Island Parent Fall 2023
Vancouver Island’s Parenting Resource for 35 Years: Out & About in Nature: Rain or Shine • The Cool of Volunteering at School • Lessons from a Little Kid • Setting Kids Up for Success at School • Be Gentle with Yourself • Tweens & Teens
Vancouver Island’s Parenting Resource for 35 Years: Out & About in Nature: Rain or Shine • The Cool of Volunteering at School • Lessons from a Little Kid • Setting Kids Up for Success at School • Be Gentle with Yourself • Tweens & Teens
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DADSPEAK<br />
You’re My<br />
Hero, Dad<br />
My 6-year-old kid looks up to me. Or so I thought.<br />
Recently, in the middle of another great adventure<br />
together, he looked at me and said, “I want to be a<br />
champion!”<br />
Gulp, how the hell do I show him this?<br />
He gets these mid-week epiphanies. They can be inspired by<br />
seeing the medals on his 17-year-old big brothers’ walls, from<br />
finding boxes of my old medals, or from catching glimpses of<br />
his auntie’s shiny medals lining her at-home gym.<br />
Like Captain Underpants, I stood there, wind blowing at my<br />
unsculpted back, and thought “I can do this, I can somehow<br />
figure out how to help shape the hero in him.”<br />
I’ve got the recipe—or so I thought.<br />
I’ve got a bit of charisma, energy, willingness to fail, grit to<br />
succeed and I surround myself with rockstar humans. However,<br />
my last decade of marriage and only recently a year out has<br />
taught me that I’ve got to tread lightly, play small, cautiously,<br />
within boundaries. Ugh, feels awkward and compromising.<br />
There’s got to be a formula for showing my kid success on<br />
the health-related battlefield regardless of the hamster ball I<br />
seem to be spinning on.<br />
Let me back up a bit. Hudson, my extraordinary kiddo is a<br />
legendary boy. He’s got a curiosity fused with kindness, goofiness<br />
laced with imagination, and a “what can we do today Dad<br />
that’s going to be fun” mentality. He’s not the kid that bounces<br />
off walls but takes more of a pensive approach to things. So<br />
naturally I can’t take a back seat to the “champion” mentality<br />
I want to instill in him. Time for me to dust off my lagging<br />
health goals and show him what it means to crush goals.<br />
The Coles Notes version of my life helped provide some answers<br />
as to what this path might look like for him. My mom’s<br />
always been my hero. I’m not really sure when it happened, but<br />
at some point in my early 20s I saw her as a beacon for integ-<br />
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28 <strong>Island</strong> <strong>Parent</strong> Magazine <strong>Island</strong><strong>Parent</strong>.ca