They don’t make baby goats like they used to!

Posted by danleone on September 18th, 2007 filed in funny, parenting

This is going to be a rant; a rant about my Baby Goats. But please don’t get me wrong. My kids are each brilliant in their own special way. My 10 year old can beat me in a game of chess. My 6 year old is funnier than any comedian in Vegas. My 4 year old can disarm you with her eyes.

But this is where the benediction ends.

This weekend I realized that there are a whole bunch of basic things that ALL kids should know by now. Or there are things that I knew when I was growing up.

1. My goats can barely ride their bikes – When I was their age, I rode my bike as a form of transportation. It was how I got around. Living in the city and with all the risks of leaving kids alone, has made this virtually impossible nowadays. The two oldest are able to ride, but have not a stitch of common sense. They might as well be riding blind-folded.

2. The goats have no idea how to tie their own shoes…in a way that they stay tied. In an age of velcro shoes, it has become too easy for parents to merely buy velcro and  forgo the hassles of bending down to tie a knot. Not to mention that when the kids do have tie shoes, the shoe laces these days stupidly and frustratingly refuse to stay tied. I must have told Michael 16 times to tie his shoes at his cousin’s birthday party over the weekend.

3. My 10 year old does not know long division or how to carry in subtraction. In fact, we as parents, were told to not teach those things to him by his teachers. We were told that would undermine the school’s attempt to teach. WTF?

4. How to respect their parents….I won’t even go there except to say when I was a baby goat, I NEVER EVER talked back to my parents!

5. How to play in the snow for more than 10 minutes without dying of frostbite. Each of the kids has North Face hats, Thinsulate gloves, L.L. Bean boots and Patagonia fleece-lined jackets, but after spending an hour getting them dressed, they walk outside and instantly complain that they are cold. All they want is to go back into the house, have some hot cocoa and play on the Game Cube. Whereas, when I was a baby goat, I had to wear those knit mittens that instantly soaked up water and froze to your skin and a pair of galoshes (by the way, my spell check does not even know what to do with the word “galoshes”!).

6. How to lose! In the days of “everyone is a winner,” we have bred a generation of kids completely ill-prepared to compete in the real world.

7. “Cursive” writing – Michael does not even know what that means!

Don’t get me wrong, there are a million things that they do better than I could ever do…even as an adult:

1. They can find an image of the Rosetta Stone on Google, copy it and then paste it into a Power Point presentation, include some transition effects and some animation…all in 20 seconds.

2. They know what the middle mouse button does.

3. Use chopsticks

4. Negotiate to the point of utter exhaustion and eventual capitulation.

5. Can locate every Family Guy video on YouTube

6. Use the Picture-in-picture feature on the TV

7. When faced with a coffee table filled with 4 remote controls, they don’t hesitate to reach for the one that will find the “Main Menu” for the DVD player.

8. Make fart sounds with at least 4 different body parts that are NOT their butts.