2 Cool Kids Seek Fun Parents
Advice to young couples: before you decide whether to have kids, hit the bowling alley. If you lose patience the first time your ball stops rolling half-way down the lane, you may want to consider holding off on the parenting thing until you have become more fun.
My husband, John, and I are still working on this, and we’re beginning to worry that our window of opportunity may already be starting to close. When our children, now five and seven, hit the critical pre-teen years, it’ll already be too late. They will Know. And they will scorn us for the pathetic sticks-in-the-mud that we are.
When they were first born, we thought we might be able to keep them from ever discovering that we were poor sports by being extra informative. Although I couldn’t bring myself to play peek-a-boo for more than a couple rounds, I would gladly name each garment, along with descriptive adjectives, as I removed it from the dryer. See, Audrey? Here is a shirt. Shirt. Neddy’s blue shirt. That’s azul in Spanish. And here’s another shirt that’s yellow. Amarillo. ¿Si? I could bring myself to build with blocks if they would let me make a gothic cathedral and name all the sections. See, Neddy? Transept here. And there’s the nave. Oooh, and if you could just keep your little hands off for a few more minutes, I’ll finish this cloister. Isn’t that fun?
No. Playing: no fun. So we all just stuck with reading for a couple years.
I began reading to them before we came home from the hospital. I read the paper. They seemed pretty interested, so I read some more. I read aloud to them while they were nursing, until they started biting me.
But when they started noticing other children more, they simultaneously began to notice something else which we had hoped would, somehow, just not come up.
The other children had parents who played games. Damn.
It was stressful for awhile after our oldest child got clued in. We made the mistake of enrolling him at one of those horrible preschools where the adults would always rather play with children than read the paper. So of course, he began to expect it. There were the most blood-curdling scenes when I came to pick him up. No, no, no! he wailed. I want to stay! I am not ready! I am not done playing! It didn’t do any good to promise him a big fun time awaiting him at home. He was already wise to that.
So, okay, we conceded, it takes a village. Maybe we can convince these other parents to have fun with our kids and in exchange we’ll — let’s see — we’ll teach their kids to balance their little checkbooks.
But there’s really no substitute for having one’s very own set of fun parents, so we have belatedly accepted that we’ve just got to do what must be done. If our kids are ever going to know how to throw a ball or roller skate or dive into the deep end, we’d better get cracking and make some changes.
I began by doing a Google search on “teach child ride bike.” Because the Internet is truly a marvelous tool, it did not take me long to find a very sensible, step-by-step guide on www.fathersfirst.org I printed it out, got the kid strapped into the helmet, and out we went to have some fun.
Five minutes later, after he fell the first time because I was holding the instruction sheet and his seat at the same time, I followed a tearful child back into the house for a nice cup of tea and a story. We spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns reading to each other and eating crackers as we recovered from our harrowing experience.
It does not happen overnight, this transformation. We are starting out small with arcade games, and we hope to work our way up to putt-putt golf. I figure by the time we make it to shuffleboard, they’ll be old enough to be embarrassed by us, and we’ll be off the hook.
Don’t Let This Happen to You: How to Find the Fun
In the July issue, Jill Levin will provide a comparative review of some of the best guides to family fun in northeast Ohio. But summer’s here and time’s a-wasting, so here are some quick hints about places convenient to the Near West Side where your family can have some fun:
Go Carts: Brookpark Fun & Games Emporium, 6770 Brookpark Rd. 216-351-1910
Roller Skating: Skateland, 13445 Brookpark Rd. 216-267-3966
Bowling: AMF Carousel Lanes, 3545 Ridge Rd. 216-281-3589 or Meszar’s Lanes, 4231 Fulton Rd., 216-741-7933.