School in these parts doesn't start until the Tuesday after Labor Day, so it's not quite here yet, but the mood has shifted in that direction. We're taking the kids out for back to school shopping this afternoon.
After this past week of no camps, I think Beth and I are both ready for them to have other things for them to do during the day. They're not being badly behaved or anything, but they clearly need to be around more kids their own age. I try to engage with them at their level and take a sincere interest in the things they're excited about, but I just can't embody the enthusiasm of a child for all the things the kids are into these days. Perhaps no adult can; I remember reducing my dad to nodding along in the car as I rambled on about castles and feudalism when I was around William's age.
Arya's passion for KPop Demon Hunters continues unabated. She and I have started playing Grow a Garden together on Roblox, which is a nice, low-impact resource management game. She's also picked up 99 Nights in the Forest, which should be my speed but was introduced to me after a day at work and without any guidance about how not to die, so that was a short-lived collaboration.
She discovered Posca markers this summer and has gotten frighteningly good at pausing an image on her tablet and successfully recreating it with her own flourishes. It's a very low bar, but she has already greatly surpassed my artistic ability. There is a certain magic to discovering that your kids have developed skills that you never had. Sometimes, as a parent, it's easy to point at something they do well and recognize that you taught it to them, and that's really cool, too, but sometimes they figure out how to do things you were never good at, so you know you had precious little to do with it (except perhaps for encouraging or enabling it, whether by enrolling them in a camp/class, buying them three times as many colors as they asked for, or just expressing your appreciation for their progress).
William continues to absorb history and geopolitics and has recently started studying Polish, and Minecraft is at least partially to blame. A year ago, he and his IRL friends joined a Minecraft server with a fair amount of internal lore and history. They were definitely on the younger end, and the admins were a bit ban-happy (they were seeking a certain vibe of fair play and good behavior that is hard when you're 12 and used to pwning strangers on public servers), so they kept getting banned for one offense or another until William (being an enthusiastic rule-follower) was the only one left. On the one hand, sad that his friends couldn't play with him on this server, but on the other, it forced him to forge a new social circle.
Which is how he ended up making friends with a bunch of teenagers and college students, most of them in Eastern Europe and nearly all of them interested in military history (the classic on-ramp to interest in other kinds of history). He was already curious about his Polish heritage (my paternal great-grandparents were immigrants), but having friends who lived in the region only encouraged him to embrace that piece of his identity more enthusiastically. Duolingo doesn't have Croatian (the native tongue of his closest friend on the server), but Polish is, so he's studying that in 10- and 20-minute daily bursts.
William isn't a reader the way the rest of us are, but he's just as enthusiastic about learning new things. And it's always really cool to see the weird directions it leads him in. I fancy myself some kind of student of history (I took multiple college classes in the subject as electives), but he introduced me to the Oversimplified History channel, which has some cool summaries of the Punic Wars and the Napoleonic Wars that were just outside of what I studied in school.
I'm also watching Severance with him, which he's enjoying, although he's no more likely to binge-watch it than I am to binge-watch the latest Life series (entertaining Minecraft videos, but I can only watch people play video games for so long before needing to do something else).
I really like hanging out with my kids. Also, I'm ready for them to go back to school - partially because the house will be quieter during the day and they'll have other people to enthuse at about the things that just don't quite hit for me, but also because I'm excited to see what they discover next.