And with everyone in the family now fully recovered, it gave me the peace of mind to proceed with meeting my friends on Friday night.
Which incidentally, is my first evening away from the kids in about 8 months. Just give me the Dad of The Year award already.
Oh wait I got it already
Anyhow, I always look forward to meeting this bunch of friends and very very rarely miss a gathering. Haters will say that I only have one group of friends and you know what?
They are probably right.
I am a firm believer that one only needs a small group of very close friends, rather than having a gazillion different friends whom you mostly only say hi and bye to.
Which is why I have stuck to this bunch of fools for the past 20 years.
The best bunch though
Collectively between the 10 of us we have 13 kids with another one on the way so all of us are pretty much alike in thinking.
Which is probably why, kind of unanimously, we decided that we should all leave our BBQ and beers behind at 9.30pm to go back to our wives and kids.
For many people, a night out which ends at 9.30p.m can barely be termed as a proper gathering, but for us we know that our families are waiting- and that we have a responsibility to them.
Ok that sounds a bit too sombre. You might have noticed that I am very big on parenting- by assimilation it’s only natural that my closest friends display similar nature. After all, birds of the same feather flock together.
It’s also true for these 2 gluttons
If you scale down the logic one level to that of our kids, it’s probably worth thinking that we should be cognizant of the people whom they interact with most frequently.
Summer has an on/off best friend in school (yes, it seems the concept of frenemies exist among toddlers as well) who, to our displeasure, taught her to:
– Dislike eating vegetables
– Chew her nails
– Turn her nose at dark colors
Ok maybe the last one was a bit out of point but you get the idea.
We’ve needed to make conscious effort to get her to unlearn all those bad habits and biases, out of which only the chewing of nails is the only problem now.
Can you imagine what will happen if the kids go to secondary school and mix with the wrong crowd?
Luckily still an angel with a halo for now
The nagging and fears of our parents back then are now becoming very real.
Still a docile little boy. Just kidding, he is so not.
By the way, out of curiosity, are there any laws prohibiting homeschooling kids forever?