My twins are brilliant. I am forever complimenting them on their achievements and constantly bragging on their academic, artistic and athletic accomplishments to others.
This past summer they purchased lots of books and spent endless hours reading. They also, however, spent countless hours watching Will Ferrell videos and memorizing all the lines of these Will Ferrell movies. They would stand in front of me and put on these little skits where they would recite, word for word, from some ridiculous movie or from "The Best of Saturday Night Live - Will Ferrell". I would sit there and watch and listen to my brilliant twins and all I could think was, "Other people's brilliant teenagers spend their time reading and quoting Shakespeare or Freud - but mine, study and quote Will Ferrell." And, while I am impressed with their abilities to recall and recite all this useless dialog ... I don't imagine they will ever be able to use any of this gibberish in their future lives. It is funny though.
We were in the car recently and my children and I had engaged in the conversation, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" When we got around to hearing my son's list, he said, "I want to be a singer. I also want to be a race car driver. Then I want to be a soldier. And, of course, I'm going to be an electrician (like his father)," and then he paused in thought and said, "That way ... I can be in the phone book," and I laughed hysterically. I explained to him that anyone that has a phone is actually in the phone book and he laughed. I also explained that it was true that business owners held a special spot in the phone book and this did imply that you were somewhat successful if you had one of those ads and that that was not at all a ridiculous ambition - however silly it sounded at first.
My brilliant daughter's aspire to be stand-up comedians and my son ... aspires to be in the phone book. I am obviously not doing something right.
On the upside, when I was young, I aspired to be either a Jockey or a Mack truck driver - neither of which came true (fortunately). And ... I still have my little daughter (The Princess) that I can continue to try to mold, influence and manipulate. Maybe there's still hope for me as a mother.