Sons

Yesterday I talked a good deal about mothers and daughters. I have decided today to talk about my son. My son is an active twelve year old. He is in some excellerated learning classes at school but this year we have had issues with him and his school work. I believe truthfully that it is because he is in a new school. I also believe that most of his teachers just couldn't begin to care how well he does or not. Every year I inform his teachers that if you don't keep him busy and engage his attention from the get go then you will have problems with him being bored. My son gets his classwork done quickly and then finds things to do that often times result in him being in trouble.

He was involved in boyscouts for the last year or so and rapidly moved from a scout through two different rankings and became a patrol leader. Then some things happened that made him unhappy with his scouting experience and he chose to leave the troop. At this point in time we are considering it a break for a few months and giving him the opportunity to return. I want him to understand that not everything in life is fun and there is hard work involved to achieve your goals. I think the scouting experience was good for this lesson, but it is also supposed to be fun and he was just coming away from it angry.

He loves computers and technology. Give him access to the internet and he is happy. He likes to go and research things that interest him. He will look up things that catch his eye that he wants to know more about. He likes math and understands a lot more of it at a glance then I do as an adult reading the text over and over again. He has always grasped mathmatical concepts easily, doing multiplication while he was in kindergarten. His question to me about halfway through kindergarten was "mom what does 3 times 3 mean?" and I said, it is like you have 3 groups of 3. From that point forward I never had to explain multiplication. He knew that it was just a quicker form of addition. He actually taught his older sister her times tables.

He is an artist and cartoonist. I have some cartoons he has created that are imaginative and funny. While he hates to write a composition, he can write a cartoon board easily that gets the whole story across in just 9 panels.

I am proud of the son that I have raised so far. I anticipate that I will have more problems as he enters his teens and fights for his independence. I believe that the values I have instilled in him already will help us get through the tough years ahead.