Monthly Archives: October 2017

When Life Gives You Lemons

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We’ve known since the middle of September that North wouldn’t be able to go trick-or-treating this year because they’ll be on a two-and-a-half-day outdoor education field trip over Halloween. (All the sixth graders in Montgomery County go on this trip but not all at the same time. North’s school was split into three shifts and they drew the short straw.) A friend of mine commented it was bad luck indeed, as Halloween is “the holiest day” in our family calendar.

We carried on as best we could, though. Beth and North went camping two weeks ago and the campground had some Halloween-themed activities—trick-or-treating from tent to tent, and a costume contest. North wore a yellow t-shirt with the word “Life” written on it in black marker and carried a bag of lemons. Get it?  They won the contest, but said they felt kind of bad about it because the competition was mostly little kids. But we do take costume contests seriously here. Both kids have won the Takoma Park Halloween parade costume contest (Noah several times) and Noah won a costume photo contest at his school in ninth grade. We continue to expand our costume contest empire, little by little.

We also went to our favorite pumpkin patch in Northern Virginia a week ago. This was a fun expedition, even though traffic was awful both ways. At one point, I told Beth we were on “the highway to hell,” because we were listening to a Halloween playlist Noah found and that song was on it. But we finally arrived after about an hour and fifteen minutes (a half hour longer than it usually takes). We got pumpkins, decorative gourds, and cider and then went out to dinner at Sunflower, where we ordered a veritable feast of vegetarian Chinese food (and ate almost all of it). Toward the end of the drive home, the playlist ended and we had our D.J. take requests. North wanted to hear “Purple People Eater” and “Monster Mash,” opining it was “a disgrace” any Halloween playlist should lack those songs. I picked “Season of the Witch,” and Beth chose “Werewolves of London,” which caused a lot of howling in the car.

And slowly, over the course of a few weeks, we decorated our yard with our ever-growing collection of ghosts, skeletons, zombies, etc. This year’s additions include a portrait that screams when you press a button (we hung it on a nail next to the front door), more spider webbing, a metal cut-out of a witch, a large window decal of a ghost, and pumpkin-head torso that emerges from the ground.

The Takoma Park Halloween parade was Saturday. North had considered expanding their Life costume to be the game board of the game of Life, still holding the bag of lemons, but they decided that might just be too confusing. So, they printed up business cards with a recipe for lemonade to hand out along the route and they were done. Noah decided to go as the Equifax data breach. He wore a thrift store trench coat with the Equifax logo painted on it and credit cards pinned all over it and glasses with bushy eyebrows and a false nose. There was originally a mustache under the nose but it was oddly narrow and both my and Noah’s first thought when he tried it on was “Hitler,” so he cut it off. I also warned him not to wear shorts under the coat, even though the day was warm, because “flasher” wasn’t the look he was going for either.

As often happens, Noah was engaged in costume-making right up until the deadline. North and I helped him pin the credit cards—they were all printed with his name and the number 1031 2017 0000 0000—to the trench coat. We decided to walk to the beginning of the parade route because no one’s costume was bulky this year and it’s always hard to find parking. (It was also the first year in recent memory no one’s costume required large quantities of cardboard—so of course this was the year Beth had been saving it).

The festivities begin in the Co-Op parking lot. There were games for little kids, a spider web background for picture taking and a can-you-guess-how-many pieces jar of candy corn. North and I both submitted guesses. Mostly though, people walk around and look at each other’s costumes. I was surprised at the dearth of political costumes. These are always popular and last year there were even more than usual. Maybe everyone needs a break from politics these days. The closest thing we saw was probably the group of famous artists (Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O’ Keefe, Andy Warhol, and Bob Ross) carrying a banner that protested funding cuts to the NEA. 

There was a strangely large number of teenage girls dressed as cats and about the usual number of zombies.  We saw two adults dressed as bacon and eggs and a girl dressed as a deviled egg (egg with a trident, cape, and horns). Probably the best costume we saw belonged to a girl who’s a year older than North and used to wait at their elementary school bus stop. She always has memorable costumes. This year she was a bowl of fruit loops. She stood inside a giant papier mâché bowl filled with sliced up pool noodles of many colors. There was a milk jug suspended over her head with white cloth “milk” tumbling down into the bowl.

Eventually, people gathered under the banners with their age groups and began to walk the parade route. I walked with North in the nine-to-twelve group and they were concerned that the judges never asked their name. Some years they take everyone’s name and costume and some years they just take the names of the top contenders. (Beth and Noah were in the teen and adult area and once we got to the end of the route and found each other, we learned no one took his name either.)

Along the way North saw a lot of kids they know, one from drama camp dressed as an archer and another as Wonder Woman, two basketball teammates dressed as milk and cookies, a former classmate in an Octopus’s Garden group costume with her family.

There was a band playing and I thought I probably had time to get an iced latte at Takoma Beverage Company before the costume contest results were announced. It was a close thing, as it turned out. I missed all the four and under and some of the five-to-eight winners. A vampire cheerleader and a monster from Where the Wild Things Are won in that age group. The nine-to-twelve group was next. Scariest went to the girl with the half-unzipped face. (Google zipper face if you want to see it—there are a lot of make-up tutorials—but be warned, it’s pretty gory, so I’m not including any links.) Funniest went to the bowl of fruit loops, and cutest went to a Starbucks latte. North was disappointed not to win, but all the costumes that did win were very well executed, so it was hard to complain. “The judging was fair,” they said.

In its publicity, the rec department advertised the categories would be Scary, Funny, and Cute this year, which was a change. There used to be an Original category instead of Cute. I thought this worked against my kids, especially Noah, who when he wins, tends to win in Original. Before the parade I thought North had a shot in Funny and Cute and Noah in Funny and Scary—after all the Equifax disaster was pretty scary. As it turned out, though, categories were inconsistent across age groups, with some groups still using Original and others not.

Teens and Adults were up next. Scary went to a woman in a black Victorian dress with a bustle and a black, metallic-looking unicorn head. The effect was kind of steampunk and very cool. Most Original went to the chicken from Moana. We all instantly protested to each other that characters in Disney movies are not original, even though it was a very nicely done costume. Funny went to Seven Snow Whites (some of them cross dressing) and one Dwarf. More family protests—they should have been in the group category! So, Noah didn’t win either. It was the first time since 2012 that neither of the kids has won.

We stayed to see the group costumes judged. A Ghost Busters group won first prize (“First prize?” we all exclaimed. What happened to the categories?) But the protesting artists won second prize and I was glad to see them win.

We made our way home and before we had a dinner of pasta with pumpkin sauce and carved our pumpkins into a cat, Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas, a skull-and-crossbones, and a scary clown, North made lemonade out their lemons. Because when life gives you lemons, there’s just one thing to do.

Secondary

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Almost a week ago, on Columbus Day, we visited the kids’ schools to observe their classes. This was our first parent visitation day with both kids in secondary school. It’s a little more complicated than when at least one of them was in elementary school because there are more classes you can potentially visit, and no set time you’re supposed to come. If you have only one kid and you want to, you can follow him, her, or them around from class to class all day long. But we have two kids. Beth was in favor of spending most or all our time at the middle school because A) It’s a new school to us whereas Noah’s in his third year of high school; B) North had a bit of a bumpy start to middle school, though things are improving; and C) North was more interested in having us observe their classes than Noah was. As in they would have been perfectly happy for us to tail them all day and he wouldn’t have minded if we’d skipped the event entirely.

I wasn’t ready to skip the high school, though. At Back to School Night at the middle school in September, Beth and I needed to split up because there was a meeting for 11th and 12th grade CAP parents the same night. We started Back to School night together but Beth only got to hear the gym and chorus teachers’ presentations before she had to leave so she hadn’t met most of North’s teachers and I had. And because I hadn’t been to the CAP meeting, I felt less familiar with Noah’s teachers and the eleventh-grade CAP curriculum, so I wanted to see at least one of his classes. The two I most wanted to see weren’t contiguous, so we decided to attend North’s Spanish and pre-algebra classes, plus part of World Studies before we cut out for lunch and then over to the high school to see Noah’s research methods class.

North was in a partial Spanish immersion program in elementary school and that continues into middle school (the school also houses a partial French immersion program). They have an hour and a half Spanish class that meets daily and they also have World Studies taught in Spanish, which is a change from elementary school when they had math and science in Spanish. All in all, it comes to about a third of the week in Spanish.

Spanish class was also the first class we saw on visitation day. The students began with a warm up in which they had to sort the words in a sentence into the different parts of speech. Then there was a lesson on adjectives. In North’s elementary school immersion program there was almost no grammar instruction, which I think makes sense for the early grades, but with both kids I noticed their Spanish grow by leaps and bounds in kindergarten, slow in first and second grade and then stall out in third grade. I think introducing grammar earlier would have helped, but I’m glad they are getting that now. I’ve heard from parents of older kids in the immersion program that their Spanish really improves in sixth grade.

The kids watched some videos in Spanish and spent some time working on the third drafts of the letters they are writing to their future (eighth-grade) selves. I couldn’t quite catch if they will actually be given the letters back when they are in eighth grade, but it would be cool if that was the case. Señor L seems warm and friendly and his room is decorated with prints of art by Latin American artists (I recognized some Diego Rivera), sombreros, flags from Spanish-speaking countries and pennants from all the houses of Hogwarts. That’s because he’s a big Harry Potter fan, and is reading the first Harry Potter book to them, in ten to fifteen minute increments every day. At first, I thought it would be more educational to read something written in Spanish, rather than a book translated from English, but then I realized it’s easier to follow along when you already know the story, as most of them do.

Señor L has also promised the class a pizza party once they’ve gone a certain number of days without him hearing anyone speak English all class. The chart they use to track their progress, is of course, a pie chart, or rather a pizza chart, with the number of slices growing. He showed it to them near the end of class.

There was a between periods session of PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports), in which the kids in North’s homeroom had to brainstorm about respectful behavior in various locations in the school. It was well-intentioned, but I’m not sure a kid inclined to start a food fight in the cafeteria or stand up on the bus would be deterred by remembering in PBIS they talked about how that was not respectful behavior.

North’s pre-algebra class was working on using equations to solve problems about ratios (fractions and percentages), using something called the butterfly method. They worked in small groups and then presented their work to the class. The problems had to do with figuring out what percentage of her great-grandmother’s age a girl was, what was ratio of different species to each other in a pet store, or how to calculate a restaurant bill (with tax and tip) and then figure out how to choose a dessert to add to the order without going over budget. The kids seemed engaged but they got a bit rowdy at times.

The last class we visited was World Studies. I wanted Beth to see Señora P’s room, which I’d seen at Back to School Night, because it’s gorgeous, with almost all the walls covered in colorful murals, but class was being held in the media center (and mostly in English) because they were hearing a presentation by a librarian about how to take notes in preparation for a research project on ancient Egypt. The tables were all labelled with professions (artisan, embalmer, farmer, pharaoh, scribe, etc.) and heaped with books about ancient Egypt because later they were going to divide into groups and practice taking notes from the books on their chosen profession. We didn’t see that, though, because we left about twenty minutes into class to grab lunch at Lincoln’s BBQ before heading to the high school. (Verdict: vegetarian options there are okay but not great, though I did enjoy the banana pudding.)

We arrived right before eighth period started and reported to Noah’s research methods class. I wanted to see this one because it wasn’t really clear to me what they are doing in this class. It used to build up to a research paper but the teacher found the grading arduous so now it’s (probably) just going to be a series of smaller research projects. I have mixed feelings about this. Noah hasn’t written a long research paper since seventh grade and it seems he shouldn’t go through four years of a rigorous, communications-focused high school program without writing one, but then again, he’s so chronically overworked, it’s hard to get too upset about it. Plus, to be honest, the teacher seems pretty loosey goosey and I might rather Noah’s college freshman composition instructor handle this task.

What the class is doing right now is a unit on race. Mr. S led the class in a spirited discussion of the opportunity gap and how wealth inequality perpetuates itself. He had some provocative statistics to get them started. The kids were smart and idealistic and everything you’d want in a group of sixteen and seventeen year olds, though I noticed Mr. S wasn’t doing as much as he could to bring the quieter kids into the discussion. Every now and then he’d talk a bit about how the statistics were calculated (what counts as wealth for instance and how the numbers change when you add durable goods in, or exclude them). Afterward Beth said she thought he could have done more with that, especially to show them how different think tanks with different political orientations might calculate something like wealth to bolster their own arguments. If we want kids to be critical thinkers, they need to understand how arguments are constructed.

We could have stayed for another period, but Noah had Spanish next and Beth had already sat through a class in a language she doesn’t understand too well, so we headed for the grocery store and home, where we met North who had just arrived home.

Beth was worn out by her day in middle and high school, so she took a nap while the kids got started on their homework. When North finished theirs, they set to work making ice cream. While we value education, that doesn’t mean fun is always secondary.

I’m North

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Hi! I’m North. But you might know me as June from other blogs. That’s my old name. I’ll be North today. I like cats, and most every animal except for dogs. My favorite color is aquamarine, (specific, right?) my favorite food is olives, and my favorite animal is deer. Sounds like a pretty average kid, right? Well in some aspects, you are right. I’m in middle school, hate gym class, and love lunch (no, seriously. I’m in love.). But there’s one thing about me that isn’t ordinary. You probably already know it. I’m transgender. There, just officially came out on the internet. No going back from that.

Ok, let’s get something straight. When I say transgender, I probably don’t mean what you think I mean. I was assigned female at birth, which I am not. But, if I had been assigned male at birth, they would have been equally wrong. I’m genderfluid, which means on any given day, I could feel anywhere on, or off the gender spectrum. I could fell more feminine, masculine, in the middle, or genderless! There are countless ways I could feel on any given day. But no matter how I feel, always refer to me in the third person using they/them pronouns. If you don’t know what those are, look them up! I’m sure there are countless people on the internet who can explain it better than me. But the simple version is, that they are used to refer to a person not female, nor male. You can also always use these if you aren’t sure. Remember, it’s always ok to ask somebody about their pronouns. Just pull them away for a second, and ask. A lot of transgender people feel good when you ask them their pronouns. It indicates a sense of respect for that person. So, if you aren’t sure, just ask.

Ok, I’m going to tell you some things that you probably should, and shouldn’t do around transgender individuals. Keep in mind that I am just one of the many, many, transgender individuals out there, and I do not speak for everyone. These are just some generalizations that I believe most transgender people do or do not like.

Let’s start on the positives, things that most trans people like: Asking their pronouns. This indicates that you don’t want to offend this person by referring to them in the wrong way. Letting them pass. If you know your friend is trans, they are meeting new people, and think they’re doing a really great job at passing, let them pass. Let people think they were born that way, even if you know they weren’t.

Now, what most trans people don’t like: Dead naming. If somebody goes by a different name than their birth name, that name probably doesn’t make them feel good, so just don’t say it.

Using the wrong pronouns. If you knew them before, and mess up occasionally, that’s okay, but just try to use the right pronouns.

Well, I gotta go now. You might see me again, I don’t know. Well, Goodbye, Aloha, Ciao, Hasta luego, See ya!

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Acting Out

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North’s going to be in production of the musical School of Rock this December. It’s part of an educational program at a theater in Silver Spring for kids from second to twelfth grade. They really wanted to be in a play and the process of auditioning seemed daunting, especially given the fact that I don’t drive, which limits my ability to get them around the D.C. metro area to go to a lot of different auditions. So, this seemed like a good compromise. You just register and it’s first-come, first-served.

They’ve had three rehearsals so far. After the second one they’d been cast in their first-choice role, Billy. If you have only a hazy memory of the characters, he’s the kid who designs the costumes for the band, and the one in the “You’re Tacky and I Hate You” meme you so often see on Facebook. North likes that’s he’s somewhat gender creative and that he has a solo. (The kid roles in the play are more developed than in the film, I hear.) After the third rehearsal, they were tickled to bring home an official script on loan from the current Broadway production.

In the spirit of preparation, we watched the first half of the movie on Friday night. I don’t usually let North watch PG-13 movies. This might have been their first (if they haven’t seen any at a friend’s house). At any rate, it was the first authorized one, but since the play’s not that different from the movie, I thought that particular horse was already out of the barn. The scene where Summer confronts Dewey about groupies wasn’t exactly comfortable for me to watch with them, though.

Because there are two to three rehearsals most weeks from now through December (and then six to eight performances), we told North they’d need to cut some of their regular extracurricular activities, and much to my surprise, they decided to ditch them all—violin, guitar, Girl Scouts, acting class, running club, and even basketball, which doesn’t even overlap much with the play, as practices start in late November and games not until early January. Most of these activities they’ve been doing for years, so I guess they just want a clean slate for middle school. They did try to get into a cooking club at school but it turned out you were supposed to register beforehand and it had filled by the first meeting. They’re also considering attending an LGBT support group at school.

Last Saturday’s rehearsal conflicted with the March for Racial Justice, which Beth and I had been planning to attend. The theater schedules rehearsals around people’s conflicts (the ones you declare by a deadline) as much as possible, but not every conflict can be accommodated, so we had to decide whether to skip the rehearsal, skip the march, task Noah with getting North there, or teach them the route on public transportation. It’s our goal for them to be able to get themselves to weekday evening rehearsals eventually, but I was thinking I’d do it with them at least a couple times first because it’s not in a part of Silver Spring we go to on the bus often. And we didn’t really want to cut into Noah’s homework time, either, so Beth suggested we skip the march and go to the evening vigil at the MLK memorial instead and I agreed.

We left the house around five, shortly after Beth brought North home from rehearsal. It was just Beth and I, as the kids were not interested in protesting anything, or as North put it earlier in the week, “chanting things no one will hear.” It does feel that way sometimes, but it also feels like we’ve got to do something, and I don’t have much faith in petitions, I only have so much money to give, and the elected officials in our deep blue county and medium blue state can generally be counted on to do the right thing without our writing or calling and pleading with them to do it. So, I write and call them occasionally, write moderate-sized checks more often, and I keep marching and showing up for rallies. And I guess North’s feelings about protest vary, too, because at dinner Monday night they asked with interest if there were any marches coming up.

Metro was single-tracking on the blue, orange, and red lines, which happened to be the exact lines we’d need to get to the Mall. Parking’s out of the question, there, though, so we allowed ourselves almost two hours to get to the vigil, which was supposed to start at sundown (6:51 according to my phone’s weather app).

We had good luck with the trains and arrived on the Mall around 5:45, so we decided to take advantage of the restrooms and food trucks near the Washington Monument. We walked down the long line of food trucks, looking for vegetarian options. The first one we saw falafel, also the second, third, fourth, and fifth. In fact, the only other choice was a veggie burrito, and Beth wasn’t in the mood for either, so she decided to eat at home later, but I got some falafel and humus. By 6:15, we were walking toward the MLK memorial.

It was a pretty evening, with the clouds touched with pink and the water of the Tidal Basin rippling and silver. When we got to the memorial around 6:35, there was no evidence of a vigil, but it was still light and there was no precise official starting time so we walked around and looked at the MLK quotes carved on the back wall and then settled in on bench.

Eventually some organizers, mostly white women, showed up and started laying down posters of black girls and women who have been victims of violence or organized against it on the ground. They were unrolling a long canvas with a painted message when some park rangers came over. I guess they didn’t have a permit because soon they were picking up the posters and the canvas. There was some discussion about the food they’d brought as well, a bag of apples and some granola bars to distribute to anyone breaking their Yom Kippur fast. I think the fact that the march had inadvertently been scheduled on Yom Kippur and the ensuing criticism was probably the reason for the sunset vigil in the first place. But it never really got off the ground. We waited until 7:25, by which point it was full dark, but there were never speeches or candles, or anything very vigil-like, only a small knot of people (ten at the most) standing together, and dwarfed by a school group (mostly teenage girls and adults about the right age to be the parents or teachers of teenage girls, so I’m assuming it was a school group).

It was a disappointing outcome, but not all bad. The MLK monument is always a moving place. We watched all kinds of people—an elderly black woman on a younger woman’s arm, a middle-aged black couple, white teenagers—snap pictures in front of the statue of MLK. Plus, the Tidal Basin with the monuments all lit up is beautiful at night—there’s a reason it’s a classic D.C. date spot. It could have even felt like a date, as Beth and I were there without the kids. But it didn’t really. I was feeling melancholy and Beth seemed subdued as well. It just wasn’t the evening for activism or acting romantic, I guess.

But there’s always tomorrow. When North asked what we could do for National Coming Out Day, I wasn’t sure. Beth and I don’t really have anyone left to come out to, but I asked North if they’d like to write a guest post about being non-binary and they said yes. Stay tuned.