The Road to 40 Day 250/365: Kids and Friends

It wasn’t an eventful day, but there was one experience that had me reflecting on kids.

When I picked Vino up from school, he asked to play with a couple of his friends. When they came back, he said they took a while because one of his friends threw a rock on the other guy’s head. I checked on the guy, and he said he was fine, but he asked help to tie his shoes up.

The helper said that even his 18-year-old brother doesn’t know how to tie his shoes. She said that it might be because of how the parents raised the kids. I said it’s a factor, but the kids are partly to blame as well. They have become too complacent because they have a helper.

I grew up with helpers, but I knew how to take care of myself. It’s concerning that kids in Vino’s school don’t even have an urge to try and take care of themselves.

I feel like I grew up the way that I did because of the friends I surrounded myself with. I’m a bit concerned about the kinds of friends Vino is surrounding himself with.

Right now, it’s a mix of kids who curse, kids who have no regard for others, kids who are disrespectful to their parents, and kids who probably won’t have friends if Vino didn’t talk to them.

It’s difficult for me because even if I’m with him most of the time at home, he will still be with these kinds of people for most of the day.

But at the same time, I’m relieved that Vino doesn’t carry these traits on a normal basis. So I think that while parents have a role in raising children well, the kids also need to want to do it.

So in the case of the 18-year-old who can’t tie his shoes, I think it’s not exactly a failure on the parents’ part, but rather a product of an overly entitled little man.

Vino asked to take a car going home. I told him he can’t because he chose to be tired from playing. We could have gone home earlier, but he said he wanted to play. So I told him it was his choice to get tired, and I wasn’t going to pay for an expensive fare for that.

He was still fine in the bus, though. He shared stories about some stuff in school. Since he forgot to bring his tablet and I wasn’t letting him sleep, we were talking all the way to the next bus stop.

He said he was hungry, and I offered to pass by Subway. He wanted egg mayo. I was wondering why he liked it in Subway, but he doesn’t like it when I make it. Maybe I’ll try again next time to save myself 7SGD.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been stuck in the kitchen preparing our dinner, then later again to clean up. On this day, I told him we should order in.

We had food in the fridge, but preparing food for just two isn’t worth losing the time spent with Vino. We still had a couple of days of this setup, so I decided to not cook this time around.

I ordered 4Fingers so that the leftovers could be his lunch tomorrow.

If we don’t get Ippudo, 4Fingers has been his default request. Sometimes it would be Jolly Hotdog or Shake Shack, but neither of those made sense to pack for lunch tomorrow.

We continued to watch Stranger Things. We’re close to the end of Season 3, but we’re watching it at a slower pace now that it has more weird and scary scenes. Before, we could still watch it before sleeping, but now, we can only watch it while we’re having dinner.

There wasn’t much to clean up, so we went to bed and watched some Mr. Beast to wash off the images of Stranger Things Se03Ep07.

Che had a long day, and she wasn’t home yet when Vino fell asleep. We were able to call each other earlier in the day, so at least Vino saw her this day. A couple more days and we won’t have to call to see each other.