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Our youngest son Christopher came home from school during that first week and grimly declared, "1st Grade is SO much harder than kindergarten". He somberly talked to us about the amount of work he has to do during the day. He sadly reminded us about all the work he brings home each afternoon...work he knows he must complete before any playtime. And then, the final straw, he told us about the lack of toys in the classroom, and the sad fact that the only time he gets to play in school is during recess. I'm guessing not once during kindergarten did they warn him about these possibilities. Poor kid. He's finding out the hard way, some years are just tougher than others.

Our other sons complained of similar circumstances. Our 8th grader Alex proclaimed the first week of 8th grade was harder than all of 7th grade put together. And our 7th grader Adam was placed, not just in Honors Math, but in Honors Math Accelerated! That’s basically Math on Steroids. He’s in 7th grade and he’s already ventured well beyond the friendly confines of the math my wife and I ever retained. So he’s on his own.

When Christopher complained about how hard 1st grade is, I didn't have the heart to tell him that it'll only get worse...that kindergarten may have been his peak. Nobody likes to hear that their best days are behind them. I had a similar discovery myself recently. It started innocently enough. I was cleaning up some of the strewn cables behind our television. One of those projects that needs to be addressed once every decade or so. In the shuffling of cables, I accidentally unplugged some of the left/right audio cables from the back of the TV. So now I really had to commit to this project. I squirmed my way completely behind the television in the corner of our family room. The dust back there could choke you. I found a few random, long-forgotten toys and tossed them into the middle of the room, much to the joy of Christopher. It’s like Christmas again when lost toys are rediscovered. The Prodigal Toys returned! Lying on my side I grabbed the red and white audio cable and arched my neck to see where I needed to plug them back in. Our TV, like any TV, has about 75 input and output jacks on the back. Finding the right one to plug into needed a closer look. I didn’t have a flashlight on me, and the odds of me crawling back behind this TV anytime soon were highly unlikely, so I arched my neck even further to try to read the raised all-black text on our all-black TV (c’mon, don’t they have white paint in Taiwan?), hoping to make out the words “Audio In” or “Audio Out”. Five years ago this is a task I could have handled in my sleep. But something has happened to my eyes since then. Depending on the lighting, my eyes now require that awkward “backward/forward” shifting thing that you see elderly people do when reading small print. Well, because of the placement of my head and the immovable wall behind my head, I had no room to do the “backward/forward” shifting thing. I tried. I gave it some time for adjustment. But I couldn’t read the words on the back of my TV to save my life. Desperately, I tried to read the raised lettering like a blind man would read Braille, feeling with my fingers to see if I can tell the difference between IN and OUT. That didn’t work. Defeated, I crawled back out from behind the TV and resorted to sliding the TV away from the wall for a clearer view. Suspecting the worst, I calmly walked to the bathroom to look in the mirror. What I saw confirmed my fears. Wrinkles have formed around my eyes. I have some gray hairs on top of my head. It’s official, I’m aging.

From this point, there were 3 teachable lessons I could pass on to Christopher about his 1st Grade predicament: 1) Accept and embrace the challenges ahead of you because you’re capable of it; 2) No matter what, never admit your best days are behind you; or 3) Don’t bother cleaning behind your TV because no one will ever notice the difference and you may not like what you find. Christopher’s response to this: “But daddy, I liked the toys you found”. And that comforted me. Because really, a good parent is only as old as his youngest child.