Tikkabik

Today my eldest child, Robert, turns ten years old. I've been a dad for a decade. Kind of hard to believe, in retrospect. He's certainly changed a lot in the last decade: From a screaming ball of fury to a ... screaming beanpole of fury, I suppose. He's a good kid, and he's his own person, with unique interests and tastes, a sense of style that's his own and a lot to offer the world. I suspect he'll turn out all right. He's still young and impressionable and I think his mother worries more than I do that he'll have problems that he won't be able to handle as he gets older (related to his ADHD). He's definitely the oldest of three kids -- the leader, the one who gets out in front of everyone to experience new things.

One thing he doesn't have enough of is time to himself. It'll be time to get him into his own room pretty soon -- that's something I don't look forward to, because one way or the other it'll require us to remodel our house and it'll mean less space for someone, somewhere -- whether it's sacrificing what we now use as the "family room" or cutting the existing boys' room in half, we're not sure.

Bonnie and I were young when we had Robert -- we were both 25 years old. In our area people do get married and settle down pretty early, and judging from the other parents we see at school days, we're not alone in our age group, either. But it did feel isolating, at first, for the same reason that it feels isolating when you first get married: All of a sudden the friends who you've developed as a single person or a couple no longer have the same experiences you do, no longer are interested in the same things as you are, and gradually you spin out of those social networks and into others.

Having two more kids in relatively rapid succession -- the spread is 10 years old, 8 and 5 -- didn't help. It can be, and has been, quite isolating in some respects. But we love our kids and want to provide a healthy and happy home for them, so we keep at it, even though it's not easy.

Bob gets gypped a little bit because he has a summer birthday, and can't share it with friends and classmates at school -- so many of them travel or are at camp or otherwise indisposed in the summer vacation months. So this year we thought we'd try something a bit different, and we're going to be hosting a combined birthday party for all three kids closer to October, and tie it in with Hallowe'en, which is collectively our favorite holiday of the year. They seem content with that, so we'll see how it goes.