What Do You Remember

Looking back on an entire childhood's worth of memories, I find it a little strange that a disproportionate number of those recollections are of times I was sick, or times I was being transported from one activity to another. After all, I wasn't sick that often, and time in the car en route to baseball practice or piano was far exceeded by time spent in baseball practice and piano. Why is it that these memories, which may represent less than two percent of my childhood by time, may represent well more of my childhood memories?

Maybe someone can chime in with an eloquent explanation. As for me, I conjecture that being sick represented fond memories of my mom taking care of me (propping up my pillow when I had a sore throat, or making me soup when my braces hurt), while short car trips represented reflective "in between" moments with both of my parents (eating snacks while going from school to piano lessons, pounding my mitt in anticipation while my dad took me to baseball). Whatever the reason, you have to agree that these types of moments are disproportionately memorable for kids, right?

I say this because I am making some of my own memories this week on the parental side. Though my kids are usually indestructible, Aaron threw up one evening this week after complaining about his tummy at dinner, so while he looked and felt good the next morning, I decided to keep him home from school to play it safe (and also as a courtesy to his classmates, in case he was still infectious). Aaron quietly reveled in the positive attention Amy and I gave him as we cleaned him and his bed up, and was pleased as punch to be able to stay home from school and watch TV.

This week was also the start of Jada's ballet class, which is the first weekday extra-curricular activity for either of our kids, and which necessitated all sorts of running back and forth to get her from school, get her to ballet, get back to school to get Aaron, get him home for dinner, and then head back out to ballet to pick up Jada. All the hustle and bustle seemed to draw Jada, sleepily, closer to me: she sidled up to me on the bus ride to the studio, held my hand a little tighter as we headed down a new street and into a new building, and was affectionate with me as she changed and snacked when I returned to pick her up.

Who knows what, out of all we've put our kids through, they'll remember about their childhoods when they're all grown up. But my money is on moments like this week.