Mommathon

Liam is at spy camp this week. He goes in the afternoons each day and let me just say, it is cool. The first day he came home talking about acids and bases. Yesterday they studied fingerprints and today they talked about the properties of light. Since they were talking about light they made “indoor firecrackers”. Not sure what that is, but from the enthusiasm that I saw it must have been cool. They also did this hovercraft thing where they floated in the air on this big frisbee like contraption. Again, I haven’t seen any of this; I am hearing it from Liam. They also do a lot of problem solving activities (some of which I have seen because they do them towards the end of class) and there is even some thought put into their snacks. For example, on the first day they had pretzel sticks and marshmallows so they could build stuff with their food before they ate it. The teachers are cool, too. They are two college-age men/boys who wear lab coats which Liam just thinks is awesome. The icing on the cake, however, is that the newspaper came to take pics of them yesterday at camp and a picture of Liam and two others boys made it into the paper today. He thinks he is famous. 🙂

I had a friend of mine from church tell me that she thought that people who didn’t send their kids to Catholic schools just didn’t love them enough. Now, when she said this lots of things ran through my head. It was the kind of thing where you really don’t know how long it has been since they spoke and you should probably say something but you can’t say what’s running through your head because that would be really rude. Honestly, I don’t know what I said in response because my mind was still in disbelief that these words had been uttered. I am still in a little bit of shock even though time has passed. Had I been one of those people who can just speak off the cuff and sound intelligent in any given situation I think I would have said something like this: I think that parents have to make the decision that is right for their child and that would demonstrate that they loved them since they were making a decision based on many factors and not just that it was Catholic.

I got that vibe quite a bit when I was teaching in the Catholic schools, too. Parents who feel like their kid is better than those horrible awful public school kids. Parents who feel that their Catholic school kids can do no wrong. Well, let me tell you. I have taught those kids. I had kids who lied, cheated, stole and did a number of other things that weren’t very holy. I think it would also be an eye-opener to a number of those parents just how few parents that send their kids to Catholic school actually go to Mass during the weekend. I must say, I was a little surprised, too. So, I guess my point is. Why does it matter what I do or what my neighbor does? Who cares. People have a lot of reasons for doing what they do in any given situation.

I would love to see those who chose public schooling and those who don’t to not see each other as adversaries, but as parents trying to do what they think is best and to have a mutual respect for each other as parents. In the end that is what we all are, parents, day in and day out making the best decisions that we can at the time.