"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...


I made a typo. It was 13. To complete the story, I steadfastly refused to
focus on bar mitzvah preparation. A week beforehand, the rabbi said "Look.
This is out of your control. Your parents want this, and they've already
paid for the party and the restaurant". So, in a week, I did the whole
thing. The party was actually pretty good. My friend Gary began flicking
lobster eyeballs at the girls. The whole thing turned into a circus.

I think my parents' mistake was that after Sunday school, they always took
my sister and I antique shopping. That's ridiculous. If you want to get a
kid to do something they don't like, you don't reward them with something
worse, especially on the weekend. My ex-wife has figured this out. She
gets
my son to attend the Unitarian church because afterwards, she offers to
stick around downtown for a hour so he can take advantage of a park that
has
lots of cement structures that are as attractive to skateboarders as a
shipwreck is to a fisherman looking for bottom structure. :-)


Gotta be careful what you do in front of the kids. When mine were very
young (5 and 3), I would take them to Sunday Mass
and sit near the back so we could slip out early just after communion. I was
always in a rush to get to the boat club and our Siren 17 sailboat. To this
day, my older son (now 25) will throw that up at me if I bring up church.