"I've....been singing at the table, all the livelong day...."

Yes, I admit it sounds a little strange: my husband Rick put our son Tim in a time-out for singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” at dinner last night.

Tim is 13 ½, which means it had been approximately eight years since his last time-out. But beyond that, it’s kind of a strange offense, by most families’ standards.

It’s also somewhat emblematic of our household. Rick and I have fairly stringent guidelines when it comes to rambunctiousness. And we felt that Tim’s insistence on bursting into song after being asked repeatedly to refrain from doing so was nothing if not rambunctious.

Although it was the first time in recent memory that the situation had escalated to a time-out, Rick and I frequently impose restrictions on dinnertime comportment. It’s not just the obvious things that most parents would object to, like eating with fingers instead of silverware or throwing food. It’s matters as seemingly trivial as exchanging inanities.

These are the kinds of moment non-parents simply can’t picture: the speed with which a family dinner involving a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old can devolve into silliness. When we deem a conversational exchange too stupid, we require a change of subject.

This is the part that all the experts in family dynamics and child development never seem to address when they discuss the importance of the family dinner hour. “Families should sit down to a meal together as often as possible,” they all tend to agree. But what about what happens at that meal? Are we wrong to insist that family dinner means an interesting exchange of ideas and not the goofiness that Rick refers to rather colorfully as “flippity-flappity”?

I don’t mean to make us sound like ogres. In general, we’re okay with silliness. But dinnertime is different. I tend to work fairly hard to get dinner ready for all of us, and when we finally sit down, I want to enjoy it with peace and quiet and interesting discussion. It doesn’t need to involve political discourse or scientific theorems, but it has to involve syllables that are real words and a bare minimum of what the fictional heroine Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle calls the “I-Thought-You-Saids.” (“What? Grandma and Grandpa are planning a vacation? I thought you said Grandma and Grandpa were scamming some Haitians!”)

So yes, family dinnertimes are important, but some standards need to apply, and last night, the standard was no boisterous singing of American folk songs. Still, I felt a little guilty when Tim was sent to his room. (“Can Holly come with me?” he asked. “No,” Rick said. “Can the dog come with me?” No again. In truth, it had been so many years that we’d all forgotten the rules of a standard time-out.) My guess is it boisterous singing at the table won’t be a problem again, unless Tim eventually takes up a career in dinner theater. In which case he’s absolutely justified in not giving us any credit whatsoever for his success.

Turducken time

“Dream big,” we tell our kids. “You can do whatever you want to with your life. Accept no limitations when it comes to following your passions.”

Yes, yes, we said all of those things and we meant them at the time. But we were talking to preschoolers or maybe third graders, and we meant that you could grow up to be a professional ball player or an astronaut or first in your class at medical school or U.S. president.

And if, even when we said it, we already suspected some of those possibilities would probably prove to be out of reach, we hid it well. Because that’s the message parents want to give their kids: assume no limitations, you have the potential to be and do anything.

But here I am, already wishing I could dial down that message just a little. Not because my child is headed for second rather than first in some hypothetical graduating class of doctors or because the Women’s NBA overlooked her as a draft pick, but because I really don’t see why – or how – Tim is going to make a turducken for his seventh grade advisory group on the second-to-last day of school.

Advisory is a weekly event in middle school in which kids are divided up into groups of ten, each one led by a teacher. The idea is generally to have a meaningful liaison with other kids and teachers outside of the curricular setting, so they do team-building activities, skits, competitions, and games throughout the year.

And Tim and his advisory buddy Reid thought the only fitting way to say farewell to the other eight members of their advisory was by cooking them a turkey dinner.

But not a normal Thanksgiving turkey dinner. That, I know how to do. That, I’ve done every Thanksgiving for the past twelve years. No, the boys offered to make a turducken. How Tim even knows the concept of turducken is unclear to me, but by the time he told me about the plan, he and Reid had already spent some time on the Internet comparing recipes and researching poultry prices. “Everyone in the group will donate toward the costs,” Tim assured me.

It sounded like a frankly preposterous idea to me. I’m quite familiar by this time in my parenting career with what generally happens when the kids take on a cooking – or more typically baking – project: I buy the groceries, I supervise the labor, and I clean up the kitchen afterwards.

Tim understands my misgivings but assures me that he and Reid will put in the necessary time and effort to get the job done. Unfortunately, none of us can quite picture just what this time and effort will look like, since none of us has ever cooked – or even eaten – a turducken before.

But as my friend Leigh said, when your son comes home from school and says he wants to make a turducken, how can you say no? How can you quash that particular dream just because you know you’ll be scraping grease off the stovetop for the next six months?

I didn’t exactly say yes, though. I very dubiously said that they could try. And I called the butcher at Whole Foods to order the three de-boned birds. “As small as possible, especially the turkey,” I told him. “It’s only for a group of ten, and they’ll have just a short time to eat between phys ed class and social studies.”

“I’ve never heard of a class project like that before,” he commented when I explained.

“Tell me about it,” I muttered.

Nonetheless, Tim and Reid are on deck and ready to bat. My feeling is that I won’t bail them out if failure or incompletion seems imminent, but I’ll coach them along until they quit.

But, of course, maybe they won’t quit. Maybe they will actually bring a roasted, carved turducken to school next Monday. (My father has already volunteered to do the carving, and if we reach that point in the project, I don’t mind lugging it up to Tim’s classroom.) Maybe the message I’ve been dutifully promoting all along – “You can do anything to which you set your mind!” – will turn out to be true in this case.

And if not, at least I gave the butcher at Whole Foods a memorable anecdote that he’ll probably be retelling at employee training days for years to come.

Boat launch

My 13-year-old has a passion for boating.

As my father pointed out, he comes by it naturally, perhaps genetically. Monday evening, Tim announced he planned to go to bed early and sleep late, just to make the seasonal launch of my parents’ boat, which was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, arrive faster, the way some kids try to get to bed early on Christmas Eve. “I was just the same way at his age,” my father remarked. “And Rick probably was too.”

So with a father and a maternal grandfather who share his passion for motorboats, perhaps it’s not surprising that this is one of the major driving forces in Tim’s life. And I always remind myself that the up side of having a child who is not particularly well-rounded, who immerses himself in a very small number of select interests, is getting to see his radiant joy when a long winter yields to a warm spring and a generous grandfather who was willing to schedule an early launch date this year.

It’s true that I’ve sometimes wished Tim had more diverse tastes. Whereas many of the boys his age watch all kinds of movies and TV shows, hang out in large groups, and opt to attend summer camps that showcase at least twelve to fifteen different activities a week, Tim has always kept his focus narrow. He has just two close friends with whom he chooses to spend most of his time. He currently likes just one genre of books – fantasy -- no matter how much his language arts teacher or I might urge him to spread his wings.

And he has two favorite activities: boating and baseball. Both are worthwhile pursuits, but both are also fair-weather activities. This means he has a tendency to effectively hibernate all winter, spending the vast majority of his free time sitting on the playroom couch reading or playing video games.

That’s hard for me to watch. There are lots of hobbies and interests I’d love to see him develop, and I get frustrated with his monomaniacal tendencies and his winter reclusiveness. But then on days like yesterday, as we prepared for the boat launch, all the hibernating almost seems worth it.

Tim woke up exuberant on boat launch day. He read the owner’s manual for the boat. He counted the minutes until it was time to leave for the marina. When we arrived at the boatyard, he was literally quivering with joy. His excitement lasted for the next several hours of boating and boat maintenance, and his first question after dinner was how early we could take the boat out the following day.

I can’t say it completely compensates for all the time he spends doing nothing during the winter. But with the boat launch this week and his first baseball game scheduled for next Monday, things are definitely looking up. Baseball and boating are under way, and Tim is his warm-weather self, his cheerful, exuberant self, again. Yes, it was a sluggish several months, even without a lot of cold and snow. Tim doesn’t have a lot of purpose during the fall and winter months. But baseball and boating are back in session, and so is he. It warms my heart to witness, yet again.

Good judgment

Perhaps it is yet another unavoidable fact of small-town existence: we parents tend to know a lot more about our middle schoolers’ lives than they necessarily realize.

We talk amongst ourselves and put together the various pieces from the stories we each hear, and eventually we have a much clearer picture of, say, the argument in the cafeteria or the budding romance in art class than any of our kids suspect.

Still, we can’t let on just how much we know. We don’t want our kids to stop telling us about their day, and we don’t want them to feel like they are under surveillance. So a lot of the time, we parents keep it within our own circles, presenting a bland sort of curiosity rather than a thirst for specifics when our kids do choose to share details from their lives.

All of which is why I can’t tell Tim why I am so impressed with him lately. I can only make heavily veiled references to his social situation, with comments like “Glad things are going better for you this week” and “Sounds like you worked things out well.”

And out of respect for Tim’s privacy and that of his friends, I can’t go into much detail here either. I can only say that three different parents whom I ran into over the past few days remarked on Tim’s mature behavior in a difficult situation.

In essence, Tim and some of his peers found themselves over the past several weeks in the kind of situation that middle schoolers for generations have found themselves in: just a timeless pre-adolescent maelstrom of uncertainty, rumor, and fluctuating loyalties. (There were definitely no nude photos exchanged by text message, though, so that’s a relief.) Without asking me for advice, Tim somehow intuitively did everything I would have suggested to avoid coming out on the wrong side of this. He treated the circle of friends who were involved in the issues with fairness, loyalty, and reassurance. He remained calm and dispassionate. He exhibited patience and avoided drama.

And in the end, everything turned out well for him. He fortified friendships and learned a lesson: sometimes your own moral compass takes you exactly where you need to go.

As another parent commented when we moms had one of our furtive discussions about our kids, that’s a lesson that unfortunately may be disproved for him at some point in the future. But I’m not sure that really matters. Right now, the important thing is that Tim discovered at the tender age of 13 that sometimes following your principles and being a kind and fair person reaps rewards. To say I’m proud of him feels inaccurate, since I can’t really take ownership over his actions. It’s more a matter of admiration than pride. He used fine judgment in a way that isn’t always easy for young teens to do.

Usually, when I hear myself saying about one of my kids “S/he learned an important lesson,” I’m referring to a less-than-ideal circumstance, whether it’s that a child rode a bike heedlessly, sent an incriminating email, lied to a friend or neglected to brush her teeth properly (all of which has at some point been the impetus for a lesson learned in our household). This time, I can say that the lesson Tim learned was that sometimes nice guys really do finish first. And even if at some point in the future he discovers the opposite can also be true, I don’t think he’ll ever forget learning this one.

Lost and found (no thanks to Tim)

I’ve written before about how much it bothers me to lose things. Materials objects, that is. I just feel that the material world is something you should be able to count on. People can be unpredictable. So can weather and natural disasters and political situations and boating conditions and reader response. But knowing that you’ll be able to find your keys wherever you last placed them – because they’re not going to decide to go for a walk, or have a change of heart about their fealty toward you, or decide it would be funny to hide – is something you should be able to count on. Object permanence matters to me; it’s one constant in a world of entropy.

And for that reason, I’m careful with objects. I pay attention to where I place things. “Is this where I’m most likely to look for it next time I need it?” I ask myself when I put something down. I’m mindful about having specific places for specific belongings and not mindlessly leaving things in places other than where they normally go.

So it was frustrating not to be able to find my pedometer chip yesterday morning. This is a little plastic oblong that plugs in to my iPod and tracks my mileage while I run. Unfortunately, since it’s about an inch long and white, it’s nearly invisible. So I always leave it in the same place, with my iPod and headphones, when I’m done running.

Yesterday, the fact that it wasn’t there gave me the feeling that something was ever so slightly wrong with the world. An object had picked itself up and gone away; that isn’t supposed to happen.

It wasn’t essential that I have it right away, but it’s so small and inconsequential in appearance that I knew if I didn’t find it quickly, it could simply be swept under a bookshelf or tracked outside with the dog or brought out to the recycling bin with the mail.

And as neurotic as it makes me sound, I felt a little off-kilter all day, knowing that a tiny fraction of my attention was diverted wondering where this little piece of plastic could be.

I told my 13-year-old about the problem when he got home from school. “So just keep an eye out for it,” I concluded. I expected relative indifference on his part, but to my surprise, he immediately started looking on the floor below the mudroom shelf. “I bet it’s either here or in the laundry basket,” he said.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“Because those are the only places it could have landed when I knocked it off the shelf last night,” he said.

A ha. A clue. “If you knocked it off the shelf, why didn’t you pick it up?” I asked him.

“Well, I looked for a minute, but I didn’t see it right away, so I figured it had to have fallen either on the floor or into the laundry basket under the shelf and you’d find it eventually.”

Exasperated but hopeful, I lifted a pile of clean laundry out of the basket. My odometer chip tumbled out.

“Tim, if you know you’ve knocked something off a shelf, look for it!” I said, incredulous not for the first time – more like the ten thousandth time – at the seemingly obvious truisms that need to be stated to 13-year-old boys.

“I figured it couldn’t be too far away,” he shrugged.

So now all is well. I have my odometer back and my faith restored in the material world. Tim has learned what I would have assumed was intuitive: if you drop something, pick it up. Okay, realistically, Tim probably has not learned that. But surely a mom can dream.

Turning 13

On the afternoon of Tim’s third birthday, I had to work, but my mother was happy to take Tim on a special birthday expedition. The two of them went raspberry-picking at a local farm. The preceding day, he’d received a cardboard crown at preschool, and he insisted on wearing it throughout that birthday, including to the farm. My mother regaled me with an account of how the only other berry-pickers that afternoon were a consortium of chefs from upscale Boston restaurants who were on some kind of group tour promoting local agriculture. As my mother told it, they made a big fuss over Tim at every turn throughout the raspberry patch, exclaiming, “Tim, you’re the birthday king!”

I thought of this story yesterday, exactly ten years later, as I waited for Tim to bike home from the bus stop. Buses, middle school, riding a bike, being outside by himself – all of these would have been unimaginable to me the day Tim went raspberry-picking as a 3-year-old, but all are commonplace matters in the life of a 13-year-old.

Contemporary American society doesn’t hold a lot of age-specific rites of passage for kids. In Carlisle, kids can leave campus on their own after dismissal as of fifth grade, and that tends to be a big deal to them; it means they can walk to the general store or the library by themselves or with friends. But after that, for a lot of kids there’s nothing specifically great about turning any particular age until they reach 16 and start learning to drive.

Happily, social media has changed that. By turning 13, Tim was officially old enough to open his own Facebook account, and he’s been looking forward to that for months.

Not every family upholds the 13-year-old rule for Facebook, since it’s essentially done on an honor system, and some parents don’t even know about the rule, as I discovered over the summer when I expressed surprise that a friend let her 12-year-old have a Facebook presence. But I felt pretty strongly about compliance. Partly it was that I believe it sets a good standard to assume rules exist for a reason, but I also liked the fact that here was an age-specific milestone at a time when those can be hard to come by. I was happy for the built-in opportunity to make something special about turning 13 for Tim.

Rick and I went over the ground rules during dinner: he had to friend both of us, so that we could keep an eye on what he was saying on line; and he couldn’t friend anyone who used inappropriate language. After dinner, Tim got to work setting up his account.

As promised, I was the first person he friended; then he found both his grandmothers and some cousins. Since he’s among the oldest of his friends, he didn’t find too many peers on Facebook, but in time he will. For now, he’s enjoying something special and new, granted to him because he reached teenagehood. It’s pleasing to find rites of passage where few exist. So far, Tim is taking it in stride – and joining Facebook was definitely less thrilling to him than other aspects of his birthday this year including his party last weekend in Maine and the apple crisp I made for his birthday dessert – but he’s having fun with it. And I’m happy in the knowledge that turning 13 does indeed come with some special privileges.