The entrance ramp was waiting for me, beckoning. It’s a challenging, imperfect ramp. It’s choppy in places, marked by crumbling asphalt. There’s a pothole on the racing line (I have to remember that). The first curve is slightly off-camber, and the guardrail is pretty close on the exit.
Traffic finally clears, and I make my turn. All four tires grab asphalt, motivated by 250 horses. A quick tap for the yield sign, and it’s all clear. I hit the apex for the first curve and then hammer the throttle. As I approach the curve before the freeway, I glance at the traffic. My lane is clear.
Before I know it, I’m way over the speed limit and merging into traffic. And from the back, I hear my two-year-old son, “schneller, papa, schneller!”* “Das mach Spaß!”**
I think I hear a “wheee!”** as well.
(* “Faster, daddy-o, faster!”)
(** “That makes fun!”)
Coming from a kid who picks through garbage cans looking for food and eats “chocolate” icicles off my car, I’m thrilled as a life lesson finally gets through.
Excuse me now while I get my son fitted for a go-kart.
I’m pretty sure that’s a real diaper and not body paint
“We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching.”
–Roy L. Smith
“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”
–P. J. O’Rourke
“Parents are not quite interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.”
“Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.”
–Bill Cosby
Update
December 21, 2011: Raising kids isn’t like herding cats, or other such similes and metaphors. I think it’s the other way around: herding cats is like raising kids (well).
