in the high chair. Gee, I have fond memories of assemblying the kids’wood crib and later assemblying a new high chair.
Len
Each one of my kids was years apart from the previous one. All we kept thinking was.. when will they all be out of diapers. when that day happened we had a party! then we realized they were getting older ;-]
that should have said 2 years apart.
:-\