Great Expectations

Recently I've been witness to the results of expecting more from your children.  When my son was less than two years old, maybe 18 months, my husband came home one day with a little tykes basketball hoop for him.  But it wasn't the age-appropriate miniature one, it was the one for older children, the one that at its lowest height was still two feet above his head.  "I don't understand", I said shaking my head, "why couldn't you just get him the one for his age.  It's frustrating and discouraging to fail with toys too advanced for his age."  My Israeli husband gave me one of his "you-crazy-uptight-overeducated-American-mother" looks and set up the basket.  Over the next few months he showed ("coached", "trained") our son how to throw the ball into the hoop and, still to my disapproval, every time he showed signs of mastering the basket, my husband would raise it a notch.  A few weeks ago, with our son only two and a half, my husband popped that basket up to the highest possible notch, leaving it standing a good ten feet off the ground.  And I, much to my secret delight, watched as our son played shots with my husband making not all but most of his baskets.

About a month ago my husband insisted, with the forecast of the season's first beautiful weekend, that we go out and buy our son a real bicycle, albeit with training wheels, but none of this tricycle "nonsense", as he would call it.**  For a week he barely touched the bicycle.  He'd sit on it and want us to push him, and then every time we'd break our backs bending over he'd accidentally hit the breaks...over and over and over again.  "The pedals go around and around," I'd keep telling him.  "Look," as I pointed out all the cyclists by the river, "look how they push the pedals round and round."  He got that part in his mind fairly quickly; the next time we took him to ride by the river he just stood next to the bike coaching on all the grownup cyclists whizzing by: "C'mon! Push! Push the pedals round, round an' round!" he'd say to them.

Then, like magic, one day he just got it; he just sat on that bicycle and started pushing his legs around and around and he was off.  Today we took him to ride by the river and I watched my husband shake his head as he ran after our boy who was whizzing away from us so quickly we could barely keep up.

Now to teach him how to stop...

(**note: the story about how we drove 30 minutes at 10 o'clock at night with a 2 year old and a 5 month old to go GET the bicycle will be saved for another post)