My two kids don't like it much when their parents talk about them. Most kids don't, and I was no different. In my fuzzy, pre-lawyer mind I claimed a non-existent copyright in the details of my early life. So how much worse it must be for Mariana (age 12) and Walter (10) that I occasionally write about them here.
While my kids are never far from my mind, I have been spending extra time with them lately as the school year wound down, sports days and school assemblies started to crowd my diary and the approaching summer drew us all outdoors. For a brother and sister they get on very well, with some passions they share, World Cup Soccer, The New York Mets and cool technology (I wonder where they get these from?) and other interests that diverge.
Where Walter can spend hours playing MLB Baseball on the Wii, Mariana prefers building artificial environments in The Sims. Mariana likes to watch movies and tv re-runs on Hulu, while also devouring thousand-page novels, whereas Walter would happily spend his entire day playing catch or watching repeats of last season's NBA slam dunk contest.
The end of the school year is a special time for kids. The long hot summer beckons with what appears in June to be an infinite expanse of days sans homework. There are some melancholy moments -- saying goodbye to a favored teacher or not getting the right older kids to sign your yearbook -- but mostly it is a time to celebrate.
From a parent's perspective, I would prefer the kids to stay in school through June as they did in London, but have more holidays during the year. However, I suspect it suits the teachers, not to mention the owners of summer camps, to have three free months each summer -- much like it suited the pilots in the early days of British Airways (then BOAC) to schedule flights when convenient for them rather than their customers.
Speaking of flying, our family is fortunate to be able to visit grandparents in Finland and godparents and friends in France and England, so I get to spend a lot of time in the air with my kids. In our slightly twisted modern life, this also passes for "quality time" - that elusive, fully interacting mode that the television psychologists tell us we should aspire to. For the Glocers it gives us the chance to watch a movie together, and laugh when we can't get four video streams to start at the same time, and share a meal at which we don't have to play the Russian roulette equivalent of "who is going to get up and fetch the Tabasco."
I have a great job which I enjoy, but which consumes a huge amount of what would otherwise be family time; however, there is never any doubt who or what comes first. As someone I admire often observes, work is what we do, not who we are.