{"id":191,"date":"2010-03-31T03:51:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T03:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/2010\/03\/31\/spice-of-life\/"},"modified":"2010-03-31T03:51:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T03:51:00","slug":"spice-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/spice-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Spice of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span>They have a few things in common, my sons.\u00a0 There were\u00a0 a couple of\u00a0 years there when backyard baseball, MLB Showdown, and Magic cards were mutually beloved pastimes.\u00a0 They both recall the same antipathy toward a certain elementary school Spanish teacher.\u00a0 They share a passion for music, and sometimes, after dinner, Jack will tune up his guitar and they will play jazz together.\u00a0 They are big on Jon Stewart\u00a0 (the two of them will sit at breakfast, the laptop open between them, watching last night\u2019s Daily Show as they eat their cereal).\u00a0 They love \u201cHouse,\u201d the Beatles, President Obama, our dog Gracie, pancakes, the Peanut Blaster at Dairy Queen, the state of Maine.\u00a0 They hold a reverence for tradition, adore their little cousins, and look forward to big family dinners.\u00a0 At this moment, I\u2019m pretty sure that Jason Mraz\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m Yours\u201d is the most-played song on both of their iPods.<\/p>\n

But the thing that still amazes me most about the two human beings I gave birth to twenty and seventeen years ago is how different they are. It\u2019s as if the God of Parenthood set out to see how wildly diverse he could be within one gene pool — and fully succeeded in the effort to create two opposite-ends of the spectrum guys.\u00a0 As one of their early babysitters, a sweet young Hungarian girl, once said after a long night of trying to accommodate two utterly different agendas and temperaments, \u201cTake these two little boys, put them in a pot, stir them both together, then you have a reasonable child.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, for years our family life was all about trying to make things work for both of them.\u00a0 We shared a house, a life, a schedule, and somehow we needed to get to the baseball games and the piano recitals, come up with one homemade Halloween costume and buy one gross-out scary mask, kiss one boy goodnight before he conked out in his bed and produce a multi-chapter goodnight saga for the other, give up on the idea of hand-me-down clothes in order to allow each to pursue his own particular style.\u00a0 (You can\u2019t ask the boy who wants to wear bright orange to dress in his older brother\u2019s sage green castoffs.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easier now.\u00a0 They\u2019ve grown up, gotten drivers\u2019 licenses, attend different schools in different states, and increasingly live their own lives.\u00a0 But I do kind of miss the old negotiations and the juggling, not to mention the variety of our days.\u00a0 Henry and Jack, together, were a spicy mix.\u00a0 Raising them, living with them, wasn\u2019t always easy but it was always interesting.\u00a0 Being their parents stretched us, in ways I\u2019m not sure I fully appreciated in the moment, when I was being asked to test out yet another original board game created by Jack, or to attend one more puppet show produced by Henry in the bedroom.\u00a0 But now, looking back, I realize that the activities they poured their hearts into when they were very young were the precursors of their passions today.<\/p>\n

Jack would spend hours painstakingly making masks, inventing playing cards,\u00a0 drawing whacky animated figures on tiny pieces of paper to make a flip book.\u00a0 A few weeks ago, he emailed me his first animation project.<\/p>\n

Henry conducted symphonies behind closed doors, a chopstick in his hand, his tape player turned as loud as it would go.\u00a0 He would corral the neighborhood kids to perform in his musical productions, put together notebooks of his favorite show tunes, envision musical revues.\u00a0 The other night he carried his laptop into my bedroom, to play me a recording of a song he performed last month at a school concert, the only jazz number in an evening of classical music.<\/p>\n

I was talking on the phone yesterday with my friend Carole.\u00a0 Our children, exactly the same age, grew up together.\u00a0 I remember her Alex at ten, masterminding the construction of a K\u2019Nex ball machine in our playroom.\u00a0 Today he\u2019s a computer science major at Princeton,\u00a0 creating a computer game that he intends to sell this summer.\u00a0 \u201cIsn\u2019t it amazing,\u201d I said, \u201cthat our kids are so capable?\u00a0 That they have totally surpassed us in so many ways, doing exactly the things that, given who they are, we would have expected them to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

Carole admitted that, when it comes to math, Alex has been out of her league since he was in eighth grade.\u00a0 But she knew what I meant.\u00a0 Our grown children are just coming into themselves, stepping up and finally beginning to realize those ambitions that first took shape years ago, in the long, dream-filled hours of childhood.<\/p>\n

I have to say, being a witness to this process of claiming and becoming is turning out to be one of the high points of parenthood.\u00a0 And since I\u2019m a mom, and this is what moms do, I\u2019m sharing what my boys are up to these days with you. Click here<\/a>\u00a0for Henry’s song “Blue Sky” and here<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0for Jack’s Bubbling Mud animation. And pay attention to the messes your own children are making, and how they spend their time when there’s nothing much to do: you may be catching glimpses of their futures.<\/p>\n

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They have a few things in common, my sons.\u00a0 There were\u00a0 a couple of\u00a0 years there when backyard baseball, MLB Showdown, and Magic cards were mutually beloved pastimes.\u00a0 They both recall the same antipathy toward a certain elementary school Spanish teacher.\u00a0 They share a passion for music, and sometimes, after dinner, Jack will tune up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,8,9,10],"tags":[175,324,373],"class_list":{"0":"post-191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-family-life","8":"category-parenting","9":"category-parenting-boys-parenting","10":"category-parenting-teens","11":"tag-family-life-2","12":"tag-parenting-2","13":"tag-siblings","14":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}