Dominick returned home yesterday after being away for 2 weeks at a French Language "Camp" in the Provence. A few stories to tell, but in the tradition of all great 14 year old males, the details are begrudgingly sparse. They did 4 hours of French classroom work every morning then “activities” in the afternoon. I ask him questions about how the French classes went and if he learned anything, and all he keep saying is “Oui”. I ask him if that is all he learned, and of course, is answer is again “Oui”!
The activities included sailing 4-man Catamarans on the Mediterranean. The kind that you get up on one pontoon and then lean off the other side. That sounded fun, and he claims to know all the parts of a sailboat in French. In the evening, they wandered the local village cracking knuckles. He had permission to be out until 1100pm (without any adults along), which was evidently not enough, because being the horrible parents we are, we did not give him permission to stay out until 1 am on the weekends, which apparently, “all the other kids were allowed to do”. Say what? What happens with 14-16 year olds between 1100pm and 1 am in a small town on the coast in southern France?
Besides his friend Lorin from school here, he had a 16-year-old Finnish roommate that evidently had a penchant for playing cards in the buff. And upon repeated questioning about the presence of the opposite sex, with firm denials of any knowledge on the matter, he did get put “on Report” for being outside of his room after hours, wandering somewhere near the female section of the dortoir (dorms), but claiming he had “gotten lost going to the bathrooms”.
Anyway, he is back in one piece. Two weeks was the longest he had ever been away, and I sense both a “child-like” glee at being back home with Mom and Dad, but also an air of newfound self-confidence and an incremental maturity that’s moved him firmly from the plateau of childhood to the turbulent sphere of teenage adolescence.
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