Everybody Wave and Sing Goodbye

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Steph

On Tuesday morning, June had a play date with the Ground Beetle. It was originally supposed to be a playground picnic with both moms present, but I accidentally scheduled a furnace tune-up at the same time, so the Beetle’s mom volunteered to pick June up and watch the girls at the playground herself and then take them to school. And then early in the morning it started to pour rain, so the play date ended up moving to the Beetle’s house. As a result, I had a longish chunk of time to myself, about five hours.

I exercised, worked on some abstracts, had a lovely lunch with the Mallard Duck’s mother at Capital Cheesecake (http://www.capitalcitycheesecakes.com/), worked some more and even snuck in a couple of short stories from my Twain collection. It was a nice day, a little like my birthday if less decadent, but definitely more balanced than my days usually feel.

June goes to school for fifteen hours a week and that sounds like a lot of free time, especially for someone who works only a couple hours a week most weeks. But between walking June to and from school, co-oping every other Friday, school holidays and sick days, it’s never actually that long. And I’m an introvert, someone who requires a lot of alone time to re-charge. In my six years as a stay-at-home mom, I’ve never really felt I had enough of that, though it gets better every year, as the kids have gotten more independent and June has spent more and more time at school.

That’s why summer makes me nervous every year, all those weeks and weeks (ten and a half for Noah, eleven and half for June) of largely unstructured time. In reality, I usually find it goes more quickly than I think it will and in the end I’m left with memories of splashing in the creek, eating popsicles on the porch, and spending hours lying under the silver maple tree and reading to them, and I try to forget all the times they whined about being bored and drove me to distraction with their bickering.

Noah came home while June was still napping. He found me on the porch, marking up a study about plant-based adaptogens and he slumped into a wicker rocking chair. “I have a lot of math homework,” he announced. And as much as my pleasantly solitary day had made me think of the downsides of summer vacation, I immediately saw the upside. He’s worked so hard this year and he really needs a break. His teacher said in a recent e-mail that he seems to have “checked out.”

It’s not time for that yet. He has two and a half weeks of school left and has to complete work on a puppet show about coral reef animals, finish researching and participate in a debate on universal health care, teach the class a lesson about thunderstorms and who knows what else? Just this week he finished a major math project, designing a board game based on the principles of probability. Does it make you tired just reading all this? The kid needs to ride his scooter and build his solar-powered car and make all the robots in his Lego robot kit manual and play on the computer. He’s not going to as many day camps as he usually does this summer, just three weeks of drama camp at Round House (http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/education-outreach/summer-programs-2011/), and I think that’s fine. He needs the downtime.

June has a week and a half of school left. Like Noah she, too, has three weeks of camp, two at her preschool, and a week of drama camp at the rec center. Her first week of camp coincides with Noah’s last week of school, so it will be a few weeks before the kids are both home all day, but Friday was my last day of co-oping at her school, so it’s starting to feel like the end of preschool is just around the corner.

I don’t even know what to say about this. She was two years old, tiny and shy when she first walked through the doors of the brightly painted bungalow and into the realm of two of the warmest, most capable, and creative preschool teachers you could imagine. She will walk out those doors a taller, more confident five year old. While we won’t leave behind the friendships we forged there with teachers and parents and children, we won’t be in day to day contact with most of them any more either and that makes me sad, as much as I want to move on to the next stage of our lives, the two-kids-in-elementary-school phase (which will only last a year because Noah will be in middle school the year after that, but let’s not think about that right now). Thank goodness for the school’s summer camps, which children up to age ten can attend. These and the after-school programs the school used to run have kept Noah in touch with Lesley in the five years since he left the school and that relationship had been a real blessing for him. She gets him a deep way most people don’t.

Co-oping on Friday felt surprisingly normal. Somehow I managed not to dwell on it being the last time. June had a play date with the Painted Turtle that morning before school started, another playground picnic. This one didn’t get rained out, but since I needed to be at school at 11:50 and the kids didn’t need to be there until noon and they wanted to climb the boulder “one more time,” the Turtle’s mom agreed to stay with them while I headed up to school.

Early in the school day as the kids were playing in the main classroom, I did ask Andrea if the kids could be divided up for music class in a way so that June was in the first group because I had housekeeping duty and the housekeeper goes in with the first music group. I wanted to see June with Becky, not for the last time because Becky will be back next week and then June’s going to be in her music camp in July and I will probably take her to a couple of Becky’s drop-in classes this summer and Becky has a daughter of babysitting age, but, yes, for the last time on a co-oping day. June’s known Becky even longer than Lesley and Andrea, having been enrolled in her Kindermusik class for several sessions when she was two and three, and she and Becky are quite fond of each other.

This year the Tracks class has been studying The Carnival of the Animals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnival_of_the_Animals) and as an end of year project, they are making a Carnival of the Tracks movie. Each child got to choose an instrument that he or she thought represented his or her symbol. June choose the sand blocks to represent the Great Blue Heron. Sand blocks, for those of you unfamiliar with children’s music classes, are little plastic rectangles covered with sandpaper you can rub together. June said the sound reminded her of a bird’s feet on a rock. The Tracks also learned a song, with hand motions. Filming starts next week.

I think the closest I got to getting choked up was at the end of music when Becky started to sing, “Everybody Wave and Sing Goodbye,” because how could it not make me think about the bigger goodbyes on the horizon? Saying goodbye to all this is so hard. I don’t know how the teachers do it every year.

But then I was back out in the classroom, threading yarn through blunt needles and tying knots in it for a sewing project and the kids went through their yarn and required more so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to think much. It was the same while they were out on the playground and I was trying to scrub blueberry stains off the kitchen floor with only moderate success. (The snack of yogurt, granola and frozen blueberries the Toad’s dad brought was a big hit.)

At dismissal, Andrea and Lesley hugged me, and they were both teary. On the walk home I asked June, “Do you ever feel sad about preschool ending soon?”

“No,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

“I do,” I said, so she’d know it was okay if she does feel sad later. It could be a week and a half is just too far in the future to bother her, but I don’t think that’s it. I think she’s just ready to move on. She’s eager to be bigger and older and kindergarten is what comes next, so that’s what she wants. That’s a good thing, but I can’t help but indulge in a few lingering backward glances before it really is time to wave and say goodbye.

Brave and Ready to Go

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Steph

I do not as a rule get very nostalgic at my kids’ milestones. I am happy to see them learn and grow, and yes, get older and more independent. True, I was sad when they self-weaned and June’s recent no-singing-at-bedtime dictate was hard for me. And I get just a wee bit sad when someone I know has a baby and I go through those bags of tiny baby clothes to make up a gift of hand-me-downs. Okay, maybe I’m more sentimental than I thought. But in any case, this week was something else.

On Tuesday Beth registered June for kindergarten and then two days later we took her to her elementary school for kindergarten orientation. On Friday, Noah had his first school dance. Yes, you read that right. And no I haven’t failed to update his headshot caption– he’s still in fourth grade. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Beth went over to June’s elementary school Tuesday to fill out some paperwork in preparation for the orientation on Thursday. That morning June and I ran some errands of the bank and post office variety. We took a bus to downtown Takoma and as it was a rainy day, the windows were all fogged up. June kneeled in her seat and used her index finger to draw stick figures on the glass. I remembered being a kid and doing that on the school bus windows and suddenly I could imagine her on a school bus, something that I have tried in the past and been utterly unable to do. As Beth wondered recently, how could we let her get on a school but by herself when she’s so small? Andrea, one of the teachers at June’s preschool answered that although small, “she is a big presence, brave and ready to go!!” And so she is.

She was more than ready for the orientation on Thursday morning. Beth drove Noah to school and came back to get June and me and pretty much the instant she pulled into the driveway, June was out the door like a shot, leaving me inside to grab my keys. At preschool on Monday, three Purple School alumni came to talk to the Tracks class about kindergarten. One of them made June a bit nervous talking about the green-yellow-red behavior charts I remember so well from Noah’s kindergarten year. I think she started to feel like this kindergarten thing was serious business. Since then she’d been veering between nervousness and excitement when she spoke of kindergarten.

All the incoming kindergarteners visit a kindergarten classroom (emptied of its students who have two days off school). They get to meet the teachers who conduct evaluations. The first thing they did was to snap a picture of June in front of a blue background for their records. (We got a copy, too.) She had an uncertain little Mona Lisa smile in it.

Then, along with several other kids, she drew and pointed to letters and played with puzzles and Legos while the teachers watched. One of the puzzles was a rainbow puzzle, which I think they were using for color identification. Finally she had a snack of animal crackers and apple juice and received a gift bag, decorated by a current kindergarten student, and full of crayons and alphabet cards. While our kids went around the stations, we chatted with the mom of one of Noah’s friends, who also has kids five years apart. Beth said she thought this would be easier the second time around but it wasn’t and Naomi agreed and said it was kind of sad, and one of the teachers said the baby is always the hardest. Still, instead of looking back, we looked ahead, discussing magnet middle school options for our older kids and the admissions process we will have ahead of us next year when Noah and Maxine are in fifth grade.

I kept looking over at June as she moved from table to table. She seemed serious and intent on what she was doing. When we left, she was happy and said the activities “took my mind off being nervous.”

Friday afternoon I was co-oping at June’s school and two of her classmates, the White-Tailed Deer and the Field Cricket had been to orientation at the same school and wanted to compare notes. The Deer had brought her gift bag to show everyone. June admired the drawings on the outside, which she decided were more skillfully executed than the one she had received. The Black Bear left school after an hour for his appointment and then came back an hour later. I tried to imagine the four of them going to school together. It wasn’t hard. Beth and I are also hoping that the Toad, who lives out of boundary and is in the lottery for the immersion program, gets in, because she’s one of June’s best friends. Because we live right on the boundary line the Toad actually lives closer to us than any of the other in-boundary kids and she would use our bus stop. Beth said recently she’d feel better about putting June on the bus that first day if she could board it with a friend.

Friday evening was the Spring Fling at Noah’s school. Unlike his first elementary school, his current one has dances. I find the concept of a dance for third to fifth graders kind of puzzling and I think Noah did, too. He skipped the fall dance because he was not sure what would happen there and he had decided to skip this one, too, but at the last minute he changed his mind. He said kids at school had been talking about it and they said the last one was fun so he decided to try it.

I never went to dances as a kid, except at camp, where they were mandatory. The idea of unscripted socialization with that many people was intimidating and as a teen I had the idea that any potentially romantic situation that did not arise spontaneously was shallow. I bet you’re sorry you didn’t know me then. I would have been so much fun at parties, you know, if I had gone to any of them. Beth wasn’t much interested in dances either, although she did go to her prom.

We were both glad Noah decided to go because social situations like that can be hard for him and we were proud of him for giving it a try. Beth said on the drive over he was full of nervous chatter. And he instructed her not to be late to pick him up. She could be early, but not late.

Beth came home and we played Sequence and Concentration with June. I think she enjoyed having both of us to herself for a little while. That rarely happens. Then Beth left to get Noah. He was wound up and happy about the dance. He danced (by himself, but that’s what he said almost everyone was doing). He bought a glow bracelet and had his photo taken in the photo booth. He said it was fun. I asked if he would go again and he said yes. One of the mothers of his classmates reported that her daughter said that the girls and boys stayed in separate groups, but when I asked him later, Noah said he talked to two girls. And of course, he talked to boys, too.

Later that night when I turned out the light in the bathroom, I saw his bracelet glowing green on the counter. After I climbed into bed, I said to Beth, “We are old.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

Old enough to have our younger child on the verge of elementary school, old enough to have our older child attending dances. But they are brave and ready to go. And I think we are, too.

Speed Turtle

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Steph

I want to tell you of the most amazing thing I know.
You’ve got to stand back now and watch it go.
It’s compact, stream-lined, built to last
Shiny and green and so incredibly fast.
It’s a Speed Turtle. Whoa-ho!
It’s a Speed Turtle. Oh, no!
Man alive, it’s in overdrive.
Go little turtle, go, go…

And when that maniac gets going,
Well, hang onto your hat—
It can tear across the road in just
Three hours flat!

From “Speed Turtle” by Sandra Boynton, performed by Brian Wilson
http://www.sandraboynton.com/sboynton/boyntonmusic.html

When Noah was in preschool his symbol was the Painted Turtle. As the years have passed we’ve realized it was the most appropriate animal for him because Noah is slow. Not in the sense of lacking intelligence, of course, but he thinks things through and considers all the angles before he takes action. Sometimes this is a good thing, when careful attention to detail is needed. But when we just want him to brush his teeth already, it’s not. The educational psychologist he saw last summer told us he was a “slow processor.” It wasn’t news, except that there’s a name for it.

This was one of my concerns about enrolling Noah in the Center for the Highly Gifted. I wondered how he would handle the increased workload when the much too easy homework he was assigned in third grade sometimes dragged on all evening. But being bored actually slows him down further and it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, so we took the plunge.

It’s been wonderful in many ways. He fits in socially much better at the Center and he’s happier. That alone would be worth the price of admission but the work does is more interesting and suited to his abilities. That makes the fact that he’s doing it all the time somewhat easier to bear. It is a lot of work, though, so we never make plans for weeknights and we don’t go out of town on weekends. And I spend a lot of time and mental energy helping him keep track of his assignments and reminding him to get back to work when he reverts to his natural state of woolgathering.

The ends of marking periods are particularly difficult. The Center’s curriculum is focused on long-term projects and the four biggest ones come due at the end of each quarter. First quarter was the Crow Indian project, second quarter was contemporary Germany and third quarter has been an in-depth author study. Over the course of two months Noah read four novels and a non-fiction book by the adventure writer Gary Paulsen. He completed a poster about literary devices in Paulsen’s work, another one on character development, setting and turning points in one of the novels, a persuasive essay about why Paulsen should be included in his school’s curriculum, a biographical sketch, and a bibliography. The last element to be completed was a Power Point presentation that gave an overview of what he’d learned about Paulsen.

Of course, at the same time, there are his recurrent short-term assignments in spelling, vocabulary and current events, and medium-term projects like an interview he recently had to conduct with an immigrant and a project to research and build models demonstrating green design in housing. (His math homework, in geometry and pre-algebra makes me think I don’t have too many years left of being able to help him with math.)

So, my point is, he’s been very busy recently. He does have some downtime built into his schedule. He reads for pleasure from the time he wakes until he has to start getting ready for school at 7:15, I read to him at least three times a week (we’re almost finished Harriet the Spy) and Friday afternoons and evenings are a no-homework zone, no matter how much he has to do. And I’m looking forward to the mid-week break he’ll get on Thursday when he has a day off school. There’s always a day off between marking periods and tomorrow is, thank heavens, the last day of the third quarter. About a week ago I posted on Facebook, “Steph’s son comes home every day with news of some previously undisclosed part of one of the approximately one gazillion long-term projects he is completing. She cannot wait, seriously cannot wait, for the third quarter to be over.”

And now it almost is. Noah’s teacher says that the big project for the fourth quarter will be have more in-school and less at-home work that the other three. This will be nice, if the work actually gets done at school. I think we need to remind his teacher of the extra attention Noah needs to stay on track. Sometimes he can only figure something out by talking it out, and he has a tendency to get sidetracked by the smallest obstacles. If no one is watching him, he may just stop working. For instance, he might lose all his pencils and rather than ask a classmate or the teacher to borrow one, he will become completely derailed.

It was like that last night. Here are a series of exasperated Facebook posts I made about his attempts to complete his homework:

5:24 p.m.
Steph’s son obviously cannot do any homework right now because someone on the bus said the math problems assigned were not the ones he thought were assigned and the girl he called to settle the question has not returned his call. Also, the purple colored pencil he needs to illustrate his poem is missing. And the one from the other set of colored pencils is not the exact right shade of purple…

5:56 pm.
And obviously crayons are out of the question. And even more obviously he can’t start on the math problems he’s sure are assigned because he doesn’t know how much room to leave for the problems that are in question.

7:03 p.m.
It just keeps getting better! Right after he got off the phone with the girl who called with the assignment, he said, “Oh, I have to study for the quiz, too. But I don’t know what it’s on.” He thought the best solution was not to study.
“Why didn’t you ask her while you had her on the phone?” I asked.
“Well, I doubt she would know,” he said.

(A note here about the girl in question: She’s been in Noah’s class every year since kindergarten. She’s whip-smart and very capable. I’m sure she knew.)

9:08 p.m.
In the end he illustrated the poem, did the math, studied for the quiz, came up with a spelling list (they make their own) and caught up on my blog while he was at it. All’s well that ends well.

And here’s his poem, which I just love:

Pencil.
Orange
paint P
ink eraser
black lead,
Bearing TICONDE-
ROGA until
it meets its
only predator,
the pencil
sharpener.
Does it miss
its friends
still in their
boxes? Nobo
dy knows.

It’s a shape poem, in the shape of a pencil. He drew an eraser on bottom of the column of text and a pencil point at the top. The background consists of scribbles in different colors.

Noah turned in the last elements of his author study project and presented his Power Point slides today. He has a field trip tomorrow and other than math and percussion practice, he has no homework due until Friday. We’re going out to dinner this week, not once, but twice as there’s a fundraiser for his school on Wednesday and another one for June’s school on Thursday, both at our favorite Mexican restaurant. After school on Friday we’ll go down to the Tidal Basin and see the cherry blossoms, which are in bloom right now.

Well, I don’t know why
That turtle keeps pushing the pace now…
Every minute of the day is like
Some kind of race now.
Some kind! Of race!
With a gotta-get-there attitude
That never fails
It blazes right past
Every one of us snails!

I love the surprise ending to this song. Of course the turtle seems fast if the observers are snails. It reminds me that everything is relative and Noah is who he is, my smart, slow, beautiful Painted Turtle. But I have to admit I’m glad there was no Snail symbol at the Purple School.

False Spring

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Steph

“What’s False Spring?” Violet asked, sitting down between her brother and the sweatered scout.

“Anyone who’s not a cakesniffer knows what False Spring is, “ Carmelita said in a scornful voice. “It’s when the weather gets unusually warm before getting very cold again. We celebrate it with a fancy dance where we spin around and around the Spring Pole…. When the dance is over we chose the best Snow Scout and crown her False Spring Queen. This time it’s me. In fact, it’s always me.”

From The Slippery Slope, by Lemony Snicket

We had a little false spring of our own the past few days, although it did not involve dancing around a Spring Pole or crowning a spoiled girl False Spring Queen. Highs reached the 70s on Wednesday and Thursday and then on Friday the temperature reached a record-breaking 77 degrees. The big dirty piles of snow at the edges of parking lots are shrinking and crocuses are popping up here and there. It’s enough to make you think spring might be around the corner, even though today has been cooler, with highs in the 50s, and by Tuesday, it might even snow again.

The other notable thing about those three oddly warm days was that Beth was out of town, conducting a training in New Jersey. By Friday I was pretty worn out from the solo parenting, despite having had an almost unprecedented six-hour chunk of kid-free time on Thursday when the Cottontail Rabbit invited June over for a morning play date that ended with her mother taking them both to school. I ran some errands (library and post office), got myself a cheese and egg sandwich and a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, caught up on newsletter clipping for Sara, exercised and read a few Flannery O’Connor short stories (I am making my way, slowly, through her Complete Stories) but when it was over I was surprised at how fast it went and how little I had to show for the time. The solitude was nice, though, even if the stress of getting Noah to finish his literary devices poster that evening nearly wiped out any inner peace I may have gained from it.

Friday was quite different. There was no kid-free time because it was my day to co-op at June’s school. On Thursday night, I wrote what we needed to take with us first on the trip to Noah’s bus stop and then on the trip to June’s school on the whiteboard on our refrigerator: “I. Noah’s backpack w/ lunch + POSTER! II. June’s backpack + SNACK! + COFFEE! If you read this blog regularly, you know I don’t use capital letters and exclamation points with abandon, but I certainly didn’t want to forget the poster, and I was the snack parent at June’s school and I didn’t think I was getting through the day without some caffeine.

I successfully got the kids out the door by 8:20 for the second day running. Unlike Thursday when June was skipping and running ahead of us, so excited about her play date she was unable to walk (Noah and I were also slowed down by his heavy percussion kit we were taking turns pulling along), June lagged behind us. She was actually sulking from an argument with Noah, but I don’t want to go into that. Nevertheless, we arrived at his bus stop by 8:50 and then she and I headed over to the community center to wait for her drama class to start at 9:30. I’d brought along some books to read and crayons and paper for her. She drew a princess and a dragon on one piece of paper and a snake on the other. I snuck in a few pages of the Post while she drew.

In drama class the teacher read them A Birthday for Frances and they made some props and acted out the birthday scene from it. They also practiced their dance routine to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins. When it was over we walked back home, pausing to admire some purple crocuses on the college campus near our house, had lunch and headed back out to go to school. About halfway to school, June removed her Cookie Monster sweatshirt to reveal the t-shirt underneath and then skipped the rest of the way to school with the sun on her bare arms.

I was continuously occupied from our arrival at 11:45 to about 1:15, escorting kids from their cars, through the parking lot and up to the porch and then preparing the snack of whole-wheat mini-bagels with cream cheese and strawberry jam and carrot sticks and cleaning up from it. Then I played with the kids who had finished their handwriting practice, mostly watching them make letters with straight and curved pieces of wood designed for this purpose and reading to them, for about a pleasant half hour until it was time for the second group to go into music class. I went in with them.

Becky, the music teacher, had opened a door that leads from the music room to the porch so a breeze came in through the screen door. The warm air seemed to drive the kids a little crazy and they had trouble concentrating on the lesson. “When will we go outside?” one of them wanted to know. Usually the kids really like music and I’ve never heard any of them say that before.

By 2:20, they were out on the playground ten minutes early and everyone was running around. Everyone was a little wilder than usual, but the defining moment of the outside playtime came early when June came running to me with her hand on her knee and crying loudly. There was an outraged quality to her crying so I thought when she calmed down she would have an accusation to make against one of her classmates. I sat on a tree stump holding her and waiting for her to quiet down. Other parents often comment to me about how fast June bounces back from injuries at school (it’s not always that way at home) so I was surprised at how long the crying went on. I suggested we go inside and remove her skirt and tights so I could see if she was bleeding.

Once we’d done this I could see what was wrong and why it wasn’t getting better. There was a big splinter stuck in her right knee. I carried June to Lesley, who was speaking to a classroom observer, and interrupted their conversation. Lesley took June over to the sink, washed her knee with soap and water and suggested I get Andrea from the playground. Now with Lesley needing to get back to the observer and one co-oper on housekeeping duty inside and one teacher about to come inside, that left only one co-oper out on the playground with fifteen energetic four and five year olds. That meant I needed to replace Andrea on the playground and leave June. I hated to do it and felt as if I was abandoning her.

It seemed like a long time before Andrea came back out (I had time to remind children that we don’t throw sand at our friends and we certainly don’t throw rocks at them) and when she did, she didn’t have June with her. She reported that she couldn’t get the splinter out because June was too upset and Andrea was afraid June was gong to hyperventilate. I’d have to get her dressed and try it myself at home. I wasn’t looking forward to that, as Beth is the designated splinter mommy, but I came in and helped June get back into her clothes. Andrea had put a Band Aid on the wound and given June a cold pack to numb the pain. Soon she was running around on the playground again as if she did not have a big hunk of wood stuck in her flesh.

June was in good spirits on the walk home. She wanted to pretend to be a mother chicken and baby chick, so I had to cluck and flap my wings for much of the way home. She had her nap and I was just waking her when Noah came home, so she listened to me read to him and then they watched television. Dinner was take-out pizza. When we’d finished eating it was time to tackle the splinter.

Lesley had suggested a warm bath might help loosen it, and had actually given June the impression it might just float out on its own, so she spent the first five minutes or so of her bath staring at her knee, waiting for the splinter to float out. I gently tried to break the news to her that if it didn’t come out in the bath, I would have to try to get it out. She didn’t like this idea, but once she was tired of playing in the bath I lifted her up to the bathroom counter and patted her knee dry. I brushed my finger lightly across the splinter to see if it was still protruding. I thought it was, though it was hard to tell what with the squirming and the screaming.

“I need you to be brave,” I told June, as I got out the tweezers.

“No!” she yelled.

Well, I tried. I thought I almost had it a few times, but she was trying to push my hands away and her tears were falling directly on my hands as I worked and finally I just gave up. I didn’t feel good about it, though, because I was worried that the wound would close overnight with the splinter inside it.

We watched a couple episodes of Angelina Ballerina until it was bedtime, and then as the kids were in the bathroom brushing their teeth, I heard the front door open. Beth was home! June started to tell her about the splinter almost at once, and so it was that after a four and a half hour drive, practically the first thing Beth had to do was to pluck a splinter from June’s knee as I held her hands down and June wailed in protest. It took a few tries, but she got the damn thing out. I was elated and June was pretty happy, too, once she stopped sniffling.

Later Beth and I talked in bed a long time, about her trip and my co-oping adventures and the honor roll certificate Noah received for getting all As and Bs in the second quarter and everything she’d missed during those three long, strange, unseasonable days she’d been gone. I’ll miss the spring-like weather, but having her back is more than an even swap.

The Eighth of January

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Steph

I am finding myself somewhat out of sorts with the new year. As I was walking June home from preschool on Thursday I noticed a few students wandering around the small college near our house. That campus has been deserted since the middle of December, so I’m assuming their new semester starts soon. Seeing those young people, I was seized with an unexpectedly strong desire to be teaching the Winter Term class on Literature of the Americas I taught twice at the University of Maryland or to be busily prepping for a new semester of the horror class I taught for six spring semesters at George Washington University. I wrote on Facebook that I wished I was starting something as “exciting as fresh, new semester,” but that was not precisely true. I didn’t want something like a new semester, I wanted a new semester.

And that’s my problem. I’ve been out of the classroom now for five and half years and I can’t stop looking back. This makes it hard to look forward and it’s time I was doing that. This year, 2011, is the year June will start kindergarten. It’s the year I could, and should start working more than the few hours a week I work now. We could certainly use the money, and I could use the mental stimulation and sense of purpose and identity work would give me. But when I consider my options, I just go around in circles. I can’t think of anything I really want to do. So if you’re reading this and you know me and you have an idea of something I might be good at, please leave me a comment. Sometimes I think I need some opinions from outside my own head. Because my own head keeps whining about things it simply can’t have. It gets annoying.

The year did get off to a good start in some respects. June slept through the night nine times in row. And our friends Jim and Kevin came over on New Year’s Day for a buffet of fancy cheese, fruit, crudités and vegetarian Hoppin’ John (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoppin’_John). I’m not from the South, but I have appropriated this New Year’s tradition of eating black-eyed peas on January 1st for good luck in the coming year. I figure we can all use all the luck we can get. It was really lovely to see Jim, who is one of my oldest friends and whom I hadn’t seen in almost two years. He sent me a hand-written thank you in the mail, which was also delightful. I can’t remember the last time someone did that.

On Friday, I co-oped at June’s school for the first time since November. (The school was closed when the boiler broke on the only day I was scheduled to co-op in December.) It was nice to be back in the classroom. It was my turn to make snack so I brought crackers along with celery, peanut butter, cream cheese and raisins in hopes the kids would make ants on a log out of them, though mostly they ate the component parts separately. And when snack was over, I joined the music class where they were listening to Carnival of the Animals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnival_of_the_Animals) and pretending to be different animals and I played with the kids inside and outside. There’s a big skeleton floor puzzle that’s new or newly brought out of storage and I had fun helping some of them put it together. I also got to see the kids’ newly invented playground game, 1-2-3 Split. Someone says this and they all go running off in various directions screaming. There is some murky narrative to it, involving screaming babies (always played by June and the Toad) menaced by the Robin and protected by the Black Bear. Unfortunately, things got out of hand at one point and the Toad got the worst of it when one kid pushed another and a few of them went over like dominoes. June was in the middle of the pack that went down and her skull crashed into the poor Toad’s cheekbone. Despite the mishap, June was very excited to have me at school; I think she missed having me there.

On Saturday morning we had a little snow and the kids got to go sledding in the yard before it melted later in the day. I have to admit I was a bit grumpy about the snow. It was coming down pretty hard for a while and after last winter’s record-breaking storms, any snow at all makes me skittish. I see snowflakes and I imagine there will be three feet of snow again and will be school cancelled for two weeks and we’ll all go completely stir-crazy. Beth reminded me it was only supposed to be an inch and that is was a Saturday morning, just about the best time for snow, from a school-closing perspective. I know I should be more supportive of the snow-positive members of my family, but I just don’t seem to have it in me.

Beth spent most of Saturday afternoon talking to prospective parents at an Open House at June’s school. When she got home, I made pancakes with an apple-pear compote for dinner. As I prepared the sauce, I listened to NPR. The top story, of course, was the shooting of Representative Giffords, which made me feel sad for the world, its confusion, its anger and its violence. Next up was A Prairie Home Companion (http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/). There was some fiddle music on the show, which put me in mind of how much I miss Saturday evenings at the now defunct Savory Café, where we used to go see Takoma Zone play blue-grass and old-time music. I was now thoroughly melancholy, wishing we could go there after dinner, when almost as soon as I had wished it, “The Eighth of January” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxva-itzRQY&feature=related), one of Takoma Zone’s signature tunes was playing on the radio. And even if a comfy chair and a latte and a live band didn’t suddenly appear in the kitchen, it was as if a little of what I had wished for had magically been granted to me.

Maybe it will be like that eight months from now, when I need a job; maybe it will just come to me. I would like that, even if what comes is only a fraction of what I want in my heart of hearts.

Later in the evening, we all listened to a downloaded copy of “Rebel, Rebel” together, in lieu of our nightly poetry reading. The reason for this is Noah’s new left-handers desk calendar. Each page has a quote or facts about a famous southpaw. It turns out January 8th is David Bowie’s birthday. Noah had never heard of him and wanted to hear one of his songs. (In some ways we have sadly neglected the children’s musical education.) So he found a photo of Bowie online and printed it out for us to look at while we listened. The song was Beth’s choice. I think I might have chosen one that didn’t contain the line “Hot tramp! I love you so” but Noah didn’t ask any uncomfortable questions. All through the song I was struggling to remember the lyrics that were coming up and wondering just how inappropriate they’d be. Despite this, it was also fun. We rarely listen to music that’s not kids’ music anymore. When I have the radio on it’s usually news and I most often listen to music when the kids are out of the house and I can pick my own CD without having to consult anyone else. I think the kids are missing out because of this, though. I have such fond memories of the records my parents played when I was young and the music that was on the radio. It’s something I almost don’t realize I’m missing.

And maybe finding a job or piecing together a part-time freelance career could be like that, too, scary and fun at the same time, and in the end, just what I didn’t realize I should be doing until I do it. I don’t know, but I hope I can be open enough to the possibilities to find out.

Three Plays in Three Days

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Steph

Okay, technically it was a puppet show, a play and a ballet, but still, we were mighty theatrical this weekend and not in a hurling ourselves to the floor and weeping over small slights kind of way. Not that any of us ever does that. Why do you ask?

Act I: Veteran’s Plaza, Silver Spring. Friday 5:45 p.m.

Downtown Silver Spring is a pretty place right before Christmas. In addition to the neon lights of the Regal Majestic Theater and the stores and restaurants that light up the night all year long, there are Christmas lights and a big lighted wreath, and this year nature had seen fit to give us the first real snow of the season the day before, just an inch or two, but enough to make June’s school’s annual Solstice lantern parade scenic. Before the parade started, people milled about in the dark. The adults socialized and the kids played in the snow. The Red Fox was quietly engaged in making a snow pile on a bench and a bunch of kids noticed a glow under the snow near a tree and dug up a ground level light, thinking they were rescuing a firefly. A group of teenagers passing by stopped and asked if this was the Purple School lantern parade they remembered attending as preschoolers.

Soon we were marching around the courtyard, in between the lines of concrete benches, once, twice, three times. The kids’ lanterns glowed, mostly with electric lights but some with real flames. Current students and recent graduates held rectangular painted paper-and-chicken-wire lanterns on long wooden sticks. June had painted the sun on hers with orange paint. Noah had an older, round black and white paper mache model circa 2005 with a wire handle and an alumna one year older than him had her light in a glass jar.

As we marched, we sang “This Little Light of Mine,” mostly just the chorus over and over. June shook the jingle bells she’d brought along. (The very same kind of jingle bells the Painted Turtle had brought as they marveled earlier.) The Robin’s dad strummed his guitar as he strolled. We marched on wet bricks and patches of slushy snow until it was time to go inside the Civic Center for pizza, veggies and hummus, and home-baked treats. The Ghost Crab’s mom had arranged some of the cookies on either side of the table in the curving bark of a stripped log, lined with aluminum foil. It was a lovely effect. June’s and my contribution was on red plastic plates but we were proud of it anyway. Over the course of two days we’d baked and frosted six trays of sugar cookies in the shapes of stars, snowmen and Christmas trees. Beth put one star cookie in each of June’s classmate’s backpacks when she’d co-oped that afternoon and we brought the rest to the party.

The conference room where the party was held this year was smaller and more crowded than the library that hosted it last year and the year before but people spread out on the floor and managed to avoid stepping on each other as they ate picnic-style.

The central event of the Solstice party is the shadow-puppet show the Tracks class puts on each year. This year the show was an adaptation of a children’s book about a yellow leaf that is not ready to drop from its tree, even after all the other leaves have fallen. June played the part of the sun and stood at the edge of the screen holding her sun puppet as the Toad stood at the opposite edge with her moon puppet and children with apple, pumpkin and snowflake puppets trooped by to demonstrate the passage of autumn. Finally a scarlet leaf convinces the yellow leaf to drop and they fly off together. The play went off without a hitch, unless you count a few missed cues and an attempt by one of the children to snatch the moon puppet away from the Toad.

After the play, teacher gifts were presented. Lesley’s gift from the Tracks was a wreath the kids had decorated together, each contributing natural items they’d collected. June’s donation was a seagull feather she found on the beach the weekend before. By 6:45 the party was over and we were on our way home in time for the kids’ baths and Noah’s percussion practice and the rhythms of our evening routine on one of the longest nights of the year.

Act II: Round House Theatre, Bethesda. Saturday, 2:15 p.m.

I had a date with a handsome and charming young man on Saturday afternoon, coffee followed by the theater. Well, he had mango juice instead of coffee, but we both had a cranberry bliss bar in the Starbucks right outside Round House theatre (http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/). The store was humming with dressed up tweens and their parents, waiting to see A Wrinkle in Time. Noah and I went on a Madeline L’Engle kick this fall reading A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters. We both enjoyed the first two quite a bit, but I don’t recommend reading the last two to your nine year old. The third book was hard for Noah to follow. It’s a family saga with too many characters, too many of whom have the same names. He wanted to keep going to see if he liked the fourth book better, and he did, but I found myself editing as I read because of some mature subject matter. We’re done reading L’Engle for now—we’re currently in the middle of A Christmas Carol—but we were both excited to see this play.

It was a good adaptation. Though I though the playwright made the character of Calvin a little too jokey, the actor grew on me. And so many things were just right—Meg’s awkwardness, Charles Wallace’s quirkiness, although they had to use a seventh-grader to play him. It would have been hard to find a five year old up to the job. I asked Noah later if the characters were as he imagined them and he said the father was supposed to have long hair because he was too absent-minded to get it cut, but the actor who played him was bald. I kind of loved that Noah noticed that but didn’t mention that the actors who played the kids were white and both their parents were played by African-Americans.

He was also very interested in the technical aspects of the production, the house that rolled on and off the stage as needed, the projections on the back wall. When the play was over, he wanted to go look at the projector. We had balcony seats so it was pretty close to us.

Beth and June picked us up when the play was over and we went out for dumplings, garlic eggplant and noodles at City Lights of China (http://bethesdacitylightsofchina.com/) and then for desert crepes at an outdoor crepe stand (http://www.yelp.com/biz/ritas-crepes-bethesda). It was fun to stand in the frosty air among the bustling sidewalk traffic and watch as the servers made the crepes on griddles and then to take the warm triangles wrapped in paper and foil to eat as we walked back to the car.

Act III: American Dance Institute, Rockville. Sunday, 2:30 p.m.

In the freezing cold restroom, I gave June a quick summary of the plot of The Nutcracker. I was hoping if I distracted her by talking to her, she might relax enough to pee before the performance. She’s actually pretty good in public restrooms, but for some reason today she couldn’t go. This was making me nervous because I had failed to bring any spare clothes for her and she’s still imperfectly potty-trained. But she jumped off, insisting she really couldn’t go and we went to stand in line with Beth and Noah to enter the theater.

We were attending The Nutcracker at the American Dance Institute (http://www.americandance.org/), a dance education center, so it was a stripped down version, performed mostly by children and teenagers. I did miss the more elaborate staging of some other versions I’ve seen and the larger casts, but it was just right for June’s introduction to the ballet.

Although, strictly speaking she has seen it before. We took Noah to see The Nutcracker at the University of Maryland when he was four and a half and then the next year, when he was five and a half and June was a baby, we all went again at another location. June was about nine months old then and I thought she might enjoy the music and the colors and the movement. I was right, but what I didn’t predict was how loudly she would express her enjoyment. A woman in front of us gave us dirty looks every time she squealed, so it was a relief when she nursed to sleep some time in the middle. Falling asleep at The Nutcracker is something of a family tradition, as Noah had missed the whole second act when he dozed off in his seat the year before. (He’d only recently stopped napping and my kids do not give up their naps easily.) June did nap this afternoon, however, so she was fresh and ready to take in everything.

We settled into our seats and I read the synopsis from the program to June in order to keep familiarizing her with the story. She said she thought she remembered it and I reminded her that YaYa had a book about it at her house. (In fact, the kids are going to see The Nutcracker twice this year, as YaYa will be taking them next week when we are in Wheeling.)

We were seated early and June was impatient for the ballet to start but once it did, she was very attentive, smiling and clapping, and at one point (during the French marzipan dance in the second act) standing in front of her chair on her toes with her arms over her head rapidly shifting from foot to foot. It was beyond cute. Noah and Beth were seated in the row in front of us, so I didn’t see as many of his reactions but he seemed to enjoy himself, clapping quite loudly at the end.

When the show was over I asked June what part she liked best and she said the Christmas party scene. I bought her a little snow globe depicting Clara holding the nutcracker. She’d seen it at intermission and fallen in love with it at once and had asked several times if she could have it.

We stopped at a supermarket for a few items on our way home and as Beth opened June’s car door, the snow globe came tumbling out of the car and shattered on the icy parking lot. June started to cry, that horrible, hitching cry you probably know if you are a parent. I hesitated just a moment, wondering if this was the moment to let her cope with a small loss, or whether to try to swoop in and make it all right and I went with the latter. It was just too tragic. I promised to try to find her a replacement. By the time we were in the checkout line with our eggnog, pretzels, hot chocolate mix and peppermint sprinkles, she had recovered her good spirits and was singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Once we were home, I consulted the URL on the box and almost immediately found another snow globe that’s almost identical to the broken one and ordered it. The shipping will be more expensive that the little trinket, which gave me another moment of pause, but it’s Christmas-time and I didn’t want to be a Scrooge. And that thought got me to thinking, with happy anticipation, that some year we should really go see A Christmas Carol.

All the Children Are Above Average

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Steph

Yesterday morning, Noah and June and I set out for the playground with two plastic newspaper sleeves. We had a dual goal, to get out of the house so Beth could have some quiet time to do computer support for an ongoing phone banking project her office is coordinating and to collect pebbles and twigs for Noah’s Crow Teepee diorama project. It was a lovely early fall day, sunny and in the high sixties–“the perfect temperature,” Noah opined as we walked.

The creek was low, as it often is this time of year, with more than half the creek bed exposed and a good selection of rocks lying there for the taking. Both kids concentrated on filling their bags. Noah carefully examined his, rejecting some as too big or too small, or too bumpy. June occasionally commented that her rocks were “more beautiful” than Noah’s. She finished rock collecting before he did and we headed to the swings.

While she was climbing one of the big play structures she befriended another little girl. They compared clothing: “I have a rainbow dress,” the other girl opened and June replied, “I have a pink pink dress,” by which she meant alternating stripes of dark and light pink. Next they exchanged ages: “I’m four and I just had my half-birthday,” June informed the other girl. “I’m five…well, almost five,” the girl returned. Once this conversation was complete they were fast friends. When Noah came over he wanted to join in their games, but they shut him out and he decided to go home on his own and get to work on the diorama. I felt a little sorry for him, getting dissed by four year olds, but rather than try to negotiate the situation I said that was a good idea because he really did have a lot of homework this weekend. He had 38 pages to read in Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive (http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/collateral.jsp?id=10829_type=Book_typeId=4669), he had to complete a worksheet on it, he needed to practice his drums and, of course, there was the diorama.

The diorama is part of a research project on the Crow tribe Noah’s been working on for several weeks and will be working on until sometime in November. Last month we visited the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where a librarian in the research center helped him find more specific books on the Crow than we had been able to find at our public library. (And then by an amazing coincidence an actual Crow historian from Montana came by to do his own research and the librarian sent him over to chat with Noah for a while. It was one those moments I’m truly grateful for the unique cultural and educational opportunities we have living so close to Washington, D.C.) Noah has already completed his research and a poster about the Crow. After the diorama, there will be a model of an artifact, an oral presentation and a paper. Come November, we are all going to know a lot about the Crow tribe. (For instance, their civilization evolved from an agricultural one to a nomadic hunter-gatherer one, in a reversal of the usual pattern.)

We’ve also learned a lot about different kinds of graphs. Last week Noah turned in a collection of four graphs, a line graph, a bar graph, a pie chart and a stem and leaf graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemplot). That last one was a new one for Beth and me. He had to decided what each graph would measure, collect the data and write a paragraph explaining how he had avoided bias while selecting people to survey. He titled it “How I Was Random,” which I love.

Overall, we’ve been pleased with the curriculum at Noah’s new school. He’s doing sixth grade math, reading interesting books (they just finished Tuck Everlasting), doing fun science experiments (observing different kinds of life forms in their soda bottle “eco columns”) and going into topics in great depth. He’s definitely being challenged, and although he won’t get a report card until November, I think his days of straight As are over for now. He’s had some As, but he also got a 70% on a math quiz and a 75% on the map component of his Crow poster. He had a healthy indifference to grades, but I can tell he’s not at the top of his class anymore, which is probably a good thing. He will need to stretch himself. That’s what happens when, as in Lake Wobegon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon), all the children are above average.

He’s also started percussion lessons. He’s playing the drums and something called “the bells,” though to me it looked like a glockenspiel. (Then I looked it up and found out glockenspiel is German for “set of bells,” so there you go.) He’s had two lessons so far and he practices faithfully and with enthusiasm. It’s nice to see him enjoying music almost as much as he did when he was little and passionate about all things musical.

We decided against the after-school Spanish club, due to time restraints. I’m a little sad about that but the boy is busy. He doesn’t get home until 4:15 or 4:30 and he had a lot of homework. He watches a lot less television and plays on the computer a lot less than he did last year. We’ve also had to cut back on the books he and read together for fun, though since school started we finished the last two books in the Chronicles of Narnia, and then we read A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door. We’ve decided to hold off on starting A Swiftly Tilting Planet until next weekend so he can focus on his schoolwork.

Socially, there’s been some improvement, as well. He has not made any new friends at his school but he says he doesn’t feel as if people dislike him and he is not teased and ostracized as he was last year. Most days he does have playmates at recess, both kids he knows from his old school and new classmates. I do want him to keep in touch with his old friends. He still plays with Sasha and I’ve been meaning to make a play date with Elias soon. With luck, he’ll make some new friends as the school year progresses.

Saturday afternoon Beth and Noah went shopping for diorama materials and Noah spent a good bit of the weekend working on it. As of Sunday evening, he had printed out photographs of a grasslands landscape and used it to line in the inside and outside of the box. He constructed a teepee out of twigs and fabric he selected because it looked like buffalo skin using craft instructions he found online. He made a campfire out of a twig and yellow felt. He cut out the figures of adult and a baby out of cardboard and dressed them in red felt dresses decorated with tiny white buttons meant to represent elk teeth. He made food out of modeling clay that June graciously donated. Finally, he printed out labels for all the components of the diorama. So far only the teepee is glued in but it was a pretty good weekend’s work. To say he needed a lot of reminders to stay on task would be an understatement, but it was completely “student-crafted,” which I believe meant “Parents, please do not make your child’s diorama for him or her.” Not that there was any danger we would. When Noah needed a reminder to get back to work, Beth told him, “Go, student, craft!”

And I must say that despite the adjustments we’ve needed to make for his long commute and heavier workload, watching my young scholar craft these past six weeks has been a great pleasure.

The First Last

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Steph

After a promising first six days with only one accidental nap, our no-nap routine started to falter about a week and a half ago. On the last Sunday in August June fell asleep on the bare wooden floor of her room and after forty minutes of sleeping there, woke up so out of sorts that she didn’t even want to go to her school’s Ice Cream Social. Ice cream, we coaxed. Friends! She was not interested. I wondered how we could get her up and walking and if we would have to drive to the playground instead but we finally got her moving and we arrived about a half hour into the event.

As we walked I said to Beth with sincere but unexpected nostalgia, “This is our last Ice Cream Social,” and then I added. “The first last.”

Then I remembered that Beth had spent the morning before at the Big Clean at June’s school, ripping up tile and shoveling mulch and that was really the first last. It was harder to feel sad about that one.

Kindergarten’s a year away but I think about it a lot and with some impatience. Maybe it’s because our kids are five years apart so we’ve had little kids for what feels like a very long time. When people ask if I’m sad about June stating her last year of preschool, I always say no. But every now and then I am, just a little.

June’s school year started a week and a day after Noah’s and, nostalgia aside, I was more than ready for it. Partly it was because Noah’s gone for over eight hours a day now that he’s going to a magnet school and has a long bus ride. So what with June either not napping or napping for shorter periods because I cruelly wake her up, once he started going to school it made for a long, tiring day without him home to help entertain her. (I’m napping less, too, under the new regime, and failing to go to bed any earlier, which makes me crabby.) Add to this the fact that I’d been working on a 4,000-word brochure about a digestive aid for Sara for the past three weeks and making minimal progress on it and feeling stressed about that and preschool five afternoons a week was seeming pretty appealing.

So I was really happy when the backpack nametag with the Great Blue Heron’s tracks on it arrived on Tuesday the week before school started. Lesley had mailed them out with a brochure about the structure of the school day. It made it feel like school was a reality, and not merely a mirage looming on the horizon but never getting any nearer. It was made even more special by the fact that on that very morning June and I had actually seen a black-crowned night heron (http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Birds/Facts/FactSheets/fact-blknightheron.cfm) in the creek. My friend Heidi, who’s a bird-watcher, helped me identify it and said it was a rare sighting. So maybe an actual Great Blue Heron would have been even more serendipitous sign, but a heron’s a heron, right?

Meanwhile, June would continue to fall asleep during Quiet Time almost every day until school started. On the last Thursday before school I peeked into the kids’ room. I was expecting to find June asleep in there since the Reggae for Kids CD had ended fifteen minutes earlier and all was quiet. But she wasn’t in bed, or sprawled out on the floor. Had she climbed up into the top bunk and drifted off there? Had she left the room without my hearing her? Then I spotted her sound asleep in the toy box. It was 2:05 when I found her there. How is she going to stay up until 3:00, no 3:30 with the walk home, I wondered.

On Friday June spent the morning and part of the afternoon at the house of the White-Tailed Deer (a.k.a. Blue Gingko, a.k.a. Praying Mantis), sharing her nanny so I could work. We’d done the same with the Field Mouse (a.k.a. Red Maple, a.k.a. Caterpillar) two weeks earlier. In between she’d been to her music teacher’s house where Becky’s daughter, a newly minted eleven-year-old sitter, watched her. All in all, I’d arranged for a record 16.5 hours of babysitting for this project but it was still far from complete.

So over the weekend Beth kept the kids out of the house most of the day Saturday and Sunday. They went to Great Falls (http://www.nps.gov/grfa/), the C & O Canal (http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc6.htm),Wheaton Regional Park (http://www.montgomeryparks.org/enterprise/park_facilities/trains/wheaton.shtm) and had all kind of adventures. I got so much written that I was able to come along with them on their planned Labor Day excursion to the Newsuem (http://www.newseum.org) and the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden (http://www.nga.gov/feature/sculpturegarden/general/index.shtm) and the Smithsonian carousel (http://www.agilitynut.com/carousels/dc.html). We came home for a holiday supper of baked beans, veggie hot dogs, corn on the cob and homegrown watermelon. Then we headed out for ice cream at Moorenko’s (http://www.moorenkosicecream.com) to celebrate June’s last night of summer vacation.

Finally Tuesday came. Beth and I had a very positive early morning meeting with Noah’s teacher before school started while June sat in the corner of the classroom and drew quietly. Then Beth dropped us off at Starbucks. Everyone, from Noah’s teacher to the baristas who greeted June by name, seemed interested to hear it was her first day back at school and admired her new sparkly purple star necklace.

At the beginning of the Tracks year a lot of parents wonder about the logistics of lunch when you have to be at school at noon. Since June eats more or less constantly throughout the day I didn’t think it would be a problem, but at eleven o’ clock when I said it was time for lunch she wasn’t interested. Maybe the snacks of half an apple fritter at Starbucks at nine and the slice of whole-wheat toast with strawberry jam at ten were not well advised. I sliced up some apple to take with us and she asked for it as soon as we set out, but she only ate two slices and then handed the bag back to me. Oh well, I thought, snack’s at one, she’ll survive.

All the way to school, June kept exclaiming, “It’s my back to school day! We’re almost there!” We were about a quarter of the way there when she started in with the last one. We arrived at 11:57. As I signed June in, I stopped to admire the new electric blue paint on the back steps and the refurbished sand pit, which was filled with pristine, white sand. “It looks like a tropical beach,” another mom said.

We went inside and I put June’s spare clothes in her box. She located her hook, which was marked with the photo of herself she’d chosen, hung up her backpack and washed her hands. Then she walked into the classroom, found the attendance card with the heron tracks and her name on it, slid it into the chart and plopped down on the floor to play. The Black Bear, who’s new to the class, was playing with plastic dinosaurs and June joined him. I said goodbye and slipped out.

On the way home, June told me about her day. Lesley read a story about a girl who lived on “Troublemaking Street” and sure enough she got into a lot of trouble, from stomping on the stairs to cutting a hole in her sweater. During dramatic playtime they used the story as a springboard for their imaginings. Snack was cheddar cheese, crackers and melon. On the playground she made a sand castle and decorated it with flowers. She tried to play on the seesaw with the Bobcat (a.k.a. Yellow Holly) but it just stayed balanced and they couldn’t get it moving. She had a good time. She was happy to see her friends. She liked school, she told me, “but home is better.” It is nice to come home, I agreed.

Once we were home, I took off her shoes, brushed the sand off her socks, read her two Curious George books and then took her to her room for Quiet Time. She flung herself across the bed. Her eyes were closing before I even got the CD playing. Another school year is laid out before us, as bright and blank as a newly filled sand pit. It’s time to get in and start playing.

Wolves

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Steph

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Last Wednesday morning we left the kids with a new babysitter so we could meet with the educational psychologist who evaluated Noah earlier this month. The sitter asked the kids when they’d be starting school. Neither knew, so I told her September 7 for June and August 30 for Noah.

“That’s soon!” Noah exclaimed in surprise. We’d been telling him school started soon, of course, but I remember how when you’re a kid the summer seems endless. It just goes on and on until all of a sudden, and quite surprisingly, it’s over.

Later that morning, as I walked out of the appointment, I told Beth, “It’s what they always say about him.” Noah is a quirky kid, no doubt about it. Over the years we’ve considered or various teachers, his pediatrician, and therapists we’ve consulted have suggested the following diagnoses: OCD, Tourette’s, Sensory Processing Disorder, Asperger’s and ADHD. But with the exception of Sensory Processing Disorder, he’s always fit some of the criteria but not enough for a diagnosis. (And even SPD diagnosis he received at the age of six was a borderline one.) So, this is a long way of saying the psychologist doesn’t think he has Asperger’s, even if she does she recognize some Asperger’s characteristics in his behavior. She thinks ADHD is a possibility, but she wasn’t ready to make an official diagnosis of that either.

What he has and as far as I know there’s no official name for it, is a big gap between his intelligence and his executive function. Or to put it simply, he’s really, really smart and he’s also a really, really slow worker. He excelled on a verbal IQ test (in the 99.6th percentile) but on a writing speed test he scored in the 20th percentile. This wasn’t news to us. Noah’s teachers have been telling us he takes a long time to complete his work ever since kindergarten. Whether they interpret this as laziness or an intrinsic part of the way his mind works often determines what kind of relationship they have with him and how effectively they can teach him. We’re scheduling a meeting with Mrs. B, his fourth-grade teacher, to discuss the report and the psychologist’s recommendations in hopes that she can make some accommodations for him, though the lack of any official type of diagnosis at this point means we don’t have any legally binding action plan. I’m okay with that for now. I’d rather just talk to the teacher and say this is what we think he needs and see how it goes.

The week before school started was busy. As I mentioned earlier Noah had play dates with Sasha, Maxine and a pair of twins who will attend his new school and he also attended Sasha’s end-of-summer pool party. On Tuesday morning I let Noah walk to Sasha’s house alone for the first time. This is something we’d been mulling over for a long time, but since he will need to walk home from the bus stop by himself this year (June’s school schedule rules out my getting him), we thought we should start letting him practice walking places by himself. As I stood on the porch and watched him set out, I could tell by the set of his shoulders and the way he held his head how proud and grown-up he felt. And it felt right to watch him go.

The next play date was Wednesday. The dynamic of meeting two new kids at once was a little challenging. At first one twin seemed more interested in playing with Noah while the other hung back, and then the twins played together with Noah left out until their mom suggested we move the play date from the playground to an inside space where it might be easier for them to interact. An inside space, of course, meant our house, which was nearby but in no condition for guests, particularly guests I’d never met before. So I just said, “Well, I didn’t clean,” and she said not to worry so we went home and as it turned out they did play better when they had something more structured to do. (They played Monopoly.) Monopoly was the game of choice again on Friday when Maxine came over. She stayed from 9:30 to 1:30 and they actually finished the game, which was satisfying to Noah since the twins had to leave mid-game.

I had the chance to watch Noah at Sasha’s party since it was a parents-invited potluck. At the beginning when it was only Sasha, Sean and Maura playing in the pool he did pretty well. He splashed in the pool, played with the squirters and ate chips when the kids got out of the water and hit the buffet. But as the party got bigger he started to hang back. I encouraged him to join the other kids when the herd of nine-year-olds moved to the trampoline because he likes bouncing, but he stayed on the screened porch with the grownups. By the time the activity had switched to sword fighting with sticks, I didn’t even mention joining them anymore because I know he’s not comfortable with that kind of play. He’d gone back to the pool to anyway. He was alone but he seemed to be having fun. We haven’t been swimming much this summer and he ended up spending almost the whole three hours and fifteen minutes we were there in the water. I think it was okay, given how big crowds of kids overwhelm him. He spent a lot of time alone but he did socialize some, too.

Of course, in addition to the play dates and party, there were school events, too. The ice cream social was Wednesday night. The principal and the teachers played Two Truths and a Lie. Each one had a Power Point slide with two true facts and a lie about himself or herself and the parents and kids had to guess which one was the lie. We didn’t know which teacher he had yet at the time but I think Mrs. B was the one who has gone bungee cord jumping from a crane. Or maybe she was the one who once parachuted out of a plane. In any case, she did not try out for the Olympic Track and Field team. I know that for sure. After learning about the teachers there was a human treasure hunt in which you had to find people in the room who met certain characteristics. (For instance, I signed a lot of people’s sheets as their vegetarian.) Beth and I both find these kinds of icebreakers tedious, so we were happy when it was finally time to line up for ice cream. We did see a few families from Noah’s old school and get to talk a bit, which was nice.

We were back at school on Friday afternoon to meet Mrs. B and tour her classroom and see who Noah’s classmates are. Samira, who has been at the same school as Noah since nursery school days, is in his class, along with Maura who he has been friendly with on and off since kindergarten. There was also a boy who recognized Noah from Improv camp (though Noah couldn’t remember where they’d met until the boy told him) and one of the twins. So there should be plenty of familiar faces.

I studied a flow chart about the writing process and noticed there was a great quantity of books on the bookshelves and a beanbag chair nearby. “Can I come here and sit in the beanbag chair and read?” Beth asked me. A couple of the kids did just that, picking out a book from the shelf and settling in to read.

There was also a display on the wall about different kinds of ecosystems. I said it looked like they were going to study ecosystems and Noah, standing right in front of the wall, said, “Why?”

Then they all had to ask the teacher a question before they left the room. After giving it a tremendous amount of thought, Noah asked why the wall of cubbyholes was filled with two-liter bottles. For a science experiment was the answer. On our way out we bought a car magnet with a wolf on it, as this is his new school’s mascot.

On Saturday afternoon Noah practiced walking home from the bus stop. He and Beth walked there together and then she waited five minutes to follow. Sure enough, they both got home, five minutes apart. I asked him if he felt confident about walking home and he said yes. After a pause he added, “But it was a little scary walking alone.”

On Sunday I made him copy his summer reading log over again because it had gotten wet at some point during the summer and the bottom was all raggedy. More importantly his handwriting was nearly illegible. He made a new grid on the computer, printed it and filled it out by hand, somewhat more neatly. As he was doing this he realized he had not actually finished one of the books he wanted to put on the log, so he spent most of the evening doing that. After he finished he paced around the house, seeming nervous and keyed up, but he went to sleep pretty quickly after going to bed at his new bedtime of 8:45. (We moved his bedtime back when we made June’s earlier. He thinks going to bed fifteen minutes later and having a bedtime after his little sister’s for the first time in his life is “awesome.”)

He slept until 7:00, which qualifies as sleeping in for him. Beth made him his requested lunch of shredded cheddar cheese, saltines, mango slices and grape juice. I took his picture at the gate and (he wanted to pose as an old man) and at 8:10, he and Beth walked off to the bus stop. Fourth grade, I thought. That is old.

June and I went about our day. I took her to Great Kids Village (http://www.greatkidsvillage.com/drop_in_playtime.html) to see Banjo Man (http://www.banjomanfc.com/), who has a Monday morning gig there, and we had a picnic lunch nearby before getting back on the bus to come home. She fell asleep during Quiet Time for the second day in a row. (She would do it the next day as well.) We’d just finished reading several chapters of James and the Giant Peach when Noah walked in the door at 4:25.

“The first day was good,” he said, before I could even ask him and he gave me two thumbs up. He likes his teacher. She had students from her last class write letters to her current class to tell them what to expect. “You shouldn’t be dreading all the homework people say you are going get. True, there are long-term projects but they are usually fun. Mrs. B is an awesome teacher and you are lucky to have her,” begins the letter Noah received. They are doing a lot of get-to-know-you activities right now. For homework he had to write five interview-style questions for the teacher, which she will answer at a mock press confererence and he had to put several objects in a “memory bag” he’ll bring to class and explicate. (So far he has a magnet in the shape of West Virginia and a potholder he made at his old school in the bag.) They have a whiteboard that you write on and what you write is projected onto a screen. They painted on a real canvas in art class. He played with other kids at recess. He said it was less scary walking home by himself the second time. He seemed really, really happy talking about his day.

I don’t know what Noah’s first year as a Wolf will be like. Of course, there’s a lot I could worry about from his uneven social skills to his wandering mind to the logistics of getting him to school and back and the question of how he will respond to the increased workload. But I have a lot of hopes, too, hopes of fun and challenging assignments and kids to whom he can more easily relate. Wolves are pack animals after all. Most of all, I hope he finds his pack.

Escaping the Boa Constrictor

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Steph

Noah likes to give us homework assignments on the weekends. (Just this past Sunday I did twenty-five two digit by two digit multiplication problems for him—and I got them all right. Apparently I can still do elementary school math.) He relishes his role as teacher and often gives a lecture with examples on his chalkboard before we complete the assignment. A couple weeks back he gave us a language arts assignment that was more fun than the multiplication. “Summer!” the paper proclaimed in yellow-orange letters, “Write a summer story.” That was it, but he gave some oral instruction as well. It should be a true story and not a fictional one, he said. I thought about all the memorable summers in my life, good and bad. Would he like to read about 1987, the summer Beth and I fell in love? Probably too mushy for a nine year old, I decided. How about some of the trips Beth and I took in our twenties and early thirties? (We have traveled to all fifty states together, most of them before Noah was born.) Finally I settled on something more mundane, but possibly of more interest to him. This is what I wrote:

The spring I turned nine years old my family moved to a new house. We moved from the city to a small town. I remember that summer (between third and fourth grade) well. I’d never had a yard before and I loved playing in it. Every morning before breakfast I would run outside to see if anything had changed overnight. There might be mushrooms after a rain or new roses or interesting bugs on my mother’s rosebushes or something new growing in the vegetable garden. The yard had a patio enclosed with cedar trees. That summer my mom read me The Hobbit and we usually sat on the patio to read. I used to stare up at the tall hedges all around me rising into the sky and imagine I was traveling along with Bilbo and the dwarves.

This was also the summer I learned to ride a bike without training wheels. I’d always had trouble learning to do things like that and in the city I could only ride up and down my block anyway so I didn’t have much motivation to learn. My father took the training wheels off my bike that summer and taught me how to ride. It was hard but I finally got it and then I was allowed to ride far from our house. I had never had so much freedom before. I could even go to the ice cream store (with permission). These are some of the reasons 1976, the summer I was nine, was one of the best summers of my life.

I had ulterior motives for telling Noah this summer story. I want him to have as wonderful a summer as I did that year and even more importantly, I want him to believe he can. I put in as many details that might connect him to my nine-year-old self as I could. (He and I just finished reading The Hobbit on Tuesday; he still can’t ride a bike.)
Things have not been going well for Noah recently. I haven’t been this worried about him since kindergarten, what Beth and I now think of as Noah’s bad year.

He’s been saying that the kids at school don’t like him and that he has no friends. I don’t think it’s quite as dire as that, even though he and Sasha do seem to be drifting apart. That’s a natural part of childhood but Sasha has a new best friend and Noah doesn’t, so that’s sad. They are not completely on the outs, though. Noah had him over last weekend and yesterday Noah went to Sasha’s second annual end-of-school pool party. Meanwhile, another good friend has been giving him mixed signals, excluding him from his birthday party (and telling him so) and teasing him at times and but acting friendly, trading books and inviting him over to his house at other times. However, when I asked Noah what he did at recess, which I did from time to time, for the last few months of the school year he always said he played alone and he sat by himself at lunch every day, too.

As they get older the boys in his class are more and more interested in sports, which hold no interest for Noah, and the kind of imaginative, role-playing games he likes to play are getting less popular. He’s also being teased at school for sucking his thumb. As much as I hate to suggest he change for other people, I finally got desperate enough to ask him if he could try to stop sucking his thumb at school and make it an at home thing only. He said he doesn’t realize he’s doing it when he starts and then when he becomes aware he figures everyone has already seen and so he doesn’t stop.

It’s hard to look at this objectively because I was never a popular kid. I went through a few years of being part of a nerdy, frequently teased quartet of girls (fifth through eighth grade) and then after we moved again in the middle of eighth grade, I just didn’t make friends until the summer before eleventh grade (except for a brief but intense friendship at the end of ninth grade). I can say, for me anyway, that it was better to have a few friends, even if we were teased and shoved in the halls, than to have none at all. I don’t want Noah to be in a position to make this comparison ever, but especially not now. He’s only nine years old.

So between his challenging social situation and the lack of academic challenge at school this year, it’s something of a relief that yesterday was the last day of school. I’m going to be proactive about having him invite kids over this summer because one on one is the easiest way for him to relate to other kids. We’ve also decided to do at least the first step of Asperger’s testing. It’s a parent interview. After that, we’ll decide whether or not to have him tested.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. Noah’s looking forward to our two beach trips this summer and to day camp (three weeks of drama and one week of art). At home, he’s his same cheerful self most of the time, except when he’s bickering with June. And there were quite a few highlights in the last two weeks of his third grade year. He was in the Variety Show for the first time. He didn’t choose to be in the show. Some teachers decide to have their whole class perform a song or dance and some kids prepare their own acts. Señor Salinas had both his morning and afternoon classes learn a song called “Que canten los niños” (“Let the Children Sing”) and Noah had fun learning and performing it. Beth took a video and he and I have been working on a set of English subtitles for it. I don’t know why Noah has never created his own act for the Variety Show, given how he loves the spotlight. Sometimes he lacks initiative, especially when it comes to putting something together on someone else’s schedule.

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun. Where else can you see kids playing piano and flute, kindergarteners dancing inappropriately sexy dances, a mime, children in fedoras and sunglasses singing the times tables, Irish step dancing, Indian dancing, a number from High School Musical, a Recycling Parade of mothers dressed in dresses made from tea bag wrappers, Dorito bags, umbrella fabric, etc. and a Michael Jackson tribute? Beth thought the moon-walking was a bit weak, but I thought some of the zombies in the Thriller section were quite convincing.

The carnival at Noah’s school often conflicts with the Lantern Launch but it was a week earlier this year so we got to go. It was a nice relaxed evening. We ate pizza, June played a carnival game (she won a toy by fishing the right rubber duck out of a kiddie pool with a net), Noah threw a ball and successfully dropped the Vice Principal into the dunking tank (much to my and Beth’s surprise) and both kids spent a long, satisfying time climbing and sliding and jumping on the huge inflatable play structures.

Field day was the next week. Noah said he liked the potato sack race the best, but he also enjoyed some of the other games. I asked him if they divide the students into competing teams on field day and he said no. I kind of figured that would be the answer, but I told him how when I was in third grade it was the Bicentennial and they divided us up into the British and the Americans on field day. The British won. He lacked the cultural context (of 1970s culture, not the Revolutionary War) to understand how funny this was.

I think my favorite end-of-year event was the poetry slam in Noah’s afternoon class. To clarify, it was not really a poetry slam. As at field day, there were no winners and no losers. It was really just a poetry recital. But if it had been a poetry slam, I think Noah would have been in the running, not so much for content as for delivery. I say that because even though we were in the front row, three-quarters of his classmates read so quietly I have no idea how good their poems were. They may have been brilliant, but they were inaudible. Noah was loud and clear, though, and very, very serious. If he ever needs to address the U.N, he’ll do a great job. He read two haiku, a diamante (http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/amy/algebra/5-6/activities/poetry/diamante.html), a limerick and a biographical poem. I liked the limerick best:

There once was a boy named Noah
And he got attacked by a boa
That horrible snake
Had made the ground shake
But still it went home with no Noah

Here his serious demeanor cracked a little and he grinned.

Beth and I attended all these events except field day and they reminded me of some of the things I like about his school, its community spirit being chief among them. And I kept thinking how bittersweet all the end-of-year hoopla would have been for me if Noah had gotten into the gifted center for fourth grade.

And then he got in. On Monday afternoon we got the call telling us he’d been admitted from the waitlist, and all of a sudden we went from thinking he’d have two more years at his current elementary school to thinking it might be two more days. Tuesday morning we took Noah out of school for an hour to tour the new school. And that night while we were eating dinner at Mark’s Kitchen (they were having a fundraiser for his current school), he announced he wanted to try to gifted school. So it’s official. Beth’s made the calls and emails and all that’s left is some paperwork.

There are drawbacks. Faced with the prospect of leaving his school, he realized he did have friends and he says he’ll miss them. (Several kids from his school will be switching with him but none are close friends.) We told him he could still have play dates with his old friends. And there will be logistical difficulties. The bus stop will be at his old school, a twenty-minute walk from our house, and the afternoon pickup time doesn’t mesh well with June’s school schedule. Also, he will have more homework and less time to finish it since he will be getting home later. And he’ll be leaving the Spanish immersion program, which has been a good experience. There is the possibility of an after-school Spanish club forming, the principal told us on our tour, but then he’d get home even later so I’m not sure I’d even want him to try it.

Despite all the challenges, we’re going to try to we make it work. It’s a wonderful opportunity for Noah that opens up all kinds of possibilities. His academic needs should be better met at his new school and while there’s no guarantee of this, I’m hopeful that some of his social difficulties could be ameliorated by changing schools at this point as well. It will be a chance to start fresh, with new kids, all of whom will be in a new school and looking to make new friends. Plus they will be as smart as he is, so possibly his quirks won’t seem quite as quirky. I’m hoping that’s how it works out anyway.

I’m feeling more optimistic about him than I have in a while. Take that, boa constrictor.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

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