I rode the Children’s Museum’s Grand Carousel with my kids!
I tend to avoid exclamation points when I write, but in this case . . . I rode the Children’s Museum’s Grand Carousel with my kids!!
My kids, you see, are teenage girls. Sofia is 18, a freshman at Wesleyan University. Elena is 15, a sophomore at White Station High School. I still identify them as my children — my kids — and I will when they are 38 and 35, if the fates are good to me. But they don’t act like kids all that much anymore. They drive cars, for instance (Elena currently with her learner’s permit). They study . . . man, do they study. And they socialize, more via device than I’d prefer, but Sofia could teach me lessons about throwing a dinner party. They are children in my eyes only.
But there was a time, merely an Obama presidency ago, when these two considered a trip to the Children’s Museum of Memphis (CMOM) a day of adventure. (Sofia and I actually watched the telecast of President Obama’s inauguration at CMOM.) Because it was an adventure. Sitting in the cockpit of a FedEx jet. Dressing up for a stage production in the miniature theater. Climbing a vertical maze of cages until they couldn’t be trailed by their “big” dad or mom. Even staring at the oversized jaw of a dentist’s dummy, imagining why teeth are such a big deal (especially since theirs were falling out). Sofia dislikes going to the dentist to this day, and yes, I’m connecting dots.
But there was no Grand Carousel at CMOM when my daughters were 8 and 5. (The Grand Carousel, it should be noted, originally carried riders at Libertyland, closed since 2005.) So last weekend, with Sofia between semesters and Elena mercifully free of soccer or softball practice, our family of four made a new adventure, one that called to mind an Eighties hair-metal anthem, Ratt’s “Round and Round.”
It’s a five-minute ride, but some five-minute rides are more glorious than others. Riding alongside Elena, one row in front of Sofia and my wife, Sharon, we “galloped” as a family. Up and down. Down and up. Sheltered from the frigid temperature by the Grand Carousel’s custom-made, glass-walled palace. Smiles of glee . . . all four of them genuine (no matter what the teenagers might say).
“They grow up fast.” Had I only charged a dollar every time another parent told me this during my daughters’ preschool years. But you know what? There are moments when we can hit the brakes on growing up, and this applies for those of us well beyond our teen years. One way is to find a grand carousel. And ride it.