Saturday, November 17, 2007

One door (may) close, while another one reopens

Last month, I posted about my son's plans to not play tennis any longer. He took lessons for several years with the goal of going out for the high school tennis team. Now, when he's in high school and a few months shy of going out for the team he's thinking about giving up on it.

Well, things changed slightly. His game improved after that announcement. So, he started vacillating on his decision. But, since he's still not sure how he feels about it, we were unwilling to continue to throw large amounts of money at tennis lessons. Then, an opportunity came up to play on a junior winter league. The money investment is less than half of the lesson fees, plus he'll get some structured competition experience. He's still unsure if he wants to go out for the team, so this will help him decide since the experience will be similar, if slightly less rigorous than the high school team schedule. Winter League matches are once a week, with no practices. The high school team has practices or matches Monday through Friday.

When K was in elementary school, he took guitar lessons for five years. He eventually gave that up when he (and we) got tired of the rigors of practicing and being nagged at by his parents to practice. In the last month or so, out of the blue, he started fiddling around with his guitar again.

When he stopped lessons, his instructor said to us that he might pick it back up again when he got to high school, since a lot of kids think that its cool to start their own band and the like. I think he hit that prediction spot on. K's church youth group puts on a 'coffee house' each February, featuring amateur performers from the church community. K really wants to participate (probably to impress his friends). So, he asked if he could go back to guitar lessons!

We made him think about it for several weeks. Plus, we watched that he was really getting back into enjoying playing his guitar. We really don't feel like reestablishing the practice-nagging routine we had going years ago.

So, here we are. Tomorrow is his last tennis lesson in almost three years. Monday evening K has his first guitar lesson in over three years. Winter Junior Team Tennis starts in the beginning of January.

Life is never boring with a teenager in the house.

3 comments:

Summer said...

Amen to that! You never know what you'll get with a teenager in the house. You will live through it!

Anonymous said...

Feh. You can say that again. Shadaughter is 17, and I haven't had any peace in years.

briwei said...

Still, it seems like it worked out well. He still gets to try his hand at tennis and those guitar lessons may actually pay off.