Grandchildren

I have three grandchildren, two of them live in the same city we do and a third one lives in San Francisco. The San Franciscan barely knows how to swim, while the other two are already well on their way to being good swimmers. Since they are already out of school for the summer, I thought I'll go ahead and have our grandchild from San Francisco spend a few weeks with us and have him enrolled at a swimming school. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately (not to my wallet though), the swimming classes within a convenient distance from our place were all filled up already, so we (my wife and I) decided to hire a private swimming instructor to teach him how to swim at our community pool.

The arrangement worked wonder for him. The one-on-one instruction was all he needed and within 8 consecutive sessions of 30 minutes duration, he was able to swim freestyle, backstroke and butterfly for six laps with a little rest in between!

At the end of the school year, my granddaughter earned a 4.0 gpa. She was also an elected member of their student council during the year. Her parents rewarded her for her accomplishments with a cell phone and my wife and I decided to take her out to dinner at a restaurant of her choice. We wanted to give a message to the two boys that they need to play less and attend to their school works more LOL.

We have been to this restaurant before but she and the boys always get a kick out of watching the cook perform his cooking wizardly in the process of preparing our food.

It is not uncommon in California to see a Mexican cook in a Japanese restaurant, but if you are after authentic Japanese cuisine, it is best to settle for a Japanese cook, preferably one trained in Japan LOL.

My other grandchild loves sport and he enjoys playing baseball, soccer, touch football and basketball. Sometimes I worry about him getting hurt because playmates of his age are bigger and taller than him. However, the supervising adults always emphasize sportsmanship, clean play and routinely downgrade the importance of winning as the ultimate goal in team competition.

When a player gets hurt, the game is temporarily stop and the players of both teams in the field sit or hunker down until the play resumes.

Winning and losing teams high five each other after the conclusion of the game.

The parents and fans traditionally welcome their players with a human triumphal arch, win or lose. This is so different during my time in Pinas. Most of the time, the team sport we participated in was only basketball - our uniforms were ragtag or shirt on and off to differentiate team members. The emphasis was on winning by whatever means and rough plays were not only condoned but encouraged. Maybe I am just talking about my experiences and what I observed during my time. I hope things have changed from "who won, to how the game was played and enjoyed by every participants."