Category Archives: Extracurricular Activities

Show Time

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I was in the drama club in middle school from sixth grade until the middle of eighth grade when we moved.  I liked the idea of the theater but I was too shy to perform so in that two and half years I either played bit parts or took backstage jobs. The pinnacle of my dramatic career was the fall of my eighth-grade year when my best friend and I were co-stage managers for a production of Annie. I was at after-school rehearsals for months and like a lot of kids in the late 70s and early 80s, I had the soundtrack to the Broadway musical. My sister I used to sing the songs a lot and tape record ourselves doing so.  Sadly, I don’t think any of these recordings survive, but the songs remain deeply engraved in my brain.

So I was excited to hear the musical June’s drama camp director chose for this summer was Annie. June attended the same camp last year (in a younger age group) and they did The Sound of Music (“A Few of My Favorite Things” 7/16/11), which was fun, but not as much of a personal touchstone for me. Before camp started the director, Gretchen, sent MP3 files of the four songs the campers needed to learn and June did listen to them a few times but what she really liked was the movie.  We rented the 1999 Disney version.  June watched it in its entirety four times over the course of five days and I let her watch the scenes with the songs she needed to learn as often as she wanted without counting it as media time, so she must have watched those at least a dozen times.

As a result she knew the songs very well when she showed up for the first day of camp Monday morning, much better than she’d known the Sound of Music songs out of the gate.  (I wouldn’t let her watch that movie last summer, thinking the Nazis would be too much for her. I might have given it a go this summer.) It was a good thing, too, because Gretchen got right down to business, casting the girls on the first day.

I knew the campers would get to state a preference and when I asked June which character she’d like to play, she said “Annie!” and then after thinking about being the star of the show for about thirty seconds, changed her mind, settling on Molly.  Since the camp was for six to nine year olds I didn’t think there was much chance she’d be one of the Annies (the role was shared) but I thought Molly would be a great part for June. She’s the smallest orphan and I knew June would probably be the smallest girl there.  But more than that, Molly’s sweet and spunky personality seemed like a good fit for June.  I will admit I’d gotten invested in this choice by the time June changed her mind again (and again).  In the end she said she’d like to be Kate or July and Gretchen cast her as Kate, after listening to her read some of Kate’s lines.  According to June, Gretchen liked her rendering of “Holy cow! Annie’s on the radio!”

Once she was cast, June had to learn her lines.  She had four spoken lines, and two solos–two lines in “Maybe” and one line in “Hard-Knock Life.” Gretchen told me at pick-up one day that she was impressed with how seriously June was taking her role and what a leader she was.  She re-arranged the choreography to move June front and center in “Hard-Knock Life” as a result.

Over the course of the week the girls built and painted a cardboard New York skyline, splattered their costumes with paint and distressed them for the proper orphan look.  (We’d bought June an outfit at a thrift store the previous weekend. She went with a black and white jumper over a black blouse because she thought it looked suitably drab.) The actors learned the choreography for all four songs, and they practiced, practiced and practiced.  When I came into the community center auditorium to fetch June every afternoon at two o’clock, there was usually a dance number in progress.  I watched the girls learn to bang their buckets on the floor in unison and on the beat in “Hard-Knock Life” and kick and wave in the chorus line of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.”

After camp, June and I would take the bus to Silver Spring to get Noah at his drama camp.  (It was the only week this summer both kids were in camp at the same time.) His camp let out at four so we usually had at least an hour to kill. We played Sleeping Queens in Starbucks, and Smoothie King and Cake Love, and we read Ramona and her Father and Ramona and Her Mother and I watched her splash in the fountain.

At Noah’s camp (Round House, where he’s gone every summer since he was June’s age) the kids were dismissed into the lobby so I didn’t get to see his work in progress to the same extent, but he did occasionally give me a report and their artwork was displayed in the corridor every day.  It was a session on theatrical production and design so they studied set, costume, lighting, sound and projection.  They designed their ideal bedrooms to practice sketching an aerial view of a scene.  (When I saw the drawings tacked up on the wall, I knew which one was Noah’s even though they weren’t signed. It was the one with the teleporter and vaporization ray, of course.) They practiced painting cardboard with wood-grain and granite patterns.  They sketched costumes, both for Young Robin Hood and for their own skits.  Toward the end of the week, they got to walk up on the grid where the lights are.  For their performance, they were divided into groups and each group worked on a short skit.  The scripts were minimalist exchanges between two to three actors they could alter as needed. The real point was working on the technical aspects of the scene.

Friday was show time for both kids.  Beth took the afternoon off and we met at the Community Center auditorium at 1:30.  June had rushed up to me when I arrived alone, saying, “I thought Beth was coming.” I assured her Beth would be there.

And soon she was. June ran over again and gave her a big hug.  Gretchen began the performance, in character as Miss Hannigan, explaining to the audience of parents that if any of us would like to take any of the “rotten orphans” off her hands after the show, we could.  It stuck me momentarily what a strange thing it is for a group of parents to watch their well-loved and provided-for children play at poverty and neglect.  But I couldn’t think about that very long because the show swept me away.  Some songs were better executed than others, but overall, for only twenty-five hours of rehearsal the whole thing was pretty impressive.  They sang their hearts out; they nailed the bucket banging.  June shone as Kate.  She was audible (the first hurdle in any performance of kids her age) and expressive and just too cute for words.

So I will fulfill my duty as her doting mother and provide video of the show (it’s about fourteen minutes), but if you only watch one song—watch “Hard-Knock Life.”  She’s great in that one. She’s got the righteous indignation down pat.

After a brief interlude at home, during which Beth and I each snuck in some work time while June watched television, we headed over to Round House for Noah’s performance. First I we admired all the sketches in the corridor and then we took our seats, making sure to get into the front row so June could see. The counselors talked about all the aspects of design the campers had studied.  At the beginning each skit, sketches of the costumes the kids would have worn if they’d had a costume shop at their disposal flashed on a screen.  Then it was replaced by ground plans of the set, and finally a backdrop for the action.  Noah’s skit was the only one that incorporated changes in the backdrop during the scene.  He was particularly proud of the lighting, because after some experimentation, he and his partner managed to eliminate some “ugly” shadows.

Here’s the skit. It’s very short.

Once the performance was over, we headed over to the Silver Spring fountain so June could play in the water.  She was still sailing on a post-performance high, singing “Tomorrow” at full volume as she dashed through the spray.  We had an early dinner at Z pizza and got dessert at FroZenYo.

At Round House camps, particularly for Noah’s age group, they always promote whatever shows are going on at the theater and Noah suggested we see one this weekend. So on Saturday afternoon, we headed back to the very same theater where he’d been all week and watched a one-woman mime show called The Suitcase Story.  June thought the character was “kind of crazy and not very smart.” I thought she represented an allegory about self-discovery.  Beth was alarmed that there was audience participation, but she herself was not called upon to participate.  At one point the actor came up the aisle and indicated she would like June to point to a place on the map where she ought to go. June gave a comic look of indecision. The audience laughed and June seemed to enjoy being in the spotlight.

On hearing about June’s theatrical experience, our friend Tom, an actor and playwright himself, said he thought he saw an obsession coming on.  Perhaps.  June is still singing the songs from Annie around the clock and next week she’ll be heading to Round House herself for another week of drama camp. Drama camp, whether at the Round House, the Purple School or the Community center, is what our kids do without fail every summer.  And year round, they enjoy singing and writing stories and making their own movies. At our house, it’s always show time.

Derecho

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Before the Blackout

My friend Megan and I had a conversation last week we have multiple times every summer, about how complicated and crazy-making summer is for at-home parents. The main difficulty is that every day is different; there’s no routine. Megan said she recently spent two hours putting together a calendar of day camps and babysitting and appointments just so she could have it all straight. I have a calendar like that, too, just for summer, and even so I still get confused sometimes.

Last week was particularly logistically challenging, or it seemed that way at the time, because June had her first day camp. It was the shortest camp she’s attending this year, at three hours a day, and also the most inconveniently located.  But I signed her up because it was an art camp and she loves art, and because Megan’s daughter Talia was attending, and as June says, “Talia is one of my good friends.” It was fun for her seeing Talia every day and they also had two after-camp play dates, one at Megan’s house and one at a nearby playground. Both girls seemed pretty happy with the arrangements.

Beth drove June to camp three mornings out of five, and Megan pitched in with some rides home and one ride to camp so I only had to take June once and fetch her twice.  I’m grateful to both Beth and Megan for making it possible for me to spend some time with Noah and get a little work done while June was gone in the mornings. If I’d had to take her and bring her home every day I would have spent so much time on buses and at bus stops there would have been no point in my even going home. But with every single day a different transportation plan, I craved consistency.

Adding to this, Beth has also been out of town on business a lot recently, with a four-day trip earlier in the month and a two-day trip last week. These trips are easier than they were when the kids were younger, but of course, we miss her when she’s gone.

So I was feeling unsettled even before the heat wave cum four-day power outage we just experienced.  And I wasn’t the only one. When school let out, June was positively mournful.  She wrote in her diary, “I do not want summer break to be a real ting.” And she drew up a set of instructions she called, “Infermashan you need to be a good student.”  (See photo.) The day we got her summer math packet she completed half of it. I secured five play dates for her in the first few weeks after school ended, but she still missed her friends, especially before she started to go to camp last week.

As for Noah, after a fun week at YaYa’s house, he was casting around trying to remember how to amuse himself when he’s not at school or doing homework all the time. He said he was bored frequently, but he had some interesting projects going: a web site about his travels around West Virginia with YaYa  (they took a lot of road trips), a CD he and June are making of themselves singing, a mystery story they’re writing together along with the script for a movie that’s going to star the Playmobil castle people. I reminded him he has a lot of toys and kits from his birthday and even Christmas he’s never opened so last week  he spent a good bit of one afternoon on the porch breaking open geodes with a hammer.  He spent last Friday at Beth’s office doing data entry for her. (His summer drum lessons started today. It will be good for him to have at least that much structure.)

We also went on couple short family road trips.  Beth and June spent a weekend camping in Western Maryland after they delivered Noah to YaYa. I stayed at home. It was the first time I’d been apart from Beth and the kids overnight since I went to visit my father when he was dying two and a half years ago and the only time I’ve been alone in my own house overnight since Noah was born. I read and gardened and cleaned the house and had dinner at a restaurant alone.  It was a strange feeling, good and bad at the same time.  The next weekend, Beth, and June and I met YaYa and Noah near Blackwater Falls and spent the night.  We stayed at a lodge, and enjoyed one of the hiking trails, and the swimming pool and the falls themselves.

The garden became more established shortly before the power outage, which ended up being a good thing when the power went out because we could eat out of it, at least a little—tomatoes, basil, cucumbers and broccoli are all edible.  We finally planted lettuce and carrots several weeks ago and they are coming up, though too small to pick. There’s also a cute little yellow pumpkin the size of an apricot. We’re having more trouble with flowers than we usually do.  The sunflowers and zinnias for the most part either didn’t germinate or were eaten by slugs or died after being transplanted to the garden right before the first heat wave of the summer a couple week ago.  Not a single sunflower and only two zinnias survived out of around forty seeds planted. We do have some black-eyed Susans and bachelor buttons in the flower bed.

We are either going to have a really good year for tomatoes or a really bad one.  We triumphed over the white flies and the plants are laden with more green and yellow and orange fruit than we usually have this time of year, but all four of them have early blight.  I’ve been pruning the diseased branches but it’s not clear if I can get all the fungus before the plants die from excessive foliage loss.  Oh, and the squirrels are eating the tomatoes, too. I picked what I thought were around ten almost ripe cherry tomatoes last week to save them from the thieving rodents. They were so soft I tried one, and it was perfect– sweet, tart and juicy, so now I think we may have planted an orange variety and not a red one.  We had them on pasta salad that night and when Beth tried her first one she gasped a little. They were that good.

Blackout

It was Friday night that the power went out. Fierce storms were predicted, a kind of storm I’d never heard of, actually, a derecho. The name comes from the Spanish word that means straight, because it travels in a straight line. This seems ironic to me because what it did was take our routine, which already felt wobbly, and throw it into crazy loops, nothing straight about it.

The D.C. region is served by a power company with a truly wretched reliability record so I had reason to expect we’d lose power that night. I didn’t expect it to be out for four days. The really fun part was that the power outage coincided with a heat wave, our second one in two weeks.  Friday was a steamy and record-breaking 104 degrees.  Saturday was only a few degrees cooler and it’s continued in the mid to high nineties ever since. In fact, we are poised to break the record for most consecutive days with a high temperature of 95 or higher in Washington, DC tomorrow.

Sleeping was a challenge.  We put a futon on the floor for Noah so he wouldn’t have to sleep on his top bunk and we eschewed pajamas.  (June was so entranced by the idea she could sleep in just her underpants that she may never wear pajamas again.)  The first night was just awful, none of us got much sleep at all, but even though it was only a little cooler the next night, we either adjusted or were too tired to stay awake and we slept better.  June did wake up in the middle of the night every night, though, and we let her sleep in our bed with Beth (I went to sleep in hers) when she did.

Eating was a challenge, too.  We had to throw out most of what we had in the refrigerator and freezer. The first two nights we ate dinner out, but Monday I made pasta (we have a gas stove) and served it with garden produce. Then on Tuesday, Beth picked up peach gazpacho at Souper Girl on her way home from work, and the kids and I visited the Latino market near our house where we bought an avocado, some mangoes and frozen pupusas and a bag of ice, which I used to fashion a makeshift icebox out of our biggest cooler. Beth went to the 7-11 for milk Monday and Tuesday morning and we went to Starbucks every day, not only for the chance to drink an iced beverage, but to sit in the air conditioning for a while. We’d camp there, playing cards and reading.

We also enjoyed the air-conditioning at the community center on Saturday morning when we all went to watch June test for her white belt in Kung Fu.  I was concerned her fatigue might affect her performance, especially when she had trouble with the concentration exercise at the beginning of class.  The students sit on the floor with their eyes closed while the instructor drops two coins near them and they have to reach out and find them. Once she was warmed up, though, she was fine.  There was a boy from her class also testing for his white belt and he went first, and passed, and it was June’s turn. She demonstrated the first four forms and the teacher tied the sash around her waist and they bowed to one another.  She looked radiantly happy.  The instructor said he knew she’d do well because “this is business to you,” approving words from a rather stern teacher.

Then it was time to watch a teenage boy from the advanced class test for his green belt.  At this level the moves are much faster.  The boy was nervous but he was also quick, flexible and strong. I was sitting behind June but I could see her face in the mirror as she watched him with rapt attention. Her mouth hung open a few times in pure admiration. I think one of the things June likes about Kung Fu is the orderly progression of the belts and that you have to earn them. It isn’t like soccer where everyone gets a medal at the end of the season.  You don’t test for a belt until the instructor thinks you’re ready and not everyone passes.  June saw a boy test for his yellow belt and fail in the spring. (He passed the next week.)

I was unable to work Monday or Tuesday because the power was out at June’s old preschool where she was supposed to attend camp. They re-opened on Tuesday morning but we still didn’t have power and the notebook computer Beth generously lent me wasn’t getting a good Internet connection.  Even though I didn’t work it was nice to have some semblance of routine on Tuesday and June was delighted to go to camp with more than a third of her old class (even though I did misremember the opening time and drop her off a half hour late). I am a creature of habit. That’s why summer, even under normal circumstances is difficult for me and that’s why I turned down my mother’s kind invitation to come up to Pennsylvania and stay with them. We didn’t know when the power would come back and I wanted to everyone to get back to camp and work and normalcy as soon as we could.

The power outage wasn’t all bad, though, especially the first two days. We spent a little more time than usual together, seeking air-conditioned places and eating out. Partially deprived of television and the computer—we do have some battery operated electronic devices—the kids were forced to find other ways to amuse themselves. They designed and played a series of board games (we took June’s first one to Starbucks to play it and I was impressed that it does in fact work, even though it’s very simple).

After the Blackout

Then Tuesday night the power finally came back and we could do dishes and laundry and turn on the fans and the air-conditioning and drink ice water and life was better. Wednesday was the fourth of July.  In the morning we attended Takoma’s quirky little parade and in the afternoon Beth went grocery shopping and I worked for a couple hours before our backyard picnic of veggie dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, watermelon and limeade.

That night Beth and Noah went to the fireworks.  Because I am the strictest mother on the planet when it comes to bedtime, it’s the first time Noah’s ever seen fireworks. But I had to let him stay up past his bedtime sometime and it seemed like the right year.  When he came home he said it was louder than he expected and that he didn’t realize the fireworks would “light everything up” the way they did.  Beth snapped a picture of his illuminated face, watching his first firework display. I think she was as happy to go as he was.  I suppose a little deviation from the routine isn’t the worst thing in the world.  Maybe that’s the lesson of the derecho.  Let it be said, though, it’s not a lesson I want to review any time soon.

Crouching Kitty, Hidden Frog

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June’s been busy the past few days. She had a four-day weekend so we filled the time with play dates, three in all, two of which featured tea parties, and she also had a birthday party to attend. But what I want to write about is her first experience with public speaking and her new Kung Fu class.

Kindergarten Roundtable: Thursday

There was no kindergarten at June’s school Thursday and Friday of last week so next year’s kindergarten students could tour their classrooms and meet their future teachers.  June and Maggie had a six-hour play date on Thursday that began at our house and ended at Maggie’s– the idea was that Maggie’s work-at-home dad and I could both squeeze a little work into the day. After they played here and before they played at Maggie’s, I took the girls to the Purple School where they and Gabriella gave a presentation to the current Tracks class about what to expect from kindergarten.  June was looking forward to the talk. She and Maggie compared notes on what they might say beforehand and they both seemed excited to go back to preschool and be the experts. When we got to school Lesley and Andrea and P.J., the teacher’s aide, all greeted her warmly.

It was only about two minutes before she was to go on that June got cold feet.  She held tightly to my hand as she waited to begin.  Lesley arranged the three kindergarteners on chairs in front of the Tracks, who sat on the bench built into the wall and on the floor.  June spoke so softly at first that her answers were inaudible.  One of the Tracks complained that he couldn’t hear her.  Lesley asked what we do when someone speaks softly.  Be quiet and listen closely someone answered.  I suspect there’s a very quiet child in the class, because the answer sounded rehearsed. After a couple questions, however, June began to relax and speak in her normal voice and soon all three girls were answering questions and volunteering information about how they got to school, where they ate lunch and went to the bathroom, what their favorite part of school was.  June said hers was listening to the teacher read stories and doing her work.  “That’s a new one,” Lesley commented. Apparently gym, art and recess are popular answers.

It was nice to be back in the cozy atmosphere of the Purple School and to see the teachers and some familiar parents– Maggie’s dad and Gabriella’s dad of course, but also some Tracks parents I know.  The Eastern Fence Lizard (whom June met at camp last summer) was happy to see June, insisting she come back in to say goodbye to him once she had left the building.

Kung Fu Kitty: Saturday

“Look at what I’m wearing,” June said to Beth, who was in the shower. I’d advised June to wear something that would allow her to move easily because in the morning she had her first Kung Fu lesson and in the afternoon one of the Purple Pandas was having a basketball-themed birthday party. As it was being held in a church gym, I suspected they would actually play basketball at the party.

Beth peeked out of the shower to see June in her pink Hello Kitty pants and t-shirt.  This was not much of a surprise. Ever since her birthday, she wears this outfit (with or without a long-sleeved tee underneath) pretty much whenever it’s clean.

“You’re a Kung Fu kitty,” Beth exclaimed and June laughed.

June is allowed two activities per season and spring will be a science class and Kung Fu. She’s taking science because I let her choose one of several after-school activities at her school and a lot of her friends have been in the science class so she wanted to try it.  The same group that teaches it has a summer camp at the community college she might try that out next summer if she likes it.  (Noah went to that camp for years and loved it.)  Kung Fu, though, was entirely her idea.  She said she wanted to take karate and this was the closet thing I could find that was offered at a convenient time and place.

The Kung Fu class meets in the dance studio of the community center. It’s a room with a full-wall mirror, which is handy for watching your moves.  We were early and then the class was locked out of the room for a while so we were all waiting for a bit before class started.  The group consisted of eight kids, three girls and five boys, ranging in age from four or five years old to maybe nine or ten. At least three of the kids were returning students.

Once we were inside the room the teacher started off right away, without much in the way of introduction; he wove his comments throughout the class instead.  He taught them how to bow and had them pledge not to use what they learned in class against siblings or classmates, and never to harm any living thing except in the defense of other living things. He explained how you have to be calm to do Kung Fu– it was not all crazy kicks like they might have seen on television. Also, this would be Jamaican-style Kung Fu, he told them, not Chinese.  The instructor learned from his uncle, a Jamaican Kung Fu master, he said. I had no idea there was such a thing as Jamaican-style Kung Fu— but you learn something new every day.

The three returning students, two of whom are about to take their gold belt test, demonstrated their skills. Then everyone practiced some poses and moves. The teacher was a stern sort of character; two students had to sit out part of class for being too wiggly in the case of one girl, or for putting his hands in his pockets then rolling his eyes when asked to remove them in the case of one of the older boys. (That boy was out for the rest of class.)  It might not have been a good class for Noah when he was six and wiggly, but June excels at paying close attention and following directions. The teacher noticed this and said she was “a wise little one.” She’s also strong and flexible, so soon the teacher was saying she was “a natural” and asking if she’d ever taken a martial art before.  I said no, but that she’s had yoga.  And ballet, though I didn’t think to mention that at the time. I think both those activities probably helped her get off to a good start.

They had to try an exercise next, squatting like a frog and then lifting their feet off the floor and balancing on their palms.  One of the experienced students managed twenty seconds in this pose. Some kids couldn’t do it at all.  (I doubt I could.) June’s bare feet cleared the floor for a few seconds.  Later she said that was her favorite part.  They did some somersaults and practiced bowing again and class was over.  June was quite satisfied with her first day of Kung Fu.

She has more to anticipate, however.  After-school science starts next week.  The theme is forensics.  She is very excited to learn how to solve crimes and as always, I’m excited for her as she tries something new. I love to see her finding her voice and finding her strength.

Leap Year

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Yesterday morning, after snuggling between Beth and me in bed for a while, June wanted me to read Are You My Mother? to her. I said I needed to use the bathroom first.  When I came back, June was reading it to Beth.  I thought she might tire after a page or two and hand it to me to finish, but she read the whole book.  All sixty-four pages as she pointed out repeatedly, until she flipped to the last page, saw it was an illustration and scrupulously amended her count to sixty-three pages. Her reading was fluent at times, halting at others.  She got tripped up on predictable words like “could” and “right.”  It is never so clear that English pronunciation makes no sense at all as when you have a new reader.

So I guess it’s official. June’s a reader now.  (And she’s not content with picture books either. She’s been trying to read Pippi Longstocking for the past few weeks, at the rate of about a page a day, and with questionable comprehension.)

She’s also a writer. Over the course of the school year she’s had the same homework assignment many times: Draw a picture of something that starts with a given letter and write a sentence about it.  Then a few weeks ago, Señora T upped the ante. The new assignment was: Draw something that starts with the letter Q and write two or more sentences about it.  Well, June latched right onto the “or more” part.  She wrote: “El quetzal es un pajaro. El quetzal puede volar. El quetzal es muchos colores.” (“The quetzal is a bird. The quetzal can fly. The quetzal is many colors.”)  Then pointed out she’d written three sentences and in case I hadn’t noticed, she informed me, “Three is more than two.” About a week later she got the same assignment for the letter Z and three sentences about carrots followed. On the back of booklet of coloring pages about parts of a snowman, she wrote the following impromptu composition, which was not assigned: “El invierno es divertido. mi mama no le gusta el nieve. mi otro mama si le gusta el nieve.” (“Winter is fun. my mom doesn’t like the snow. my other mom does like the snow.”) She drew a picture of the three of us in the snow, Beth and June smiling, me frowning.  For this she received a star next to the smiley face that denotes completed work.  The star is for extra effort.  But my favorite piece of recent writing is her essay on ancient Egypt.  This wasn’t schoolwork– she did it at home, after I read her a book on the topic. If you click on the photo it will enlarge.

Some years are almost magic when you’re raising kids.  The year from one to two is a favorite of mine.  At the beginning, you have a baby who maybe knows a few words and doesn’t walk and at the end you have a running, jumping, climbing chatterbox.  When Noah was around two one of the teachers at his day care asked another if he spoke in sentences yet and his teacher answered, “He speaks in paragraphs.” Both of my kids have been pretty much like that.  The kindergarten year is another notable one.  This is what my kids do that year: they start going to school full time, they acquire a life that’s separate from me, they learn to speak Spanish, and they learn to read in English and Spanish.  The Spanish immersion program at June’s school is full-day in kindergarten (it switches to half-day in first grade) so she is not receiving any formal instruction in reading in English, but it doesn’t seem to matter.  Being taught to read in another language seemed to flip the switch for her just as it did for Noah, in both cases right before their sixth birthdays. Kindergarten is a year of leaps.

June’s learning things outside of school, too.  Basketball is over, and June never became one of the more skilled players on her team, which finished the season with a 0-8 record. But she did improve and as competitive as she is sometimes, she seems satisfied with that. She made her only basket of the season in practice last Friday night and she was stoked.  (And I missed it because I glanced away while talking to another mom!) Her yoga teacher is full of praise for how “focused” and “serious” she is and June can do a pretty impressive split now. She’s recently taught herself how to pump on the swings and doesn’t even need a starting push any more.

I knew she could do this because Beth took June to the playground over the weekend and she mentioned it, but I got to see it firsthand yesterday. We stopped at the playground for about twenty minutes on our way home from yoga.  I went to sit on a bench and started digging through the papers in her backpack while she went down the slides.  Then I glanced up and saw her on the swing, sailing through air, her legs in their pink leggings pointed toward the sky.  I hadn’t even noticed her get on the swing.

She can also jump rope.  They were doing a jump-roping fundraiser for the American Heart Association at her school and they focused on it for a few weeks in gym class leading up to it, and while she still gets tangled up in the rope, she gets more and more jumps completed in between the tangles. And now it’s one of her favorite things to do right before she gets on the school bus in the morning or after school.

Noah is teaching her to multiply, with half decent results. She clearly understands the concept even if her execution of it is shaky.  She’s also learning to tell jokes that make sense.  On the way to basketball practice every Friday evening for the last eight weeks, we got a ride with her coach Mike and there were usually at least three Pandas in the minivan.  They usually told jokes all the way there. Here is June’s new favorite, which she learned from Maggie:

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting Cow
Interrupting Cow Wh…
MOO!

June turned her calendar page to March this morning, even though she knew it was still February.  She’s gotten into the habit of crossing off the days but often she gets impatient and crosses off a day before it’s actually over.  That’s my girl, always looking ahead, always taking the next leap forward.

Fly Like an Eagle

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I’ve been spending a lot of time in schools recently, two high schools, two middle schools and two elementary schools in the past nine days. I’m writing a grant for two D.C. public charter schools and I needed to visit their campuses to interview the principals. Then we got the news about Noah’s middle school applications: one thick envelope and one thin.  He got into the humanities magnet but not the math and science magnet, so that simplifies our choices. We attended a meeting for admitted students on Thursday evening.  And then as she does every Friday and Saturday, June had basketball practice at one elementary school and a game at her own school.  In between, we attended a girls’ high school basketball game, a field trip for the Purple Pandas.

Writing these grants has been a real learning experience, both in terms of re-learning how to write grants and in learning about charter schools.  (The grants not actually finished, but I’m waiting for feedback between drafts.)  I’m not an education specialist, but I have been impressed and moved by the dedication of the school officials with whom I spoke and with their sense of urgency about closing the achievement gap.  The middle school serves a majority low-income Latino population, with a high proportion of English language learners.  The high school is largely African-American and poor, too. They’ve made impressive gains in recent years in test scores and in the case of the high school, in college acceptance rates. They are applying for grants to pay stipends to the teachers who currently volunteer to stay after school to tutor kids and to increase the number of college campuses the high school students can visit.  I really want them to win, but I know they are up against many probably equally deserving schools and there’s only so much grant money to go around.

Both schools are part of the Chávez network, named for Cesar Chávez.  Their mascot is an eagle, an homage to the symbol of the United Farm Workers.  By a strange co-incidence, the mascot of Noah’s middle school is also an eagle. It was a strange thread tying these campuses together.  The cafeteria of the charter high school is called The Eagle Café; there were posters of eagles in a couple of the magnet middle school classrooms. Everywhere I went, I was seeing eagles.  Halfway through the tour of Noah’s new school, I started humming, “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Of course, there are significant differences between the schools.  The charter schools are open enrollment; that’s part of their mission.  The magnet Humanities program has a competitive admission process and an advanced curriculum.  There was some diversity among the admitted students at Noah’s school. I saw kids of all races, but it was definitely a majority white crowd.

Do I feel some white liberal guilt about this? Yeah, I do, because Noah’s school sounds like it will be such a wonderful place for him to learn and grow over the next three years.  At one point during the orientation, Beth leaned over and whispered to me, “I want to go here.” I knew what she meant.  In their English class at the beginning of sixth grade they will be reading Watership Down, The Hobbit, and Animal Farm (I lost track of the reading list after that). In seventh grade, they study and perform Shakespeare.  (There’s a stage built into the classroom for this express purpose.)  They learn to use a university library for research in the seventh grade. They design car bumpers and pretend to be a forensic unit investigating a food poisoning case in science class. They take a media class every year. One of the sixth-grade projects is to make an animated film of a Greek myth (using Garage Band, a favorite program of Noah’s) for the soundtrack.  In eighth grade, they take a five-day field trip to New York City for the purpose of making documentary films, which are shown at the end of the year at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring. Now tell the truth, don’t you want to go there, too?

As we left the school, Beth asked Noah, “Are you ready to be an eagle?”  He responded with the shriek of a bird of prey.  I suspect it was a yes.

The next night we were at the high school both kids will most likely attend. It’s our home school and both the math/science and humanities magnets are housed there, so no matter where their interests take them, they will probably end up there.  Mike, June’s basketball coach, had gotten the idea that seeing a basketball game might improve the girls’ game. (The Purple Pandas have lost all six of their games so far, but their morale remains high, thanks to Mike’s sensitive and positive coaching.) The Pandas wore their team shirts and sat together, watching the game pretty intently for five and six year olds.  At half time, they were invited down to the court to exchange high-fives with the home team.  This was the highlight of the game for a lot of them. They kept asking, “When will it be half time? When will we do the high fives?” There were cheerleaders at the game and Beth and I wondered if June would be more interested in their uniforms and routines than the game, especially when we saw the enormous bows that had in their hair for some reason. June definitely took notice, but as we walked back to the car, she was running up the sidewalk as fast as she could, darting to the left and weaving to the right, pretending to be a big girl, running across a basketball court, heading straight for the basket.

I want them to fly like eagles, all of them, on basketball courts and athletic fields, in classrooms and on stages and in science labs, the kids who enter middle school years beyond grade-level work and those who enter years behind and those who are smack dab in the middle. Is that so much to ask?

Hoop Dreams

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Friday morning at breakfast I told June that she would have an unusual afternoon. After playing outside and watching television (these are the usual parts of her after-school routine) she’d have a bath and we’d have an early dinner because we were leaving for basketball practice at 5:40 and we wouldn’t get back until bedtime.  June perked up on hearing this. She loves starting new things, which is why she’s already starting her third team sport a few months before her sixth birthday.  She’s allowed up to two extracurricular activities at a time. Fall was soccer and ballet.  Winter is basketball and yoga. Yoga will be an after-school class on Tuesdays, which I think will make things easier in terms of weekend scheduling because basketball actually meets twice a week—Friday evening practices and Saturday morning or afternoon games.

That afternoon she came home, played in the yard while I took clothes off the clothesline, watched Maya and Miguel and Arthur, her current favorites, took a quick bath and then got changed into a t-shirt and bike shorts underneath sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt. I ordered pizza and the kids and I were eating before 5:00 p.m.  After dinner I pulled her still damp hair into pigtails and we were on the porch waiting for our ride at 5:40. It had been a stunningly beautiful sunny day after a four-day-long cold snap and it was still quite warm, if dark, so June was happy to climb on the porch walls and jump over the row of candy cane lights that still adorn our yard.

June’s team is an all-girl, mostly kindergarten team being coached by Maggie’s dad Mike, who was giving us a ride because Beth is not home early enough. In the min-van along with Maggie, Mike, June and me, was another player (the youngest one, who’s still in preschool) and her older sister, a middle-schooler, who’s serving as Mike’s assistant coach.  We drove to the elementary school where practice is held.  The gym was packed. All the kindergarten teams were there and there were probably at least fifty kids, plus parents and coaches. Among the kids on other teams we saw two of June’s classmates, including Malachi, and a former nursery school classmate.

Some of the time all the teams practiced together—watching fifty five and six year olds all running around the gym and dribbling was particularly impressive—but mostly they were split into their teams.  Mike obviously put a lot of thought into the games and activities he designed, and he followed Maggie’s interests.  There was a game called “Protect the Princess,” in which laminated printouts of Disney and Star Wars heroines and villains were scattered on the floor.  The girls had to try to dribble the basketballs on the villains while avoiding the princesses. The game I played with them was “Magic Rock.”  The girls were fairies passing each other a magic rock (i.e. basketball) while a witch (me) or troll (Mike) tried to block them.  If they could complete six passes before the witch/troll intercepted the ball, the villain fell asleep and the fairies won.  There was another game called “Loose Ball.” All the players except one had to stand facing the wall while the other one tossed the ball into the air as high as she could and yelled “Loose ball!” at which point they’d all turn around and scramble to catch it. During the course of this game one the girls made a basket, completely by accident. I wondered if we’d found our center because those baskets are eight feet off the ground and the average girl on the team might be over four feet tall if she stood on tiptoe.  (June’s not even three and a half feet tall.) I wondered if any of them would ever score in a real game.

During the team meeting Mike produced the team shirts, purple much to June’s delight, and the girls voted on a team name from a list Maggie had brainstormed ahead of time (though there were a couple more candidates added).  The Purple Pandas won, with the Purple Penguins a close second.  (One girl suggested the Purple Grapes because her soccer team was called the Orange Oranges.)  Mike talked about being a team and being a good sport and solicited opinions about what that might mean, then he asked them to each name something for which they were thankful. June said that trees made oxygen for people to breathe, but the gym was too loud for me to hear most of the other girls’ responses.

In the van on the way home, Mike asked the girls what they liked about practice. June wasn’t specific– she just said, “I loved it!”  Later she said she liked dribbling the ball and the “Protect the Princess” game.

This morning June wanted some temporary tattoos applied and Beth replied in an off-hand way that it was a good idea because basketball players have a lot of tattoos.  Well, that settled it. June selected a butterfly and an assortment of suns and moons, including a band of them that went around her leg just above the ankle.  She had one on every arm and leg by the time Beth had finished to her satisfaction.

This afternoon’s game was in a different elementary school gym, this one at June’s school.  When we got there the 12:00 teams were still finishing up and the 1:00 teams were drifting in so it was a bit chaotic. We saw a boy who used to attend June’s preschool leaving. When the teams were sorted out there were two kindergarten teams and two second-grade teams.  There was a half-hour practice period before the game, much of which was shooting practice.  I’d thought the fact that all the kids are so far from the basket might eliminate June’s height disadvantage but she never made a basket during the practice time (none of her shots even reached the bottom of the net), even though a few of her team-mates did. The youngest player, the one still in preschool, actually made the most.

The Purple Pandas were playing an all-boy team in green t-shirts.  Malachi and one of June’s former preschool classmates were playing on that team and they both got baskets.  (Ram also got a “bleedy nose,” as June put it later.  I didn’t see how it happened but I saw him crying and comforted by several adults and later I saw someone come to clean the blood up off the court.) Actually Malachi didn’t just get a basket, he got the majority of his team’s baskets.  I knew he liked sports and now I know why.  The kid’s got game.  The green team shut out the Purple Pandas, who often looked shocked when the green players knocked the ball out of their hands, despite having been warned by Mike both Friday and today that this would happen, that it wasn’t rude or mean, it was just part of the game.  As the game progressed the girls got better at running to defend their basket when they lost control of the ball, instead of just standing there looking shocked. So that was progress.  A few of them, including Sally (formerly known as the Raccoon) and her first-grade sister showed some hustle by the end of the game.

They all seemed happy after the game and when I asked June if she had fun, she gave me a smile and a nod.  I don’t think it’s realistic to expect basketball will be June’s sport in the long term. Gymnastics is probably more like it, based on her small size and wiry strength (not to mention her performance on the monkey bars on the school playground after the game, but I think she’ll enjoy the next two months of practices and games, and who knows, maybe one day she’ll even toss that ball in the air and see it sail through the hoop—nothing but net.

A Half Older

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It’s just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead.

From “The End of the Summer” by Dar Williams

Sunday: A Different Ball Game

On a cool, cloudy afternoon, the third Sunday in September, Beth, June and I stood on the playing field of the same middle school that hosts the folk festival. This time we weren’t there to hear a bluegrass band, however. We were there for June’s first-ever soccer scrimmage. She played soccer the fall she was three and a half and again the spring she was four, but she’d lost interest and skipped a year before deciding to give it another try. Kindergarten soccer is different than preschool soccer. There are games against other teams, like in t-ball, and this appealed to June. Also, she wants another medal to hang from the beams of the lower bunk bed.

Four or five of June’s preschool classmates are playing on a Saturday morning team but she wanted to do ballet this fall, too, and that conflicted with that team’s practice time, so we signed her up for a Sunday team. I think I was more disappointed about her not being on a team with friends than she was. It felt like all her friends being in the other kindergarten class all over again, like a missed opportunity. It’s sad to see them go their separate ways, knowing how easy it is for kids to drift apart and forget each other. Noah barely remembers any of his preschool classmates who didn’t go to elementary school with him.

But June was not indulging in any melancholy thoughts on the soccer field. She was happy and excited and ready to play. It took a while for us to locate the maroon team, but once we did the coach handed out their t-shirts and sat them down in a circle to talk about what was going to happen and then got them doing drills right away.

Beth and I watched from the sidelines. When the coach said they were going to play sharks and minnows, Beth said, “I hope she’s not still afraid of this.” June hated sharks and minnows in preschool soccer. The sight of the coach and other players pretending to be menacing sharks was just too much for her. This is how it works: All the players have a soccer ball they dribble around the field. The coach, who’s the original shark, tries to take their balls. Once a player’s ball is taken from him or her, the player becomes a shark too and goes after other kids’ balls, until all balls are out of play and everyone is a shark. June showed no signs of ever having been afraid of this game, but she did forget the rules. When a fellow player kicked her ball away from her, she said indignantly, “That’s mine!” and the coach had to come over and explain the game to her again. Once she understood she was right out there trying to kick other kids’ balls away from them.

For the next drill, the coach balanced a soccer ball on a cone and arranged the players in a circle around it. They were to kick their balls at it all at once and try to knock it down. On the first try no-one’s ball went anywhere near the cone, but on the second try one of the taller boys knocked it down. He knew it was his ball that did it, too, because he pumped his fist in the air.

After almost an hour of practice, it was time for the game. June’s team divided and half their players went over to play another team while half of the yellow team came over to our part of the field. The yellow Cheetahs looked a little more organized than our team. They had appeared to be well into practice before our team had even assembled and they had their names and numbers written in marker on the backs of their shirts. The coach was also more intent on diving them into offensive and defensive lines that ours was. “They’re going to get slaughtered,” I predicted to Beth.

But they didn’t. The Maroon Pumas won the match, 3-1. This was mainly because of the boy who knocked the soccer ball off the cone during practice. This kid has moves. He scored two out of the three goals, and made a few good saves when they ball was near our team’s goal, too. (There are no goalies at this level.)

Considering she was the second smallest kid on her team and has had no soccer instruction in the past year and a half, June did great. She had no fear of getting into the mix, ran after the ball, and usually remembered which direction to kick it when she got the chance. (This is a big issue with five and six-year-old players. At halftime our coach’s whole message was which direction to kick the ball.) She even kept control of the ball and moved it toward the right goal for at least five yards at one point.

Beth kept yelling, “Go, Junie!” whenever June had the ball and then said to me, “I really shouldn’t be so into this.” I was quieter but I was keeping score in my head. Even though I thought I’d keep score at June’s t-ball games, I never did. I don’t think anyone did. Because every player swung until he or she got a hit and the inning ended after everyone had a turn, and fielding was such that almost everyone advanced a base whenever anyone hit the ball, scores were high and kind of meaningless. This was a different ball game, however. And I saw in a way I never really had before why soccer is the game of choice for elementary-school age kids all over suburban America as well as much of the world. There aren’t as many rules to master and five-year-olds can play something more closely resembling the real thing. Play was unpredictable and fun to watch.

By the end of the game, June was flagging. She’d been running around for an hour and half and she was ready to be done. Every time play slowed or stopped, she plopped down on the grass and started to pick blades of it. She’d jump up every time the ball started to move again, though. When the game was over she was excited. “We scored a goal!” she said. I informed her they’d scored three. She was surprised. She’d missed that. She’d heard the other team cheering when they scored and thought maybe the Yellow Cheetahs had won. No, I told her, her team won. Even when she thought they’d lost, she was pleased with her performance, “It was like my brain just remembered—this is how you play soccer!” she said, all smiles.

Friday: The Half-Birthday Girl

June climbed into our bed at 6:50 on Friday morning. “It’s Friday!” she announced. She’d been looking forward to a classmate’s birthday party that afternoon all week. It felt funny, thinking about sending her to this party because I barely know the girl, having met her once at the Open House but I know she and June have been playing together and sitting with each other on the bus. June’s never been on a play date or to a party at the house of a kid I don’t know, but I guess there’s a lot of that in her future now that she’s in a big public elementary school and not a small co-operative preschool. I learned last weekend when we were all having pizza at Sasha’s house that June’s new friend lives next door to Sasha’s family. Somehow this made it a little easier to think about leaving her there.

“It’s also your half-birthday,” Beth reminded June and told her she’d picked up the cupcakes at the grocery store the night before, while June was in bed. June had selected them ahead of time. They were patriotic, with red and blue sprinkles on white frosting and topped with plastic flags and statutes of Liberty. They were in the frozen section so they might have been left over from September 11. (Would anyone buy or sell patriotic cupcakes for September 11? I’m really not sure, but I don’t want to think they’re left over from the Fourth of July.)

June wanted to go see them immediately. She thought she remembered there was only one with a flag. “And do you know who gets it when there’s only one?” she asked.

“The half-birthday girl,” Beth surmised, correctly.

Then June realized it was also the first day of fall. “I’ve waited so long for this day,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

Because after fall comes winter and then spring, she answered, and she can go sledding in winter and her real birthday is in the spring. “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” Beth sang. June is always looking several months ahead, wanting whatever it is that comes next. She is good at beginnings, pushing herself into new things. She loves kindergarten and gets on the bus each morning without a backward glance, even as I linger to watch her walk up the steps.

It was an odd afternoon and evening. A power line went down near our house and the power went out three times, staying out for all but an hour between 2:30 and 8:30. Later I joked on Facebook that the alternation between light and dark was an equinox-themed performance art piece by the power company. Our street was blocked off, too, so June’s bus was forty minutes late. I thought she’d be rattled because she was the last time the bus was (much less) late but she seemed to shrug it off. She now knows the bus is sometimes late. When she got home we had to hurry to the party, taking the long way because our most direct route was blocked to pedestrians as well as traffic.

She did balk a little at being left at Keller’s house. There was only one other guest she knew; the rest were Keller’s preschool friends. So I stayed until she felt comfortable and then left her with the rest of the cape and tiara-wearing five and six year olds. (It was a She-Ra themed party.) There was no power at Keller’s house either. I approved of her parents’ spirit of adventure in continuing with the party.

After I fetched June there was just enough time to heat up dinner from cans (luckily we have a gas stove) and to eat her half-birthday cupcakes before I put her to bed. She fell asleep by the light of the camping lantern in the hall, soon after commenting, “I’m a half older now.”

Saturday: Tiny Dancer

On the sidewalk outside the dance studio, June had a flash of nerves. Beth scooped her up into her arms and reminded her she often felt a little nervous before starting something new but it usually passed quickly. I wondered if it was just too many new things and too many new people in a short period of time. June’s friend Gabriella (a.k.a the Ground Beetle) is enrolled in the ballet class but was spending the weekend with her grandparents so she had to miss the first session.

“How old are you?” The receptionist wanted to know, as we were checking June in and ordering her ballet uniform.

“Five and a half,” June answered, after a pause.

The receptionist wanted to know why she had to think about it and we explained she had only been five and a half for a day.

Soon after this exchange, Talia (whom I will always secretly think of as the Mallard Duck) and her father and brother walked in the door. I knew her mom was thinking of signing her up for this ballet class but I hadn’t wanted to get June’s hopes up so I had not mentioned it to her. June was delighted. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here!” she exclaimed. And like that, all nervousness was gone.

Parents watched the lesson through a large window in the studio wall. We could see but not hear, so we had to guess what the teacher might be asking them as they sat in a circle and raised their hands in different combinations. Beth said it was like watching a silent movie, and Talia’s dad, Tom, laughed. We watched as the eight girls, mostly in pale pink or black leotards stood in a circle holding hands and standing on their toes and as they stood with their feet flat on the ground and bent their knees deeply. They walked in a line, watching themselves in the mirrored wall and mimicking the movements of the teacher. They practiced at the barre. June stood for an astonishingly long time on the toes of one foot with her other leg extended behind her. She only quit after her leg started to tremble visibly. A couple of the girls had trouble paying attention and wandered around the room instead, but June was all focus, sometimes smiling, but more often looking dead serious.

At one point I thought I heard the music to the Mexican Hat Dance but I wasn’t sure if it was coming from June’s studio or one of the other rooms. The two-to-four year old class was practicing nearby. June told me later they danced to a song from The Lion King and to “Penny Lane,” one of the few Beatles songs she can identify. When class was over, the girls got their hands stamped and then lined up to take a running leap toward the door.

June was not as elated as she was after the soccer game, but she was quietly satisfied. As we were on our way out, the receptionist asked her how it went and she gave her a thumbs up. “So you’ll be back next week?” she asked.

“Yeah,” June said in a matter-of-fact voice.

And she will be back, back to school, back to soccer, back to ballet. It should all be routine now that she’s gotten the last of the beginnings under her belt. After all, it’s just that time of year and she’s a half older.

A Few of My Favorite Things

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“Brown paper packages tied up with strings/These are a few of my favorite things,” June sang as she stepped out of the bathtub Thursday evening.

“You’re going to be great tomorrow,” I told her, wrapping her in a towel and kissing her on the nose.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because you’ve been practicing so hard,” I said.

Friday was the last day of the only week this summer when both kids had camp at the same time. As they were both in drama camps, we had two performances to attend. June was going to be Marta in a revue of songs from The Sound of Music and Noah was playing Simon in a scene from a stage adaptation of Lord of the Flies. And to top off our day of the performing arts, Beth and I had a date for dinner and a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was playing at the American Film Institute (http://www.afi.com/). We were celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of our first date.

We’re about halfway through the two-week stretch of the summer I’ve been anticipating more than any other except our beach week in August. I’ve just had a week of kid-free mornings, which I split pretty satisfactorily between relaxation and working on abstracts. Next week is the only week this summer when June has camp (Music Tink—they will make their own instruments) and Noah doesn’t. I’ve been looking forward to this as much as the me-time of last week because while June and I have a lot of time alone together Noah and I don’t and he’s good company. Then next weekend, the kids are having their long-awaited weekend with Mom and Jim, while Beth and I stay in a B &B in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chadds_Ford_Township,_Delaware_County,_Pennsylvania).

Friday morning I heard one of the kids stirring just before six. I hoped it was Noah, who would read quietly until breakfast at 7:15, and not June, who would climb into bed with us and probably not go back to sleep or let me sleep. I was just about asleep again myself when June came into the room ten minutes later, announcing she’d wet the bed. Now I knew we were definitely not going back to sleep.

“Happy anniversary,” Beth mumbled sleepily as I instructed to June to take off her wet pajama bottoms and underwear and leave them in the sink, put on dry underpants and come to bed with us. Her bed could wait, I decided. We snuggled and read some books and eventually got up.

By the time we left for camp at 8:20, I’d started the dishwasher, as well as two loads of laundry, and carried the drying rack with June’s freshly laundered mattress cover to a sunny spot in the yard so it would be dry by Quiet Time, and packed June’s snack, a chore that involved actual cooking (well, boiling an egg). Even needing to go back to the house twice for forgotten items (including cucumbers from our garden, a thank you gift to the White-Tailed Deer’s dad for driving June home from camp this week), we were still early to camp. June was that excited and eager to get going. “It’s too bad Noah can’t come because this show is going to be awesome,” she predicted, though she also confessed to being “a little nervous.” I assured her Ms. Gretchen has a lot of experience with kids and shows and she would know how to put her at ease.

After I dropped June off I lingered in the rec center lobby, drinking bottled coffee and writing and listening to the children practice their songs in the nearby auditorium. I had decided to stay in the general area because I wanted to do laps at the public pool at the elementary school next door and it didn’t make sense in terms of time to go home after that. After a long swim, I returned to the rec center lobby and read the newspaper until parents (including Beth, who had a morning doctor’s appointment and had taken the whole day off) started trickling in. The drama teacher’s parents were there to watch their granddaughter in the show. They had two bouquets of pink carnations, one for Gretchen, I assumed, and one for her daughter. Gretchen’s daughter, we learned, was wearing an authentic Austrian dress, a brown jumper with embroidery (not precisely a dirndl because it lacked the apron, but it was close).

Three of June’s nursery school classmates (the Ghost Crab, Ground Beetle and White-Tailed Deer) and another Purple School alum from the class ahead of theirs, who June knew from science camp last summer, were all attending this camp, so I knew a lot of the parents. It was fun to see them and chat, though I was sorry to see the Ghost Crab’s mom, who is one week overdue with her third child, hasn’t had the baby yet. We all hope it will be soon.

Finally, it was show time. We all took our seats, and oh, the cuteness, I cannot adequately describe the cuteness. The children, all girls ages four to six, had all been cast as Von Trapp children and had been instructed to dress as they thought a Von Trapp child should. At first this was distressingly vague as I am not all that familiar with The Sound of Music. It’s possible I’ve never seen it. I’m not sure. But Google Images is my friend and I decided June’s yellow dress with the purple flowers and white bib was old school enough and even called the play clothes made of curtains to mind. The girls had interpreted Gretchen’s instructions in varying ways. A lot of them had braids and wore jumpers with blouses but a lot of them just went in the fancy dress direction. One girl was resplendent in a sparkly purple gown that looks nothing like what anyone in the film ever wears. June was probably somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of authenticity. I put her hair in pigtails because I have not yet learned to braid hair (although I suspect this may be in my future.)

The show consisted of a brief scene in which the Von Trapp children, played by campers (and one college-age assistant who played one of the boys) introduce themselves to Maria, played by Gretchen, followed by four songs, one of which was musical narration for a puppet show with sock puppets the kids had made. There was also a lot of choreography and I have to say the girls did a pretty good job knowing where on the stage they needed to sit, walk, run or dance. Because there were fifteen kids it was not imperative that they all know all the lyrics to all the songs as long as some of them were singing at any given time, which is more or less how it worked out. In the introduction scene they didn’t even need to say their lines alone as most of the Von Trapp children were played by two or three real children. June’s line was “I’m Marta. I’m turning seven on Tuesday and I want a pink parasol.” I couldn’t actually hear her over the other two Martas.

We took a video of the entire show for Noah, at his request. He’s in the process of editing the footage now. Let me know if you’d like a look when he and Beth have finished.

When the show was over, all the girls got a pink carnation from the bouquets. I’m not sure if that was the original idea, or if Gretchen decided to divvy the flowers her parents brought among all the performers. June’s is sitting in a glass of water on her bedside table now.

We went home for lunch and a nap and a little after three, we were heading out to Noah’s performance. Round House Theater (http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/) has four age groups this summer and Noah had the option to be in the nine-to-ten age group or the ten-to-thirteen group. He picked one camp in each category. This one, Acting for the Stage, was a two-week camp with older kids. They did the usual drama camp games he has loved for years and drew big pictures of how they imagined characters and settings. But they also spent a lot of time working with real scripts, which was a new thing for him. They did monologues and scenes from several plays. One day I figured out they’d been working on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from the following clues: “It was about two people with long names. I can’t remember them. There was a lot of word play. It had something to do with Hamlet.” He was amazed when I came up with the title of the play. A liberal arts education is good for parlor tricks like that.

At the performance, campers did scenes from Lord of the Flies, Winnie the Pooh, The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Diary of Anne Frank. My suspicion is Noah would have chosen The Phantom Tollbooth if they had not been assigned parts. He loves that book. Noah’s scene was from early in Lord of the Flies, while the boys are still fairly civilized and only just starting to bicker, so we didn’t see his character get mistaken for the beast and killed in the frenzy of a primal dance. Oh well. He remembered all his lines and performed well, even though in this particular scene Simon has a small part. June loved the Winnie the Pooh scene, which was done twice with different actors, and laughed both times. It made me decide to take her to see the new Pooh movie.

When the performance was over, we drove Marta and Simon home, delivering them to the care of the babysitter who was waiting for us on the front porch and then drove straight back to the same neighborhood we’d just left for a lovely dinner at Pacci’s (http://paccispizzeria.com/) and the movie. We were eating early so at the beginning of our meal we had the side patio all to ourselves, which was nice. Despite living so close for so long, we’ve never actually been to AFI. The theater is big and beautiful, just like movie theaters used to be and the movie was fun. We’re thinking of going back in a couple weeks to take Noah to see Time Bandits. (They’re doing a series of films from the 80s, which as Noah says are “really old movies.”) It felt appropriate to be seeing a movie for our anniversary, too, because not on our first date but on our second (which was the very next day–I know, very lesbian) we saw Raising Arizona at the theater in downtown Oberlin.

We don’t go out and participate in the arts as much as we used to when we were twenty (look at that photo—we were practically children!) and living in a college town or thirty and childless and living in a big city, but the arts are still important in our every day lives. The kids have both been to multiple drama and music classes and camps. We hear the sound of Noah’s snare drum and the mournful little ballads June composes all the time. I do miss having more of a cultural life and I look forward to seeing more concerts and plays and movies and museum exhibits as the kids get older, but I also have to say that watching my kids sing and act really is one of my favorite things.

Things Fall Apart

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So Noah’s been out of school for two weeks and June for three. You might think I was into the swing of our summer schedule by now. You’d be wrong.

The reason is simple: we have no summer schedule. Every week is different. First there was the week Noah was still in school and June was attending a half-day camp at her preschool. I liked that week. There was a lot of peace and quiet. I read a lot and got some work done, too.

Next there was the week Noah was at YaYa’s house and June had no camp. I scheduled play dates with the Cottontail Rabbit and the Ghost Crab, thinking June would be lonely and wanting playmates. She did miss Noah, especially at first. Early in the week, she drew a picture of their bunk bed with both bunks occupied and then one of a “princess riding away on her unicorn while her brother, the prince, waves goodbye.” Notice how she turned it around there? She also dug through all the books in her bookshelf looking for Kimbo’s Marble, a book about a princess whose brother is abducted by a troll and who has to rescue him.

But eventually, June started to take for granted having undivided maternal attention (of one mother during the days and, even better, two in the evenings). She got to pick the cinematic entertainment. I took her to the video store twice while Noah was gone. She selected Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue (not as bad as I thought it would be) and Snow White, which she watched in its entirety without running out of the room whenever the witch came onscreen. She was proud of this accomplishment. By the time Noah returned, she’d had so much fun she was actually kind of lukewarm about seeing him again. (Noah enjoyed his first-ever week away from home, too. At one point he emailed Beth that he was “ : ) x infinity”)

I was expecting that this past week would be the first one of both kids home all day, but on Sunday (the day after Noah returned from West Virginia) we found out he got into Tinkering camp at the Purple School off the waitlist. All the camps at June’s preschool this summer are tinkering camps. The kids (ages three to five or four to ten depending on the week) brainstorm a construction project, draw plans and then build it. June’s week they made a “Water-Ball Track,” a ramp for balls and water. This week they made a squirrel bridge that was strung between two trees. Noah’s been to a Purple School camp every year since he was five, and he loves them so we were glad when he got in. It also allowed me to have a few hours every day when the children were not at each other’s throats. Re-entry has not been pretty.

So all this week June and I were on our own from 9:30 when we dropped Noah off at camp until 2:00 when he came home (he walked home by himself). We went to the 7-11 for ice cream after lunch one day, to the library for Spanish Circle Time, on a walk along Sligo Creek trail, and we visited two playgrounds. Wednesday was particularly busy. After leaving Noah at camp (five minutes late because he forgot his backpack with his lunch and had to run back to get it once we were several blocks away from home) June and I dropped some clothes in a donation bin, went to the rec center to register June for two of Becky’s drop-in summer music classes and to the library to drop off books. We got to the Co-op just in time to buy whole-wheat tortillas and get settled in for the 10:30 Story Time they have in the basement on Wednesdays.

As June sipped her juice box (snacks are provided), I leaned back in my chair and congratulated myself on a very organized and productive hour. The storyteller commented that not many people had come. One of the nannies said people were probably in downtown Silver Spring. They have children’s activities down by the fountain on summer Wednesday mornings, and also, I remembered with a sinking feeling, $1 second-run kids’ movies. I’d meant to check the film series schedule before I signed June up for music classes. So much for being organized.

That afternoon Elias came over. Setting up that play date was complicated because I couldn’t take Noah over to Elias’s house during June’s nap per the original invitation so Elias’s mom agreed to bring him to us instead.

As the boys were playing a spirited second round of Sleeping Queens (http://www.gamewright.com/gamewright/index.php?section=games&page=game&show=140) on the porch and June was off playing quietly somewhere, I got a chance to go online and check the film schedule. I was surprised to find that instead of the usual even split between G and PG fare, the films were almost all PG this year (eleven out of fourteen!) and even the three G-rated films were what I’d consider older Gs, mainly because of complex plots. The only one not showing at a time June was at day camp or during our beach week was Tale of Despereaux. Noah loved this book but he was older than five when we read it and the reviews of the film say it’s hard to follow for a kids’ movie. So, I don’t think we’ll be going to the $1 movies this year. I was mostly disappointed, but also a little relieved since it meant I wouldn’t have to try to reschedule the music classes.

That evening as we were all sitting out on the porch, Beth and I were talking about Noah’s drum lesson the next day. He’d asked if he could have lessons this summer to keep in practice so Beth found him a teacher pretty close to our house. His next lesson was Thursday, the following day. When Beth reminded me of the time, 4:00-4:30, I dropped my forehead into my hands, remembering that June had a play date with a boy she met at tinkering camp (next year’s Eastern Fence Lizard) that ended at 4:30. I could not pick them both up from different places at the same time.

Summer does this to me every year. The lack of a set schedule makes it feel like possible events and activities are buzzing all around my head, like mosquitoes I can hear but not see so I am constantly loosing track of things. And just when I think I’ve got the puzzle pieces of any week put together, something upends the table and they are scattered all over the floor.

Even something as simple as picking one weekend out of the whole summer for my mother and stepfather to take the kids for a weekend and visit Sesame Place (http://www.sesameplace.com/sesame2/) with them is fraught. It took me forever to get back to them about what weekend we wanted to do it because every single possibility had drawbacks. The one we choose, in late July, means June will miss a t-ball game and the Painted Turtle’s birthday party. I felt bad about that because it’s the second party she’s had to miss this summer. But it was the best we could do. Every other weekend had problems, too. The upsides of this weekend are that my moms prefers it, and Noah has no camp the week before and June has only a half-day camp, so we can leave early Friday afternoon, and we are able to squeeze in a visit to my high school friend Pam, who is leaving for the UK where she and her family usually live the following weekend after a sabbatical year in the U.S.

So I went to work putting the pieces of Thursday afternoon back together. I emailed the Lizard’s mother to see if we could shift the time of pickup back to five. It ended up working out fine. Between dropping June off, getting Noah to his lesson, going back for June and getting home the half-hour lesson turned into a three-hour outing. But it was a fun three hours that included a lot of time reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone to Noah at various bus stops and at Capital Cheesecake while he ate a key lime mini-cheesecake and I sipped an iced chai. And later we hung out a fountain on the campus of a nearby college campus with the Lizard, his mom and baby sister before heading home.

Also, Noah seemed to hit it off with his drum instructor, who predicted that by the time Noah went back to school his band teacher would be “amazed” at his progress. The only hitch was that I was apparently supposed to pay him at this meeting. Beth had set up the lesson and she and I had miscommunicated about that so I didn’t have a checkbook with me.

Just as we were leaving for the Lizard’s house I found a jury summons in the mailbox for the last week in July, a week neither of the children has camp. I started calculating the babysitting costs for June, if Beth could take Noah to work with her that day. It wasn’t going to be cheap, I concluded, but I didn’t have time to think about it. In the hustle of getting everyone where they needed to be, I forgot about it but the summons was still there when we got home.

That evening while the kids were watching an Inspector Gadget (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Gadget) episode on the computer, Beth and I had one of those rapid-fire, multi-topic discussions you are probably familiar with if you have both a spouse and kids. In ten minutes or so we covered home repairs, where we should go when Mom and Jim take the kids, and jury duty. Beth said she’d take the day off work, thus simplifying both my childcare arrangements and my travel plans to the county courthouse, which is on the opposite end of the horseshoe that is the Red Line. She also offered to drop by the drum teacher’s house the next morning with a check.

So things fall apart, but then they knit together again, whether through skipping what must be skipped or through the accommodations of other moms and a supportive partner. The center always holds. But I must say I’m glad that it’s finally July. Only fifty-nine days left until kindergarten and fifth grade.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

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“I might be a little nervous because I’ve never done this before,” June said as she got dressed for t-ball practice yesterday morning. I assured her that a lot of the kids would be in the same boat and that they’d all learn the game together. June’s playing in t-ball league for five and six year olds this summer and there was an all-teams skills clinic yesterday to give the kids an idea of the fundamentals before the first game next Saturday.

Noah was really sweet. He stooped down to get on her level and said, “You’ll be wonderful.” He’s not at all interested in sports, but he’s always been supportive of her when she’s been on a team. When she played soccer, he often came to her practices. He stayed home yesterday but he’s planning to come next week to film her first game.

In the car on the way to the field June kept up a stream of non-stop chatter. She does this when she’s nervous. Among other things, she wanted to talk about winning and losing. She’s very interested in this aspect of the game because when she played soccer, there were no games, just practices, and t-ball has real games. Noah played when he was five so we know it’s a very laid back league, with the emphasis on building skills and having fun. No official even keeps score, but June wants to know whether she has won or lost, so she will be keeping score in her head, no doubt.

Once we arrived at the field she got quiet. There were one hundred and twenty players there with their parents, siblings and grandparents. It was a huge and overwhelming crowd. After a lot of announcements, the coaches set up the skills stations for the kids to visit. Though there were more boys than girls attending overall, June ended up in small, female-dominated group that moved through the stations together. I was glad on both counts. In the smaller group she loosened up and even if her team is mostly boys (which it probably will be) she will at least start her t-ball career with the idea that this is something girls can do as well as boys can. That seemed to be the case in her group anyway. The best player was a tall, lanky girl.

June’s group consisted of three boys (one of whom disappeared about halfway through the practice) and four girls. One of them had attended June’s nursery school in the class one year ahead of June’s (co-incidentally she was the Great Blue Heron of her class) and June knows her from summer camp last year. I’m sure it was nice for June to see a familiar face and Beth and I also know the Elder Heron’s mom so we could chat.

The stations were catching and throwing, batting, catching wiffle balls in plastic cones (to practice getting under the ball), running the bases and catching grounders. As June caught a ball in the cone and Beth and I cheered, I realized what an advantage it is to June, being Noah’s little sister. He’s never been particularly athletic so whenever she demonstrates basic competence, we cheer as if she’s qualified for the Olympics. She does seem to have a good arm, I have to say, though, and she connected with the ball pretty easily when it was time to bat.

By the third station, June was asking if she could play t-ball again the summer she’s six. Beth said yes, but suggested we get through this season before thinking about the next one. By the last station, the kids had been running around on a muggy morning for almost an hour and a half and they were tired and sweaty. The coach gave a little talk about staying alert while fielding. He asked if you should take a nap in the field (“even if you want to now”) and lay down on the grass to demonstrate. The kids laughed and said no. “Why not?” he asked.

“Because we won’t win,” the Elder Heron said, surprising the coach a little, and making the cluster of parents laugh. He probably expected something like because they wouldn’t catch the ball, but the Elder Heron went right to the big picture. I think she and June might be kindred spirits. I hope they end up on the same team.

After the last station, June was pink-cheeked and she had finished all the water in her bottle a couple stations back. But before we left, we needed to stand in a line of people with questions to find who June’s coach will be. However, though the recreation department official was able to confirm she is registered, we weren’t able to get her team assignment. We still don’t know if she’s playing on a 9:00 a.m. team or a 10:30 team (we’re supposed to get an email); nevertheless, I think she got off to a good start.

As we left the field, Beth asked June if she liked t-ball and she said it was too tiring, but she perked up when Beth said we could go to Starbucks, thus continuing an after-soccer tradition. In the car on the way there she asked again if there would be real games and if there would be winning and losing. She predicted her team would win sometimes and lose sometimes. I said that was probably about right. When Noah played t-ball he was so uninterested in the question of which team won or who lost I never kept track. If you’ve ever watched a t-ball game, you know that most little kids, with some coaching, can learn to hit, but very few of them ever learn to field, so most of the time, the scores are quite high for both teams. I imagine keeping track is not as easy as it might be in soccer. This year, though, I think I might be keeping track in my head along with June because my girl wants to win, and we’ll need to know if we’re celebrating or plotting how to do better next time on the way to Starbucks.