I dodged a layoff yesterday. A lot of good people, doing good jobs were “let go.”
Honestly, considering what my job has become, I don’t know why I was kept.
Today is one of those days when I am mindful of a God that keeps his eye out for me and my family.
Thank you Lord.
Every generation blames the one before…no wait…that’s a song.
Let’s try again:
About every 20 years, another generation is born. Or at least, that’s been the schedule up until couples decided they were making too much money and having too much fun by themselves to have kids. I guess now, a lot of people are waiting 30-35 years, so maybe the generation schedule is widening.
Anyway, what with my decrepitude rearing its ugly head again, I’ve been thinking more about getting old. But not in a morose kinda way, but more in a kinda, “How things have changed” kinda way. A few days ago, some of my more enlightened readers and I discussed a bit how parenting has changed and while there is fodder there for at least a week’s worth of blogs, I’m gonna give it a break for a bit.
So today, I’m offering my Top Five list of things that have changed since I was a child in the 70s and 80s. If you’d like to play along, feel free to offer up your top picks via a comment.
Here Goes! The TOP FIVE Things that Have Changed Since Gen-Xers were kids!
5. Water used to cost .0000143 cents per gallon: Do you remember when you could turn on the Slip n’ Slide in the morning and the only thing that got you off the thing in the afternoon was either dinner, or someone sliding into an anthill, or catching a nipple on a hidden rock? These days, water is so scarce here in the Atlanta area that we can’t even wash our cars. I suspect that in certain demographics, this is causing quite a social uproar. I remember when the big thing was washing your car in the afternoon so you could go cruising for doughnuts chics later that night!
4. There are no quotable movies anymore!: Just this morning I heard part of “Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail” on my Sirius radio. It was the bit about burning witches, “…and so, if the witch weighs as much as a duck…then she must be made of wood!” It got me thinking about how movies today, while visually stunning, lack a certain wit that we all grew up with. I mean, how many different quotes can the average Gen-Xer offer from Star Wars, or CaddyShack or any of the National Lampoon series? Nowadays, the best kids can do is offer, “Lucky” (Napoleon Dynamite) or “Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.” (Ok, that one is actually a GREAT movie, but it was really geared more towards us older folk rather than the kids)
3. Cars suck!: On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented the lack of customized vans today! Oh, do you remember those? We had a blue GMC something or other, with a beautiful airbrushed picture of an old sailboat out on the open sea painted on our van. It had a refrigerator, a huge raised bed in the back (it never occurred to me what that was probably used for when I was a kid), and the BEST! captain’s chairs you ever sat in. Oh, and the windows were tinted so dark, that even if they’d had seat belt laws back then, you could have flaunted them while parading around in your skivvies in the back while driving up I-10! Oh, the good old days!
2. Lack of open space: This is one of those things you hear quite frequently from Gen-X’ers; “When we were kids, mom used to kick us outta the house in the morning and we wouldn’t return till dinner time.” And this was when we were like six years old! Nowadays, if a six year old is seen walking around the neighborhood alone, you can count the minutes before Child Services is knocking on doors trying to figure out who to blame. The problem is not that the kids are out without their parents, its that they are out in plain sight! When we left the house, we disappeared man! We hit the woods, or the drainage tunnels, or the big fields with the massive water ditches. You could stand out on our deck and look out over the back of the neighborhood and all you’d see every now and then is a head pop up out of the sand, or a pine-cone bomb being lobbed towards the enemies’ fort!
And the #1 Change is:
1. Weekend activities expectations: Do you remember what you did on an “average” Saturday? I bet it was something like this:
Nowadays, by 7:30 a.m., my kids are asking, “What are we going to do today?”
What are we going to do? I want to say, “We’re going to catch up on all the daddy chores that we didn’t get done this week because we were too busy working in the day, and playing with you kids at night.” But what really happens is that we parents end up dragging our kids from one activity to the next in a vain attempt at wearing their little butts out so they’ll go to bed early, so that we parents can have a few minutes alone that doesn’t cost $15 p/hour in babysitting fees!
So this was probably waaaay too long of a post, but I hope you at least scanned for the good parts. And I’d love to hear your Top 5 or Top 10 changes. It’d be interesting to compare childhoods!
Have you ever wondered where the phrases, “Daddy’s little girl” and “Momma’s boy” came from? And isn’t it strange that “Momma’s Boy” sounds derogatory, while “Daddy’s little girl” sounds all sugary sweet. Cripes! Even at that young age, we’re putting gender roles on our kids!
Anyway, regardless of the origin, there does appear to be some truth to them.
Before we had kids, if you’d asked myself or CareerMom what gender of kids we’d like to have and in what quantity, I think we’d have both said, “At least one boy and one girl.” That didn’t happen, and we’re probably done having kids so it’s two boys for us and we’re very happy with that.
But…
I’ve watched my two sons grow and I’ve watched how my wife’s expectations for them has changed from when they were little and it got me wondering about my own expectations for our children and I realized that, when I DID dream of having kids, whenever I really thought about how I would raise my child(ren), I almost always did so with the picture of a little girl in my head.
Stick around, it gets worse.
I can’t speak for what goes on in women’s heads, but for me, and from the actions of many of the guys I know, it seems that a lot us guys dream of raising this beautiful little girl that we’ll fawn affection over and that we’ll hug and love and protect…hmmm, protect. Now that’s interesting. Most of the manly men that I know, myself included, are fiercely possessive AND protective of the women in their life. It’s a natural instinct–possibly even as strong as that “motherly instinct” we all hear so much about. But nobody talks about men’s natural instincts, but they are there. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my boys, but I gotta admit that I don’t feel terribly “protective” over them when they’re going about their daily activities.
– When they wrestle, as long as they aren’t near a sharp corner somewhere, I generally don’t worry about it.
– I encourage them to play in the rain.
– Wanna go fast down the hill on your bike? Eh…have fun.
With my boys, I don’t have any expectations…I just want them to grow up and be happy.
CareerMom on the other hand, has had to make some adjustments. I can’t tell you how many baseball hats she’s bought the boys in the vain hope that they’ll start wearing them. She has this idealistic picture in her head of a boy in a baseball uniform, and so far, it’s been a major disappointment for her.
She wants to see them dressed up in church clothes, sitting quietly for a picture. Hasn’t happened.
She wants them to just sit in her lap and enjoy being cuddled. Uh uh. Nothing doing!
Now, I know she would love to have a little girl that she could dress up and put little pigtails in her hair, but those dice weren’t rolled for us, so I don’t know what her expectations would have been; although, from my experience, most little girls these days aren’t terribly tolerant of all that attention either.
I just find it interesting how, at least in my experience, each gender seems to have greater expectations for children of the opposite sex. Maybe it’s just an experiential thing, or maybe it’s a natural desire to mold a young person into one’s own ideal of perfection (oooh, now that could be hitting very close to the truth).
Something to think about and maybe share your own thoughts…
Those of you who follow my blog at all, know I was on vacation last week. I’ve personally e-mailed a couple of you, but I’ve thus far not really posted anything about my vacation because…well, it was kinda ho-hum and boring really and I wasn’t sure how to spin it to make it a riveting read.
But then I figured, “Hey, maybe my experience will help others decide where to/not to go on vacation.” So based on that, here’s my vacation synopsis, complete with familial and experiential pics at the bottom (Note: This is the first time I’ve posted pics of myself, so don’t pass up this opportunity to deride and guffaw!)
A lady CareerMom works with suggested an island in S.C. called “Kiawah, Island.” It’s run by some resorty place and it’s billed as a golf resort, which is its primary draw. With four uber-expensive golf courses and approximately 6 miles of sandy beach to play on, it offers something for dad to do while mom and the kids play, or…it offers something for mom to do at the spa while Dad and the kids play…or it offers something for the whole family to do while both mom AND dad play with the kids when dad pulls his shoulder just prior to the trip and mom, for whatever reason, fails to book a spa day far enough in advance.
To start, I was not looking forward to the drive based on our previous beach trip the year before, but we let the kids play all morning before packing them in the car on Monday and overall, it really wasn’t a bad trip. We arrived in time for a bit of play on the beach that evening and then it was inside to figure out how we were going to set up the sleeping arrangements so that nobody woke anyone else up should they be having a bad night.
Sleep wasn’t so great the first night. MLE woke up around 3 a.m. and didn’t want to go back to sleep, so none of us got much rest. Tuesday was all beach, all day. I also got some surf-fishing in, catching some Sea Trout, while the kids and CareerMom played in the sand.
By Tuesday evening, we’d discovered the bathwater-warm pool and we probably spent the bulk of our remaining daylight hours there, since quite frankly, both CareerMom and I can only take so much beach! The sleeping arrangements sorted themselves out and though we were generally up by 5-5:30 a.m. each morning, we slept pretty well up until then.
We also did a Dolphin tour thingy, on a small boat with just our family. It was run by some tanned, good-looking naturalist type, who probably drives a solar-powered Prius and who, I’m pretty sure, was blowing some serious smoke up our butts about how much fun the dolphins are around them sometimes, since we didn’t even see any dolphins till halfway through the trip. But, it was fun and they did get really close to the boat so it turned out OK.
Overall, we had a good time…nothing “OH MY GOD” great, but a good time. So if you’re looking for some tips on Kiawah, here are my thoughts, in bullet form to make it easier to follow:
If you’ve been to Hilton Head, then this is kinda like that, except maybe a bit more remote, and a lot less diversity from a dining and activities standpoint. It’s also, for a “family vacation” destination, kinda boring. I mean, at the main pool (Blue Heron pool), there was only one hour of organized games. During this time the only music played was the same tape consisting of old “Alabama” and “Lynard Skynard” tracks. I mean honestly, I’ve seen better activities organization at the YMCA (“…we love to stay at the Y.M.C.A hey…”).
It’s also a LOT more expensive than Hilton Head, but I’m not counting that, because my family’s happiness is worth any price tag.
Riiiiggghhhttttt!
Let the photo montage begin:
A doe, A deer…
A gator.
Um..a shark?
The happy couple!
Postulates & Pastimes 