A new series

Even though my son and daughter will, in a couple of months, both be in their 30s, they are forever little children in my dreams. When they walk through my night world, they are not adults but always sometime between the ages of 5 and 14.

I suppose it's only natural; kids that age have a way of hijacking the lives of their parents. Everything their mother and I did then revolved around our offspring. Their education, school activities, youth sports, music and dance lessons and Scouts consumed all our leisure time. Our emotions, our fear, anxiety, pride and disappointment were hyped. So much so that those emotions still bubble up from my subconscious when I sleep.

About 23 years ago, I started writing columns for the Observer-Reporter, and many of them were about family life. They began to peter out when my kids went off to college and then set out on their own. I felt as if I had nothing left to write about, and so I quit the column for good in 2002.

I'm going to go back 20 years or so and resurrect a few of those old columns for this blog - the ones about kids. Because this blog is for people like me who have short attention spans, they will be shorter versions of those columns. I hope that those of you just now going through the trials of parenthood can benefit from our experiences, even though we raised our kids before cell phones and the Internet. And I hope those of you my age and older will appreciate a visit to those days of childrearing that aged us so.

As always, feel free to comment and chime in with your own stories of children and their Grumpy Old Parents. It starts Wednesday. We'll call it "Dreams of My Children."