The Kids Are Alright

A tribute to SteelyKid and The Pip

The Pip’s eleventh birthday was this past Monday, and I thought about doing a tribute post to my favorite Little Dude on the day, but as has been the case for most of this fall term, I didn’t have time to write anything. Also, I realized that I hadn’t done anything to mark SteelyKid’s fourteenth birthday back in August; in that case, it was because I had Covid that week, and wasn’t up to much of anything but lying in bed watching streaming television.

But I do feel a little bad about not marking their birthdays, so you get this delayed combination post full of parental bragging. Which, if you’re allergic to that sort of thing, bail out now…

The Pip (left in both) and SteelyKid outside the Walter Kerr Theater before a matinee of Hadetown, and at the Cloisters.

I probably can’t say often enough that we’ve been really lucky to end up with two kids as good as SteelyKid and the Pip. This is not to say that we don’t have occasional moments of inexplicable grouchiness or sullen-teen mulishness, but for the most part, they’re pretty agreeable and get along with each other really well. The hard-Covid year of 2020-21 was a bit rocky, but as we’ve emerged from that, it’s been really fun to see them blossoming as people.

I don’t get to spend as much time with SteelyKid as I used to back when we were going to taekwondo practice multiple nights a week, and I sort of miss those car rides. After the weirdness of Covid, though, SteelyKid has settled into a good place, now in the high school— doing well in classes, and socializing a reasonable amount with a core group of friends who are generally kind and supportive of each other. Middle school and the transition into high school can be a real shitshow, but SteelyKid is navigating it pretty well, and juggling a diverse (and constantly changing) set of interests. Math is one of the more constant passions, and I’m consistently impressed by how well and quickly SteelyKid picks up concepts in geometry and algebra and explains them in ways that wouldn’t’ve occurred to me but that seem completely clear and intuitive once I hear them.

I see a whole lot more of The Pip these days, because he’s big into sports, and that’s something we can do together. In fact, we spent this morning at a local park, where I was pitching him baseballs in a tennis court and he was trying to hit the balls into the duck pond. He takes everything he does very seriously, but not in a humorless way— he listens to coaches and teachers and works to improve, but with a lot of goofy jokes and wickedly funny trash talk along the way. And he’s doing great in school, too— he was grumpy the other day because a missed assignment in art class dropped his grade from an A+ to only an A…

Even better, they’re both turning out to be fairly independent but also responsible. The Pip has walked to and from school on his own almost every day this year, and I have no hesitation about letting him go run around the neighborhood with his friends when they ask. SteelyKid’s been walking to school and then going to friends’ houses or the local Stewart’s store after school, to hang out and occasionally do homework, and again, I’m not really worried about this leading to trouble. (It does take some parental prodding to get SteelyKid to focus and complete homework, but not at an unsustainable level…) They’re even both doing their own laundry these days (something Kate showed them how to do in late summer), which is pretty great.

Most importantly, they’re both generally nice. They’re polite to adults and other kids, and good with each other. We get occasional bickering about family activities, but they’re generally pretty chill, and don’t fight with each other the way some other sets of siblings do. The photos above give a decent sense of their relationship— they tease each other, but mostly in a joking and supportive way.

So, as I said up top, they’re pretty awesome, and we’re really lucky to have them. It’s a little frightening at times how quickly they’re growing up— I realized the other day that SteelyKid is not far off from getting college recruiting mail— but also fun to see them rounding into good people. I’m ridiculously proud of the both of them, and probably don’t say that as often as I could.

So, belated happy birthdays to SteelyKid and The Pip. Of all the sillyheads I know, you’re the ones I love the best.

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So, yeah, parental bragging over. Here are the traditional buttons:

And next week, we’ll be on to something else.