book pick: The Retired Kid

life has been really crazy lately... which is to say, more crazy than usual for any family with young children! i'll spare you the details, but in short it involves an ever-expanding to-do list, a house encased in plastic, correspondingly elevated pms symptoms, and the newly discovered need for a security system. oh, and a stomach virus. yay!

a friend of mine reminded me of a date on our calendar, however, that makes everything bearable: Cancun 2013. we're celebrating our 10-year anniversaries with our husbands at an all-inclusive resort, which means nothing to worry about but the sunscreen. swim-up bars. towels shaped into animals. grass umbrellas. some local ruins. someone else cooking all the meals. ahhhhhh...

sometimes my husband and i daydream about "when we retire." our kids are ages 2 and 5, but we're already banking on grandkids and bicycle tours of Europe. maybe even an rv to tour the lower 48. but lately, the habit has come to annoy me. for one thing, they really are pipe dreams. who knows if we'll be able to retire, much less go to Europe! for another, it makes it seem like what's happening now is some kind of lesser existence – when it is anything but! even when there are more stresses than usual, what's happening in our lives now is nothing short of splendiferous.


a fun book we've been reading around here that gets me in the right present-frame of mind is The Retired Kid, a somewhat-older gem by the prolific Jon Agee. "It's hard work being a kid." so Brian decides to retire at the ripe age of 8. he flies off to (where else?) Florida, and settles in as the latest resident of the Happy Sunset Retirement Community. there are card games, golf, and poolside naps. but also long documentaries, prune juice smoothies, and false teeth mishaps. so Brian gets to thinking about "the good old days." and you know what? being a kid ain't so bad.

and neither is being a parent! (i even hear they have resorts with childcare nowadays...)



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