Moments of Parental Pride

Everyone thinks their own kid is a genius, and I am certainly no exception. But I don't usually brag.

But right now I am going to take a moment to do just that.

My twelve year old, David, has a history of fighting and bad grades a poor attitude and low threshold for paying attention. This year he has made quite a turn around, and I am so proud of him. He doesn't fight anymore, his attitude has improved, he does his own homework with very little prompting, and his grades are mostly A's and B's with a couple of C's.

Wow.

What most impresses me is how far he's come in his academics, his grasp on what it all means.

Some examples are:

During the Iowa primaries we were watching when the final stats came in and some of the candidates had tallies like 49% or 52%, but a couple had 0%.
One of my boys said,
"Wow... it would be embarrassing if you got 0%, nobody voted for him!"
David, without missing a beat, said,
"0% doesn't mean he didn't get any votes, it just means no enough people voted for him for it to count as at least 1%! If there are 200,00 voters, and less than 200 people vote for him, that doesn't equal 1%. "

I was amazed. He said he hadn't talked about that in school, that it just made sense.

Then, just yesterday on the way home in the car he was telling me what he'd been watching on television. He said he didn't understand why President Bush would have pushed us into war without proof of WMD's. We were discussing that when he said, "We need to get out of that war. We are spending billions, and that money could keep us from getting into this Recession everyone says is coming."

It's not whether he is right or wrong that impresses me, it's that he is paying that much attention, and that he cares about it all all. I didn't get into political discussions at 12 years old.

It's cool to see your kids grow up, watch them change and become adults in thier own right. It's these moments that make it all worth it. :)