Lanterns on the Water, Heron in a Tree

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Steph

Last year the end of June’s school year was difficult. She was just distraught about leaving the Bugs class, leaving Andrea, and not going back to school for three long months. This year she’s taking it in stride. School ended on Wednesday and she has not shed a single tear about it.

In her three years at the Purple School, Leaves to Tracks will probably be the easiest transition. Unlike last year, she’s been through this before so she knows what it means to go on summer break and then come back to school. And unlike last year there’s no switch in teachers. Her Leaves teacher, Lesley, teaches Tracks four days a week and her Bugs teacher, Andrea, teaches it the remaining day. And unlike next year, elementary school is not looming in the near future. June’s one concern is that at the end of the summer she will have to give up napping because Tracks meets in the afternoon. (This is a concern I share. June’s still a regular napper—I don’t think she’ll give it up easily.)

The last week of school was full of fun. On Monday a ranger came and made a joint presentation to the Leaves and Tracks (the Tracks came early that day and the Leaves stayed late). She brought an owl, a box turtle and a corn snake. June was full of comments about the animals on the way home. The owl had just one feather, she said, but it still tried to fly. Just one feather? I asked. That couldn’t be right, I thought, but she insisted. (Beth later surmised it probably had just one wing, which made June’s comment that it had “had a hard life” make more sense, though I supposed an owl with just one feather would also have a hard life.) Corn snake smell with their tongues, she informed me, and the snake kept sticking out its tongue. She laughed heartily at the memory. Apparently it was a really funny snake.

June complained a bit about being tired on the walk home (it was forty-five minutes later than usual) but she held up and even wanted to watch some Dragon Tales clips on the computer before her nap, since she’d missed her show. I was glad she was able to stay up at least that late without falling apart because she will be attending a science day camp at her school three mornings next week and it lets out at 1:30, two hours after her normal dismissal time.

Wednesday, the last day of school, was a water play day. The kids came to school in their bathing suits and the co-opers sprayed them with the hose on the playground. It was actually a cold, drizzly day and I sent June to school with a long-sleeved t-shirt and a raincoat over her bathing suit to keep her warm. They did not head outside immediately but waited until later in the morning when it cleared a little and then they all came back inside to get dry again. The Yellow Gingko’s mom was co-oping and she said it was quite a job getting fourteen wet and naked children re-united with their clothes. By the time I picked June up it was raining again and the Red Gingko’s mom gave us a lift home. I remembered June’s last day of Bugs, also a cold rainy day, and how I carried her weeping through the parking lot of the school. Today she was sniffling a little about a skinned knee, but overall she was more interested in discussing what she would have for lunch and what she would watch on television than crying.

The day before everything had come home—her spare clothes, her journal, her art portfolio, the photo of her that hung by her coat hook, the little card with the Yellow Dogwood symbol on it that she stuck in the attendance board every day, and of course her lantern for the lantern launch on Friday. No matter how well prepared I am for the end of the year, the day the stuff comes home always undoes me, and it’s the little things like the attendance card that are the worst. I taped it to the kids’ door, underneath June’s hornworm symbol from last year and Noah’s painted turtle symbol.

Next year June will be the Great Blue Heron. Normally the kids choose their symbols for the year at the end of the summer, either during Andrea or Lesley’s home visit or at the ice cream social held at the end of August. But this year Lesley said there was a lot of discussion among the Leaves about what their symbols would be and she let the particularly eager ones make their selections early. Younger siblings are generally given first right of refusal of their older siblings’ symbols, but June wanted nothing to do with a hand-me-down track. She picked the Great Blue Heron, which makes sense because she has been really interested in birds lately, after they read some bird books at school this spring. She says she’s “a kid bird-watcher” and we are keeping a log of all the birds she sees.

At school a couple weeks ago Lesley and I talked about how June reminds us of the girl who was the Great Blue Heron in Noah’s class. Like June, she was a tiny little thing, but very strong-willed, and she loved nature. I remember walking home with her and how she’d be stopping to pick up acorns and leaves and pebbles just as June does. Lesley said this year’s Great Blue Heron is quite a strong personality as well. “The tracks find their children,” she mused.

Last week we saw actually a juvenile Blue Heron in the creek near the playground, a sight which is not unprecedented but not common either. And then, as June, Noah and I were walking to the picnic site for the lantern launch on Friday evening, we saw another heron, standing in the shallow water of Constitution Gardens (http://www.nps.gov/coga/index.htm). (Beth was parking the car and she had the camera—so no picture.) We spread out our blanket and started snacking on watermelon and macaroni salad and cheese and crackers and we visited with other families.

The launch is such a lovely event that it’s really a shame I spend every single one getting stressed about the fact that it’s running so late and when are they going to start the program already and how outrageously late will it be when the kids get to bed? (Answers: It finally started at 7:35 and both kids were in bed at 9:25, about an hour late.) Beth told me I should just relax and she was probably right, so let’s just pretend I did.

It was a gorgeous evening of a gorgeous day, sunny and warm but not too hot. As we ate and listened to the presentations the light turned gold over the grass and the water. Presents were exchanged. The teachers got gift certificates and Lesley received a book of the children’s artwork and box full of intricate little hand-made figurines representing a scene from a Baba Yaga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga) story—she’s a witch in a series of Russian folk tales that play an important role in the Tracks curriculum. Lesley was completely overcome by that last gift. It’s a special school that presents its lead teacher with a little witch’s house made of skulls for her year-end gift and reduces her to tears in the process.

The kids and families got gifts, too. Bugs got butterfly nets, the Leaves got jars for catching fireflies, the Tracks got sweet gum seedlings and all three classes got a book of the songs they sang at Circle Time or at dismissal and a DVD of pictures taken in the classroom over the course of the year. (Another difference from last year—June is not nearly as fixated by the DVD as she was last year.) Our family also got a birdhouse in recognition of Beth’s two years’ service on the board. When it was June’s turn to go up to Lesley and get her gift, she threw her arms around her and gave her a hug that went on and on and on.

As we headed over the bridge that leads to the launching site, everyone sang “Make New Friends, But Keep the Old.” And then it was time to put the lanterns on the water. They were beautiful this year. The last day I co-oped Lesley asked me if sequins were too tacky for the Leaves’ lanterns, but these are four and almost four years olds were talking about, so I shook my head. She went with them and the sequins glittered as the candlelight shone through the painted paper. Noah had wanted to bring his old lantern, but Beth said no–while alumni are encouraged to bring their lanterns to the Winter Solstice parade, at the spring event the focus is supposed to be on the kids who are either graduating or moving up a class. Anyway, when June abandoned her lantern after a few minutes of sailing it out into the water and reeling it back with the string, it was too much for Noah, so we let him sail it.

June meanwhile was busy climbing trees. There were a few just her size. As she stared out from the branches, I wondered what the Great Blue Heron was seeing out there in the distance, and what the she was thinking about and what will come next for her in her last year of nursery school, the last year of early childhood.

Ars Longa

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Steph

Noah and June and I had a very pleasant afternoon on Friday. It was a warm, sunny day, but not too humid, perfect mid-May weather. It being Friday, we didn’t need to worry about homework and for some reason, the kids didn’t fight much. Noah rode his scooter up and down the block with June following him on her tricycle. Then he sat under the silver maple in the back yard reading This Book Is Not Good For You (http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=this+book+is+not+good+for+you&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=15407216404610757703&ei=MXDwS6fEJIKdlgeiu-i0CA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDQQ8wIwAg#ps-sellers) while June and I played in the sandbox. These days her sand castle building prioritizes decoration over building so she will quickly mound some sand together then spend a long time sticking twigs, blades of grass, clover flowers and thistles into it. We also keep a baggie of shells and sea glass in the sandbox for her to use on her castles. When Noah finished reading, he played with his Extreme Bubble Kit he got for his birthday. It took him a little while to get the hang of how to hold and move the rope on sticks to form the huge bubbles, but once he did he couldn’t stop laughing and yelling, “Did you see that one.” When he was finished, he said, “The kit was right, Mommy. This is extreme fun.”

At five we headed inside. I got on the phone to order pizza and the kids watched The Electric Company (http://pbskids.org/electriccompany/). Both kids like this show, despite the fact that it’s designed for emergent readers, in other words kids younger than Noah and older than June. The plot of the main story holds Noah’s interest even if he doesn’t need the little phonics-based sketches that interrupt it. June likes the stories, too, and who knows, maybe she’s absorbing some of the pedagogical material. She has been intensely interested in letters recently. She had a burst of interest last spring, learned to identify most of the alphabet and then forgot about it for a year or so. Now she’s focused on learning to write the letters. Sometimes this is all she wants to do. She likes to make little books. She’ll get one of us to staple pages together and then she’ll draw the pictures and write the words. If she can’t get anyone to help her she will just draw random letters but she prefers to have an adult or Noah tell her how to spell what she wants to say, which is a laborious process because she also asks for instruction on how to shape most of the letters. Just this weekend, she got the hang of starting the letters from the top left corner, going across the page and down to the next line. Before this, she placed them randomly all over the page and was disappointed when the story could not be read back to her.

The Electric Company episode they watched was called “Pop Goes the Easel.” Several of the characters get trapped inside a magical painting and have to figure out how to escape. In the end, what they need is for someone in the real world to finish the series of paintings and paint a castle they can use as an exit. At first the painter thinks he can’t do it because he lacks artistic skill. Then he learns “there’s no right and wrong in art,” gains confidence and saves the day.

I thought it was a fitting gateway to our weekend, which was going to be heavy on the arts. Noah’s school’s annual art show was on Friday evening, June’s school’s art show was Saturday afternoon and on Sunday afternoon we were planning to attend a family sing-along at the rec center led by the music teacher from June’s school (who also used to be June’s Kindermusik teacher). In between all this, we’d squeeze in June’s last soccer practice of the spring season, a long playdate for Noah, Noah’s last swim lesson for the season, some gardening and the usual weekend chores.

I love the art show at Noah’s school. The lead art teacher is very talented and wonderful at helping children realize their artistic potential. It’s always fun to stroll through the halls looking at the paintings, collages, masks, kites and clay figurines, running into families we know. This year a four seasons mosaic made by all the students in the school was unveiled. One circle depicting winter and spring is on the left side of the main doors of the school and another circle depicting summer and fall is on the right side. Noah worked mainly on the spring portion.

I don’t know if more people than usual came to see the mosaics or if people came on the early side to beat the predicted thunderstorm, but it was packed in the halls when we arrived around 6:30. Noah wanted to pretend to be a tour guide as he led Beth around. I thought it would be better for June and me to move at our own pace so we split up. Every student in the school is represented by one or two pieces of work the art teachers select. The kids don’t know what will be chosen until they see it on the walls (usually in the days before as the show is being installed). All the art was lovely, from the kindergartners’ cherry blossom paintings to the fifth-graders’ clay gargoyles. Noah’s piece was a jazz collage. The students looked at art with jazz themes and listened to jazz and then they each picked an instrument. Noah chose a tuba and he represented the music coming out of it with pink and blue strips of construction paper.

The next morning we all headed off to June’s soccer practice. Usually Beth and June go by themselves, but since it was the last day, I wanted to come to see her improvement and to watch her get her medal. Noah brought his scooter so he could scoot around on the path that circles the huge field. There were baseball teams practicing on the field as well and we ran into Noah’s friend Sean (along with his mother and three younger siblings). They were there for Sean and his brother Timmy’s game. They were going to spend the rest of the day at their family’s farm and Sean wanted to know if Noah could come along. I hesitated just a little because it would mean he’d miss June’s art show and I didn’t know if they get him home in time for his bedtime. But it seemed important to say yes so he could have some extended time with a friend. He came home that night around seven o’clock full of stories about climbing on a tractor and in a haystack, gathering eggs and digging in the garden.

Meanwhile, we went to the art show at June’s school. This event is held outdoors, with the children’s art hung on the playground fence, one piece for each of the Bugs and Leaves and two pieces each for the Tracks. In this case, the kids pick their own artwork at a portfolio conference earlier in the spring during which parents get to see their children’s art and journal entries from throughout the year. June ran straight to her collage, which is entitled “Me and Noah going to School Without Mommy.” The kids had selected pre-cut elements to paste together into a snow scene. At the portfolio conference, Lesley told me how careful June had been to match different elements of the children’s clothing and to make sure each figure had a right and left hand mitten. Once we’d admired her work, June wasn’t much interested in looking at her classmates’ art so she went to play in the sand pit with some of her friends while Beth and I socialized with other parents, sampled the refreshments and walked around the perimeter of the playground, looking at the beautiful art hanging on the fence. Around 3:55, five minutes before the show was to end, June decided she did want to look at the art after all so we made a quick circuit. I pointed out every piece that was by one of her classmates. “Where is Yellow Gignko’s picture?” She kept asking. It was near the end, because all the pieces were arranged alphabetically by the children’s first names and the Yellow Gingko’s name starts with a T. Finally we found her self-portrait as an astronaut and June was satisfied.

In some ways it was a nostalgic event. We saw two alumni families from Noah’s class on their way out as we were going in. And even before I saw the Yellow Gingko’s and Red Dogwood’s moms carrying their infants I was reminiscing to June about being at the art show when Noah was in nursery school and how I spent most of the show sitting in a chair, nursing a “teeny tiny baby.”

“That was me!” June said excitedly.

We walked home and Beth and June worked in the garden while I cooked dinner. They weeded and got three tomato plants and four sunflowers into the ground. Beth says June composed and performed a rap called “I Love to Weed.”

The next day Beth had a busy morning grocery shopping with June and taking Noah to his swim lesson and then out on errands. They got home just in time to hurry over to the rec center’s newly renovated auditorium to see Becky’s concert. Along with another singer and with a lot of audience participation, she sang a DC/Baltimore area-specific version of “Little Liza Jane” (a favorite of mine), “Froggy Went a Courtin” (a song that’s four hundred years old, I learned), “The Green Grass Grew All Around” and lots of other folk and childhood favorites. Noah knows that last one from drama camp and loves it. All through the concert he was smiling and singing and doing the hand motions. June was more reserved but she seemed to be having a good time, too. By the end she had started following along with the hand motions.

“Is there anything better than being with kids and singing songs that have been around forever and ever?” Becky asked toward the end of the concert.

Maybe. I think seeing my kids develop as readers and artists and athletes is right up there, but I know we’d all be poorer without the arts in our day to day lives and I hope my children’s early artistic experiences will be with them for a long, long time to come.

Fab Four: A Birthday in Four Acts

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Steph

June turned four on Tuesday and as Vice President Biden would say, it was a big… well you know what he would say, right? And it was.

Act 1: The Weekend Before

My mom came to spend the weekend and we had a nice, low-key visit. We went out for pizza at Roscoe’s on Friday night and on Saturday morning we went to June’s first soccer practice of the spring season. The Red Gingko is playing on her team again and the Yellow Gingko is joining the fun this time, too. The three of them spent a lot of time before practice huddled together discussing who knows what. Two of June’s other classmates are on a different team for a total of one third of the Leaves class playing soccer at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings. (So when did we schedule her party? At 10:30 a.m. the Saturday after her birthday, which also happened to be during the first weekend of spring break when two of her best friends were going to be out of town, but I’m getting ahead of myself here…)

I had wondered if June would pick up where she left off at the end of last season or if she’d be shy all over again, but she jumped right in and was soon dribbling her pink soccer ball all over the field while I got to stand on the sidelines and watch and chat with my mom and other parents. Plus the weather was gorgeous. You couldn’t have asked for a nicer first day of spring.

After June’s nap, she opened her presents from Mom—two beautifully illustrated hard cover books about a fairy born without wings (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316590789/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk & http://www.amazon.com/review/R2C4R3KAJZVO6P) and the fanciest dress June has ever owned. The bodice is a white satiny material and the skirt is white with green vines and coral-colored flowers and it has underskirts that make it poof out. She loves it and I am terrified to let her wear it anywhere.

Next, Mom and I took the kids to the playground and they spent most of their time there splashing in the creek (Noah) or climbing on the boulders nearby (June). Mom and June and I played an extended game in which June stood behind a tree and Mom and I took turns knocking on her door and pretending to be UPS delivery people, the Big Bad Wolf, the Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood, all of whom needed help locating each other, all that is except the UPS woman- she delivered the wolf in a box at the beginning of the game, which set the rest of the game in motion. June kept pretending to be completely exasperated with these interruptions, but then she’d instruct us to knock again.

We saw Sasha there but he has recently decided he’s going to be in the Tour de France by the time he’s sixteen and was too intent on riding his bike to play with Noah. There was also a girl there who was in Noah’s second grade class and informed Mom she didn’t like Noah because he once tried to kiss her. I asked him later if he’d ever tried to kiss her and the look of utter shock on his face was comic. “No!” he spluttered once he could speak. I have concluded that either a) she is a pathological liar, or b) She misremembered which boy had amorous designs on her last year, or c) Noah crashed into her once—he’s always crashing into people—and she misread his intentions.

We came home and Mom played with the kids while I made pasta with asparagus and a strawberry sauce for cheesecake to celebrate the Equinox. Then we watched about half of Pippi Longstocking and it was time for bed.

Sunday morning we went to a different playground and then Mom and Noah continued the game of online Monopoly they’d started the day before until it was time for her to go home. Before I put June down for her nap I asked her to thank Grandmom again for the books and the dress and she said, “But I already did!” in an indignant tone, because, you know, thank yous are strictly rationed around here.

Act 2: The Big Day: Morning

“Happy Birthday,” Beth whispered to June when she crawled into our bed around 6:10 on Tuesday. June was too sleepy to respond at once, but eventually she said it wouldn’t be her birthday until it was light outside. June’s not a morning person, even on her birthday.

Once everyone was up and about we let June open three birthday cards, one from YaYa, one from Beth, Noah and myself, and one from Ladybug. Ladybug is the eponymous character of her own magazine, published by the same company as Cricket, but for a younger audience. Because I was renewing the subscription I bought a card with a ladybug on it and wrote her a message from the point of view of Ladybug telling June she was so happy she liked the magazine and that it would keep coming for another year. June did not buy it. “But how could Ladybug send me a card when she is not in our world?” she wanted to know. “ So I had to cop to having written it myself. It made me wonder if she will make it to first grade believing in Santa as Noah did. She did like the ladybug tattoo that came in the card, though and wanted it applied to her hand right away. And another of the cards had a sticker in it that said, “Yah! I’m 4!” which had to go on her shirt and the one from YaYa folded out into a castle with little paper doll princesses and a horse that could be punched out to inhabit the castle.

Between June playing with the paper castle and me trying to gather up the birthday treats we were bringing to school, the birthday card I needed to get in the mail for my sister, and the hand-me-down baby clothes I was bringing to school for the Red Dogwood’s new baby sister, we got a late start leaving the house and I was almost ten minutes late for my co-op shift.

The Blue Holly’s mom was doing the yellow team’s journals and she asked June if she wanted to do a special birthday entry. While June drew and the co-oper transcribed her story, the Blue Holly herself sat nearby and set to work making a long series of birthday cards for June. Soon the Blue Maple joined in. They kept bringing the cards to me as I read to a small group of kids. Put them in her backpack, I told them. When I examined them at home I found them covered with a multitude of random letters, or maybe not exactly random. They favor Hs. Os and Ts, just like June does when she writes. It’s amazing how close they all are developmentally sometimes. There were also balloons all over the Blue Holly’s cards.

During Circle Time, Lesley got out a dark, oblong wooden tray filled with polished stones and five votive candles and called June up front. The class discussed how many candles Lesley would need to take away to make four. There was general agreement that the answer was one. Lesley took away one candle and lit the rest. June walked around the lit candles four times and each time Lesley asked her to tell one thing about when she was one, two and three years old and one thing about what she would do when she was four. June replied that when she was one she was “learning to chew” and that when she was two she learned to ride her little bike and that when she was three she played with her mommy a lot. She didn’t have a clear goal for four—so Lesley suggested learning to swim.

The kids proceeded to snack, and after they’d had their fill of oranges, strawberries and popcorn, I handed out the sugar cookies with pink and blue sugar on top that June and I had made the day before. She initially wanted pink sugar for the girls and blue sugar for the boys but I put the kibosh on that plan, saying we could do some of each and let kids chose their own cookies, at which point June suggested we put both colors on each cookie and that’s what we did. As the kids were dividing up into groups for music, the Blue Gingko told me in a very grown up tone, “Steph, the cookies were delicious.”

Just before playground time, as the kids were all milling about in the coat room, June informed me in a panic that I forgot to put the lollipop favors into backpacks. So I rushed to get them in as the kids were shouldering their packs. I hope I got everyone, but it was kind of chaotic. If you’re a Leaf parent and you haven’t found one yet, check all little compartments of your child’s backpack.

On the way home, I let June walk on a brick retaining wall I have never let her on before because it’s high off the ground and it tilts out at an alarming angle. “You said I could do it when I was four,” June said. What I’d actually said was she could do it when she was a Track, which is another five months off, but it sometimes resistance is futile and I sensed this was one of those times.

“Do four year olds take naps?” she wanted to know after lunch. Yes, they do, I told her, and she did.

Act 3: The Big Day: Afternoon and Evening

By a strange coincidence, June’s birthday fell on free pastry day at Starbucks and free cone day at Ben and Jerry’s. Plus, you can get always get a free cupcake at Cake Love on your birthday. We were saving June’s birthday cake for her party so it seemed incumbent on us to take advantage of at least one of these opportunities. Beth came home early so we could go to dinner at Noodles and Company, followed by dessert.

But first June opened her presents from us and from YaYa. There was soccer net and ball, a big box of modeling clay, two outfits (both quite pink) and a tiara with pink ribbons that Noah picked out for her at Port Discovery. She immediately decided she wanted to wear the pink and green striped dress to school the next day and the tiara to dinner. So she did. We ended up getting both ice cream and cupcakes in the same evening, even though June only picked at her dinner. She did eat a fair amount of broccoli, and it was her birthday, so I set the bar low.

All evening she was full of proclamations: “I can do it myself. I’m four!” or “I know how to do everything. I’m four!” or Beth’s favorite, “I don’t have to hold hands in the elevator. I’m four!” Then she would add, “You guys can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me again if you want,” as if she were conferring a favor.

As I was cuddling with her in bed that night, she told me “The night I was three and I was going to be four the next day, it felt different going to bed.” Maybe that’s why she was out of bed six or seven times with sippy cup and stuffed animal related problems before she finally fell asleep close to quarter to ten that night. But this night, her first night as a four year old, she dropped right off to sleep.

Intermission: The Day After

On Wednesday, soon after waking, June informed me, “It’s my second day of being four.” On the way home from school she asked, “Do four year olds wear diapers a lot?”

I pounced. “Not really,” I told her. “Actually I was thinking you would sit on the potty and wear underwear a lot this week. What do you think of that?”

She said “No!” about a dozen times quite firmly. So much for that opening, I thought.

In the afternoon, she played with her soccer net and made letters out of the modeling clay. I showed her how to make the letters of her name. Later Noah called me over, saying he’d added a word. I expected to find “Noah” under “June” but instead he’d written “Rocks.”

That evening we opened Auntie Sara’s presents, which had arrived that day. There was pink kimono-style dress, a necklace with interchangeable magnetic pendants (ladybug and rainbow) and a beading kit (the same beading kit June got Sara for Christmas actually—she regifted it). June put on the necklace with the ladybug attachment and with Noah’s help soon got to work making bead necklaces. It was hard to convince her to take them all off to go to bed.

Act 4: The Party

Friday morning, the day before the party, June and I were in the Langley Park shopping center and on a whim, I decided to go inside the Expo Mart and see if they had cakes. June wanted a supermarket cake instead of a homemade one and she and Beth were scheduled to get one that evening. I thought if we could find one, I’d save her a trip.

We went in and there was a bakery section, but no cakes. The Expo Mart, a small supermarket that serves the neighborhood’s Latino population, just opened in December and it’s a work in progress. Almost every time I’ve gone in looking for something specific, I can’t find it. However, what they did have, and what I really should have expected, given the demographic, was an impressive selection of piñatas. June gasped when she saw the princess in the gold dress. She wanted it. Could she have, please, please, please?

Let’s look at all of them, I suggested. June’s party was loosely organized around a coloring theme. We got coloring books and crayons for all the guests. There were crayons on the invitations that Noah designed for her and I’d picked out some multicolored foods (rainbow goldfish crackers and rainbow sherbet). I’d been half-hoping to find a rainbow cake or at least a very colorful one. And while June picked the party theme, her interest in sticking to it in any consistent manner was tepid and somehow princesses kept creeping in. She picked Disney princess plates and napkins and there was a random picture of Pocahontas on the invitations she forced Noah to include, despite his protests that it had nothing to do with the theme. (At one point I’d thought he’d found the perfect clip art—a princess that looked like it had been drawn by a child—princesses and coloring! Of course, June rejected it.) Anyway, I was wondering if I could steer her away from the princess and toward something more multi-hued. I found a star-shaped piñata with stripes in various colors and there was the traditional burro, also striped. She was having none of it because she had spied something even better than a gold princess. There was a pink princess! I knew I was beat then and asked a salesclerk how much it cost. It took three or four staff members and two languages to get someone to take it down. I paid five dollars over the price I told myself was the absolute ceiling of what I would pay as I was waiting to find out “cuanto cuesta la princesa rosa.” What can I say? I fell victim to “please, Mommy, please?”

Our evening plans involved going to Noah’s friend Joseph’s house where Noah had spent the afternoon and joining his family for pizza. But Beth discovered she had a flat tire as we drove down the driveway. So June and I went to Joseph’s house and Beth went to the service station. When we got there we found they hadn’t ordered enough vegetarian pizza and Noah had already eaten the last slice. So June and I had some cheese and crackers and we hung out for a while and walked home where I fixed dinner for June. By the time Beth got home I was getting the kids ready for bed. But Beth had brought home takeout falafel from the organic falafel cart in the gas station parking lot. (What? You don’t have an organic falafel cart in your Citgo parking lot? You need to move to Takoma Park.) The cake would have to wait until the next morning.

Saturday morning Beth took June to pick out a cake while I finishing cleaning the house. I had set up several play areas in the back yard the day before and Noah made signs for all of them (Bubble Zone on the table with the bubble soap, Sand Zone by the sandbox, Soccer Zone by the soccer net and balls, etc.) He also made a welcome sign with a circus ringmaster we taped to the front door.

Beth and June came back with a white-frosted cake with pink roses and a bunch of balloons and after some more tidying inside and out, the guests started arriving. I was reading to June in her room to calm her down when I heard The Yellow Ginkgo’s voice. We came into the living room and soon Blue Gingko and Blue Maple were there too, all busily exploring the array of toys in our living room.

In retrospect, the party was structured a lot like a school day. There was free play in the living room for about twenty minutes after arrival (the musical instruments were especially popular); there was an art project (coloring in the living room); there was outside play in the back yard (the sandbox and slide were big hits as was running in and out of the fairy princess tent which had been temporarily relocated outside); and there was snack (in the form of pizza, cake and sherbet). The only thing I missed was Circle Time and the funny thing was I had considered reading Harold and the Purple Crayon to the guests, but I completely forgot about it. (I also forgot to serve the goldfish crackers). We finished up with the piñata. I had been afraid June would cry when it was smashed, but the damage was not too bad, just enough to cause her to rain candy from the bottom of her tattered gown and Beth had to deliver the final blow after all the kids, including Noah and the Yellow Holly’s little sister, had taken several turns. The pink princess turned out to be one tough broad.

Overall everything went very smoothly. The girls all played nicely together and no one threw a fit or cried. Although she had very specific plans about all the activities and what she wanted her guest to wear (sunglasses, party hats) she was satisfied as long as she had partial participation with each part of the plan. I got a little nervous when the Blue Maple found June’s new tiara in the dress up bin and wore it for a while, but June either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Several moms stayed and the party was calm enough that we could actually sit and talk with the adults from time to time, which was an unexpected bonus. Noah helped with the piñata and the Blue Gingko, who knows from experience what older brothers are good for, drafted him to help her and June with the stickers in their coloring books. (The Blue Gingko also demonstrated her high level Disney skills while we ate, matching the princesses on the napkins to the castles on the plates.)

By twelve twenty the last guest had left and we let June open her presents. I thought she might be too wound up to nap, but she fell right asleep when I put her down around one o’ clock. She spent much of the afternoon coloring in the coloring book, listening to her new book, playing her new harmonica, turning her Tinkerbell lantern on and off and begging to fly her new kite. Beth had dinner out in Virginia with her high school friend Sue who had a layover at Dulles airport so I made quesadillas and the kids and I watched Cars. After they were in bed, I did the dishes and licked the frosting off the numeral four candle that was first used on Noah’s fourth birthday cake. Then I washed it and put it away to wait for my forty-third birthday come May.

Today June has been making signs announcing a party for her imaginary friend Gaspard and taping them to the walls and furniture. They are covered with hearts and lots of Hs and Os. With June organizing it, I’m sure it will be a fabulous event.

Geo Kings (and Queens)

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Steph

“What’s the capital of Texas?” I asked Noah, as I got up from his bed after our nightly bedtime snuggle last night.

“Austin,” he answered.

“Good job,” I said.

“You know which one I don’t know? It’s a hard one,” he said.

“Which one?”

“South Carolina.”

“I think it’s Columbia. I’ll be right back.” I went to check the sheet of state capitals I’d found on the Internet and printed for him during the endless stream of snow days last week.

“And North Carolina,” he yelled after me. “That might be Raleigh.”

I came back into the darkened room. “North Carolina: Raleigh. South Carolina: Columbia,” I said.

“Okay. Thanks,” he said.

It was the eve of the Geo Bowl. The competition had been postponed twice this month due to weather, but it was on for this morning. (The potential snowstorm on Monday turned out to be rain.) At dinner last night, Beth broached the subject of good and poor sportsmanship, not because we have any worries about Noah’s behavior. Noah’s an extremely good sport and always has been. He could lose a game of Chutes and Ladders graciously at the age of three, whereas his sister…well, she’s not there yet. Beth was worried that if there was gloating from the winning team, whether it was his or another one, it might catch him unaware or hurt his feelings. He thought about it and named one of his teammates as the most competitive and likely to revel a bit too much in victory.

“He’s not too upset when he loses, but he gets really excited when he wins,” he said.

I wondered if the boy in question had studied more than Noah. While Noah did get bored enough to study the state capitals (and his times tables, which his math teacher recently asked us to review with him) during the snow week, he really hasn’t studied that much since qualifying for the team, although he has attended a few study sessions, both at school and at his friends’ houses. Noah picks up facts very quickly and easily but he’s not much for disciplined, solo study. I was glad the contest is structured so that all the members of the team are allowed to consult with each other before answering the questions. That way, they all have the benefit of whatever knowledge each member managed to glean from the booklet they were issued back in November.

Noah’s most concrete contribution to the team, prior to the actual competition, was to design the t-shirts (with some help from Beth). As his team was called the Geo Kings, the shirts sport a globe wearing a crown. A while back I asked him why the team was not called the Geo Kings and Queens, as half the members are girls. “Mommy, I didn’t vote for that name,” he told me impatiently.

This morning Noah was keyed up. He was up before five, though I didn’t become aware of him stirring and yawning and muttering to himself until June woke me for diaper change at 5:35. Needless to say, none of the three of us got any more sleep. Once the kids were up, Noah kept crashing into June and annoying her, so I sent him down to the basement to jump on the trampoline in hopes that would calm and focus him.

After some discussion he decided to wear a flannel shirt over his Geo Kings t-shirt rather than the t-shirt over the long-sleeved shirt. I was afraid if he removed the flannel shirt for the competition (his plan) he would lose it, but Beth told me privately she thought he might be concerned about being singled out if he had the Geo King shirt visible all day. One day last month, Sr. S announced in class that Noah was the only one to have a perfect score on the math portion of a standardized test and that day at lunch, some kids told them they had a special seat for him because of his perfect score—far away from them. He’s been pushed and pinched at school recently as well. I wasn’t sure that was what was really going on with the shirt, but it made me sad to think he might want to cover it, after putting so much work into it. He even said this morning, before the Geo Bowl had started, that making the shirts was the best part of the experience. I don’t ever want him to feel he has to hide his light under a bushel. The gifted school is looking better and better. We’ll find out if he’s accepted in April.

Beth drove Noah to school and I met her there, after leaving June at school. Even though the crowd of parents in the audience was not huge, we knew a high proportion of them, as many of Noah’s friends had made the teams. There were three girls who went to the Purple School with Noah (Jazmín, Jill and Samira). Jill has always been very shy, so I was proud to see her up there on stage. Many kids he’s known since kindergarten and several of his closest friends were also there. Sasha and Maxine were on the Golden Gators team. Maura and Joseph were on the Red Hot Chili Peppers team and Sean was the spokesperson for the Geo Kings.

We chatted a bit with Maxine’s mother before the Bowl got underway, touching on how much less challenged the more advanced kids seem to be in third grade than they were in second (we blame the focus on standardized test prep) and how social interactions have gotten more complicated and sometimes negative.

Then it was time to start. The first two rounds were on state capitals and the very first question for the Geo Kings was the capital of South Carolina! I wondered if it was a good omen. They go it right, in fact all the teams got all their questions right for the first five rounds. It was really a wonderful thing to see. All the kids looked so proud and confident. Sometimes Noah jumped straight up into the air or gave a teammate a high five after the judges declared an answer correct.

I was proud of all the kids on all the teams and I didn’t want anyone to miss a question. But of course, eventually they did. In the last three rounds instead of sending a spokesperson to the judges with the team’s answer, the scribe wrote the answer on a white board and held it up for the judges to see. This was where it got competitive. The answers were multi-part and worth more points. The question that undid the Geo Kings was to name four of the eight “Mountain States.” They took the question to mean any states with mountains and answered California, Colorado, Georgia and Maine for one out of a possible four points. The Golden Gators supplied four correct answers and the contest was basically over then and there. Even though Noah’s team only missed one more point, they finished last, three points behind the winning team: the Golden Gators.

Sasha came rushing over to his mom, jumping straight into her arms. She caught him and he shouted, “Mommy, we won!” Noah didn’t seem too down, but Sean stood on the stage, his arms crossed over his chest, looking glum. I guess he didn’t buy it when the principal said, “We’re all winners here.”

Beth went up to the stage to take pictures and to make sure Noah got his flannel shirt back on and didn’t leave it in the Multi-Purpose Room. I gave him a quick, wordless hug as his class lined up to leave.

In the parking lot, we chatted with Maura’s mom. She asked if we’d applied for the gifted center and if we’d send Noah if he got in. Yes and probably, Beth answered, adding that we’d been more conflicted in the fall, but that this year has been dispiriting. She said she had the same experience when her older son was in third grade.

As Noah was getting ready for bed, he was telling Beth about a Civil War-era historical novel they are reading in language arts and he mentioned it took place in Ohio.

“What’s the capital of Ohio?” Beth joked.

“The Geo Bowl is over! C’mon,” Noah said.

It is over but I won’t soon forget all those bright and eager faces, as the kings and queens of geography took their places on the stage and how for the longest time, no-one missed a question and they were all golden.

But I just want to add—the Geo Kings had the best shirts. No contest there.

Holly Jolly

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Steph

The Radio Shack receipt was for $38.87. I stared at it uncomprehendingly. The remote-control trucks June had selected for Noah’s Christmas present were $14.99, a surprisingly good price, and when the clerk suggested batteries, I agreed, not sure what kinds we had at home. Almost immediately I was chastising myself for saying yes. Surely there’s a huge mark-up on batteries at Radio Shack. But $38.87? The batteries couldn’t be that expensive. Then I noticed the trucks had rung up at $24.99.

I told the clerk the shelf tag said $14.99 and added that the trucks had been sitting behind that shelf tag for at least two days. I knew because I’d been in the store by myself on Wednesday morning while June was at school, looking for appropriate gifts to suggest to her. The clerk was unmoved. He didn’t even apologize for the shelving error. (If it was an error, I thought–I was getting irate and uncharitable.)

I felt a deep weariness settle over me. It had taken forever to get rung up despite the fact that the line was short. Before the price dispute, the clerk had been chatty and over-friendly, full of tips on how to manipulate my husband into getting me what I want for Christmas (perhaps a new computer from Radio Shack?). I never know how to come out in situations like this and sometimes I just don’t. Eventually I lay my left hand with its bare ring finger conspicuously on the counter, hoping he’d see it, take me for a straight single mom and just be quiet already. But he didn’t.

I was not going to walk out of the store with almost $40 worth of trucks and batteries as a present to Noah from June. That much was clear. Most of the presents I’ve been purchasing on her behalf have been very inexpensive, most close to $5, so $15 was a stretch as it was. I asked the clerk to refund my money and he did. We went back to the shelves and I gave June a few more options. She refused them all. She liked the trucks. She didn’t like the blue car or the silver car or the little cars that ran around a track. I gave up and we left the store empty-handed.

I thought she might be more amenable to my position after a snack, so we went to Starbucks next. As her spoon scraped the bottom her yogurt parfait, I broached the subject. Would she like to go back to the store and reconsider? No, she would not. I wondered desperately how we ever got through the beginning gift-giving stage with Noah, when the child is old enough to have some responsibility for reciprocating gifts but too young to make rational choices. The problem is I want it all: I want her to pick gifts (or at least pick from several choices I give her), to pick gifts the recipients would like (had I been willing to buy a light-up Cinderella figurine for Noah we could have gotten out of there with a gift) and to pick affordable presents, too. It’s too much to orchestrate, but I wasn’t sure what needed to give.

“Where are we going now?” June wanted to know as I pushed the stroller away from Starbucks.

“Home, I guess,” I said. “I don’t have any other ideas. We’ll have to think of something later because if we don’t, Noah won’t have any presents from you and that would be sad.”

“But I got him a book,” June piped up.

“What book?” I said. Did Beth help her pick a book for Noah? But she would have mentioned it if she had, because she knew I was taking June to get his present that morning.

“The book I got him at the store at the beach,” June said impatiently. Then it hit me. The limerick book! I even blogged about it not two weeks ago. I didn’t know whether to be hugely relieved or irritated I’d made not one but two completely unnecessary trips to this shopping center looking for a gift I had already bought. I settled on relieved. I still had two more “from June” gifts to buy for other people so one down was good, no matter how it came to pass.

We came home, I ate lunch (June passed, having just eaten that big yogurt) and I put June down for her nap. The babysitter arrived while she was sleeping and I set off for Noah’s school’s Holiday Sing. That morning he’d been excited about it and practicing a selection of the Kwanza, Hanukah and Christmas songs. (He also invented a pirate version of “Holly Jolly Christmas” for his own and June’s amusement. Sample lyric: “Ho, Ho, the mistletoe, hung where ye can see. Somebody waits for ye. Kiss her once for me!”)

As I walked along the side of the school, I could hear the pianist practicing “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I had a moment of panic, thinking what if it wasn’t practice. What if I had the time of the concert wrong? I knew “Holly Jolly Christmas” was the last song on the program. But when I arrived ten minutes before concert time, there were parents milling around and the multipurpose room (the cafeteria is often pressed into service as an auditorium so they call it the multipurpose room) was not even set up. I hadn’t missed a thing. Parents helped set up folding chairs in the back of the room, finishing just as the kids filed in. As I was waiting outside the room, I was happy to see Beth walk down the hall. I didn’t know if she would be able to make it.

“You made it,” said and then I saw her face. “What’s wrong?” I asked. There was a nursery school fundraising crisis involving addresses on letters that don’t line up with the windows in the envelopes. Plus she had been handed a huge unexpected project at work that might mean working on vacation next week. She was anxious and overwhelmed.

The sing-along was cute, as usual. I could tell Beth was distracted, though, and when Noah’s class came in we waved at him but he didn’t see us. I knew if he didn’t see us then, he never would because the 4th and 5th grade choir faces the audience but the rest of the kids sit on the floor and face the choir. I was sad about that. He always lights up when he sees us at school events. Telling him we were there later just isn’t the same.

We made it home before June woke from her nap. Beth spent the afternoon in a frantic effort to get letters re-printed while I watched the kids. Just before six, we piled into the car and drove to the community center for June’s school’s Solstice Party. We paraded from the Community Center to the library with the children all wearing paper crowns and holding their glowing, painted paper-wire-and-wood lanterns they made at school. (Noah, along with other older siblings, carried his old lantern.) We sang “This Little Light of Mine” as we marched. Inside the library we feasted on pizza, crudités, hummus, oranges and a wide variety of homemade sweets. Noah, June and I sat with the Yellow Gingko’s family. Beth sequestered herself in a corner, assembling the re-printed fundraising packets for people to collect at the end of the evening. I brought her a plate of food but she was afraid food wasn’t allowed in that room, so I took it away.

After we ate each class presented the teachers with gifts and there was a shadow puppet show (to celebrate shadow at this, the darkest time of the year). The Tracks class (four and five year olds) gathered behind the screen and held up their puppets as Lesley read a story about a magically expanding mitten that shelters a whole forest of animals. At one point the Red Maple (last year’s Caterpillar) rushed the stage (he wanted to see what was going on behind it) and he had to be snagged back by the Blue Gingko’s dad, who assured him it would be his turn to be in the puppet show next year. Next the classes gathered together and greeted the other classes. And then it was time to go home.

Of course, the evening wouldn’t have been complete without another snafu. Some people took the wrong packets with them on their way out. Beth was beyond frustrated.

But it was the eve of the biggest December snowfall in the history of the Washington region and Beth loves snow about as much as I love the beach. We woke this morning to seven inches of pristine, white snow. It snowed all day and by evening, we had eighteen and half inches on our patio table. Beth took the kids out to play and then Noah spent a good bit of the day sledding with Sasha’s family and then again in our backyard. June tramped around in snow up to her waist and enjoyed sledding down our little hill, crying “Again! Again! Again!” When she was too cold to continue, I snuggled with her under blankets and we read six of the seven Curious George stories in The Complete Adventures of Curious George. Later in the day, I took her out in the snow again. Beth designed and printed our holiday cards and heroically shoveled the walk (two times!). I made some very tasty bulgur burgers and roasted potatoes for dinner.

When I went into the kids’ room to tuck June in, I found her kneeling on the bed, looking out at the snow through parted curtains. Even with the frustrating shopping outing and mounting work and school committee stress, it was still a holly jolly two days.

Rainy, Rainy Day

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Steph

Yesterday morning I had a dilemma. On Thursdays we always start our day with a trip to Savory, where I get coffee or tea and June gets a snack (these days she favors whole-wheat bagels with cream cheese). From there we head to the library for Spanish Circle Time, which starts at 10:30. The perfect bus to catch for this expedition stops in front of our house at 9:20. But on the past two Thursdays that bus did not show up at all, leaving us to wait a half hour for the next one and forcing us to cut the outing short. I had June eat her bagel in the stroller instead of lingering in Savory and we ended up grabbing books to take home more or less randomly of the shelves instead of give them a leisurely test read in the library.

Now last week something like 750 traffic lights were out in Montgomery County and it tied up traffic all over (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/04/AR2009110402413.html), so that might have been what was going on, and I really wasn’t sure if there was a pattern of trouble with the 9:20 bus or not. The weather was miserable, in the forties with rain pelting down. I didn’t want to end up waiting a half hour at the bus stop again, but catching the 8:50 would leave us with quite of a bit of time to kill at Savory because the library doesn’t open until ten. (The fact that Ride On has recently reduced service on this route from every fifteen minutes to every half hour only raises the stakes of these decisions.) After thinking it over, I decided to catch the 8:50. We’d test out the 9:20 again some other Thursday when the weather was less punishing.

The bus came more or less on time and we boarded it. I sang softly to June:

It’s a rainy, rainy day
But that’s okay.
We’re gonna have fun anyway.

She sang back to me, rather loudly:

On this rainy, rainy day
We’ll laugh and play It’s a rainy, rainy day.

http://www.lyricstime.com/milkshake-rainy-rainy-day-lyrics.html

The rest of song is about making mud pies and stomping in puddles and other rainy day fun, not that I had anything like that in mind (temperatures in the forties, remember?) but I was glad to be on our way and hopeful about having a good day.

We got off the bus near Savory and right away I noticed something odd. It was dark inside and there were no cars in the parking lot. I checked my watch: 9:05. I wasn’t sure when they open, but it’s a coffeehouse, so surely they should have been open by 9:00 on a weekday morning. I saw a hand-lettered sign on the door: “Temporarily Closed.” Someone had stuck a post-it note to the sign indicating that an Amnesty International meeting at Savory had been cancelled. We’d been there just a week before and there’d been no indication of anything wrong, but the hastily scrawled sign seemed ominious. (Later in the day I read a melancholy Facebook posting from a friend who said it was going out of business.)

Standing under the awning I looked at the rain and considered my immediate problem and the irony of having left the house early. We were a fifteen-minute walk from the library, which did not open for almost an hour. Since we had so much time, I decided to venture into downtown Takoma in search of bagels and coffee. We ended up at another eatery I won’t even name because I don’t like to badmouth local businesses, but the coffee there is almost always horrible. It’s not horrible just often enough for me to keep ordering it there on the rare occasions that I go just in hopes that this is one of their better days. I took the gamble. It didn’t pay off. June’s bagel was edible and warm though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

While we were eating a man came in, surveyed the menu and then asked for directions to Savory. The man behind the counter started to give them, but I interjected to tell him that Savory was closed, that we’d just come from there. Two women at the next table over, the only other customers in the place, said Savory had been closed for two days. They’d tried to go both days. The man asked where he could get a vegan breakfast, just a bowl of oatmeal would be fine. I suggested he try Mark’s Kitchen. The two women said that had been their second stop, after Savory. None of us had any other ideas. The vegan man studied the menu again and found nothing he could eat. I felt sorry for him, but I was also amused that everyone in the restaurant was there as a second or third choice. We wished him luck and he left.

Now I had to decide how we would get to the library. We were very near a bus stop for a bus that would go right there, but I didn’t know the schedule for this part of town. We were probably about a twenty-five minute walk from the library now. Should we risk a half hour wait in the rain or not? I was leaning toward walking when I saw a bus pull up to the stop. It wasn’t the route I wanted, but one that goes to a lot of the same stops and generally runs about five to ten minutes earlier in most part of town, so I knew the bus I wanted was on the way. I hustled June into her coat and we headed for the bus stop. Soon, we were on our way to the library. We arrived about ten minutes before the library opened its doors so we waited in the lobby of the nearby community center, reading the books we were going to return.

We had plenty to time to choose books before Spanish Circle Time started but we spent a lot of it reading a Curious George book we own and I won’t check out books we own, so we still ended up hurrying to pick our take-home books. When Circle Time started June was distracted. She’s unsure about this new Circle Time. She misses the old one we used to attend on Tuesdays, which is quieter and conducted in a language she understands by a librarian she’s known for almost two years. (We made the switch because she goes to school on Tuesday mornings this year.) Sometimes she will watch attentively and she has learned some of the songs, but she can get overwhelmed by the leader, who is a bit too effusive for her taste. We always sit in the back ever since the horrifying day when the leader tried to dance with her. She asked to go to the bathroom for a diaper change in the middle, which is kind of unusual. Then she insisted on following me when I went to the poetry section to get a book for Noah. When I got up to dance during one of the songs, I tried to get her to hold my hands and dance with me, but she turned her back on me and paged through a book. Clearly, she was not up for the rollicking experience of Spanish Circle Time. I let her look at her books, and then we checked out and left.

Noah had an early dismissal, his second this week, due to ongoing parent-teacher conferences. (We had ours with Señor S on Wednesday.) So he got home before I managed to get June down for her nap. I thought the novelty of having him home might disturb her nap but she went right to sleep. When she woke, I went outside to see if it was still raining. It was misting a little, just as it had been two hours earlier when I’d been outside waiting for Noah’s bus. I decided the weather was good enough to walk to Noah’s school and pick up the fundraiser cookie dough we’d ordered. Beth had to go straight from work to back-to-back nursery school meetings so I wanted to save her the trip. I thought it might make it more likely she’d have time to stop and get herself something for dinner.

June was a bit grumpy to go out into the cold and damp again, but soon she was settled into the stroller with one of her new library books and we were off to the wooded creek-side path. “Over the river and through the woods, to Noah’s school we go, because we want cookie dough,” I sang. We sang this a few more times, deciding to change the word “river” to “creek” for accuracy’s sake.

We got to school and went up to the library where they were distributing cookie dough. The man behind the desk asked for Noah’s homeroom teacher and last name. And then he delivered the sad news that half of the school’s shipment had not arrived and our order was in that half. I couldn’t believe we’d walked twenty minutes to school for nothing. If I’d brought my wallet I could have salvaged the trip because there was a book fair and a bake sale going on, but I hadn’t. They had hot cider, too, which would have been nice after our cold, damp walk. I scanned the halls for parents I knew well enough to ask for a loan of ten or fifteen dollars, but even though I’d seen two such families the day before when we went to Noah’s conference, I didn’t see anyone I knew well at all.

“I wish we had some money,” Noah said about twenty times. Just as I was starting to get seriously annoyed at him, he stopped and commenced to skip down the wet, leaf-strewn path home.

June was more distraught: “Where is our cookie dough? Why is there no cookie dough? We need cookie dough! We need it! Now we will never be able to make cookies ever again!” (I am thinking of enrolling her in a preschool drama class at the rec center this winter. Do you thinks she needs it?) Finally, I managed to get her interested in looking at an unusual hairylooking mushroom growing on a tree-trunk after two days of non-stop rain.

When we got home, I fished the mail out the mailbox and found the November/December issue of Ladybug, which was odd, since we already had a copy. Then I remembered I’d recently called to extend June’s subscription. Apparently, they had created a new, overlapping one instead. This is not the first customer service problem I’ve had with the Cricket brand of magazines (which I love, for the record). As I considered the prospect of trying to sort this out, I felt overwhelmed. Then I wondered if Savory, where my dissertation director told me she thought I was ready to defend, where we passed many a Saturday evening listening to live music when Noah was a toddler and loved music more than anything, and where June and I have had a weekly date for close to two years, was really closed for good. We were thinking about going there for dinner on Saturday. If I’d known there were closing I would have picked up some spinach pies to take home last week. If I’d known we would have gone to see Takoma Zone (http://www.takomazone.com/) play one last time.

I was home alone with the kids all evening while Beth was in meetings. In between making and cleaning up from dinner, I tried to pick up the living room in anticipation of June’s playdate with the Blue Maple the next day. I forgot that June needed a bath until I’d already told the kids they could watch both June’s Sesame Street dvd and Noah’s Fraggle Rock one so I ended up bathing her late and trying to get Noah ready for bed at the same time. (He ended up getting confused and when I went in to check the water, I found him in it.)

Before that, though, as I walked through the living room while the kids were watching television, I saw them snuggled together on the couch and for a moment the dark day seemed just a little brighter.

Today June and I went to Starbucks and ended up having a really nice time. I read her one of her library books, and then I perused a newspaper someone left behind as she paged through her book and Stevie Wonder played. We came home and watched most of Sesame Street. A new season has just started so it was one we hadn’t seen over and over. Then the Blue Maple and her mom and baby sister came over for the playdate, which June declared “a lot fun” right before they left. (They brought with them the very mushroom we’d admired the day before. The mom told me where they found it. Apparently it’s called Lion’s Mane and is edible–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hericium_erinaceus.)

The rest of the day unfolded more or less like a normal Friday. Noah’s school sent out an email with a new pickup date for cookie dough and announced a plan to mail the dough directly to students’ houses starting next year. A representative from Ladybug returned my call and said she’d cancelled the duplicate subscription and extended June’s old one. I didn’t need to take any more action on either front. At dinner Noah addressed me as ”Madam,” for some reason. It struck me as really funny and made me laugh hard, which felt good. It was a much superior day.

I guess Friday the 13th came a day early for me.

In His Own Head – Postscript

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Steph

Columbus Day is the most excellent of holidays. The kids go to school and Beth has it off. (It’s like Yom Kippur reversed in this respect.) So Monday morning after dropping June off at school, Beth and I headed to Savory for coffee and a half hour of uninterrupted conversation. More would have been nice, but there was an Open House at Noah’s school. This meant parents are welcome to drop in and watch their children’s classes in action. We went to his morning class since June’s home and napping during his afternoon class and we wanted to go together. He has Sr. S for math and science in the mornings. It was all in Spanish but Beth was able to follow along pretty well because so much of math and science vocabulary consists of English cognates. I whispered to fill her in when necessary.

The work is too easy for Noah; that much is clear. The entire morning’s math lesson consisted of material that he and many of his classmates have covered in previous years. At least the science is new. He’s never learned the parts of plants before. And we did witness some positive things about Sr. S’s teaching. He was very energetic and engaged as he explained the different kinds of angles. The kids seemed eager to answer his questions and at one point he had them all standing up to put their arms in obtuse, right and acute angles. (Noah was putting his legs in angles, too.) As the class discussed points, lines, line segments and rays, I watched Noah doodling in his notebook. If you couldn’t see what he was doing, it would look like he wasn’t paying attention, but he drew points while Sr. S explained points, and rays while he discussed rays. Later, though, I knew he really wasn’t paying attention, because when Sr. S said, if you’re listening raise your hand, hands shot up all over the classroom, but Noah’s remained at his sides.

Then they brainstormed geometry terms. (Noah chose a rather esoteric shape—the octagonal prism—it’s like a cylinder with octagons instead of circles on the ends. Sr. S looked surprised, but wrote it on the board with the rest.) Then there was a geometry pre-test, which would not be graded, Sr. S keep assuring them. It took Noah a long while to get started coloring the shapes blue or yellow based on the types of angles, but once he buckled down he finished quickly. Next they got the plants they are raising out from under the grow lights and made observations about them, while Sr. S went over the parts of a flower. Beth noted that all the kids’ plants had sticks with their names written on them, but Noah’s did not. He suddenly noticed the same thing. “Hey, where did you get that stick?” he asked one of his classmates. Later, Noah got his science book out of his desk while Sr. S was talking about plants. Was he checking something Sr. S was talking about or off on a tangent? It was impossible to tell. Toward the end of class, Noah slumped over his desk, looking unresponsive.

Finally, Sr. S called Noah up to the front of the room to recite the poem the class has been working on. He was picked because of the two kids who’d volunteered before the parents arrived, he knew it the best. I was nervous as he started because even with a week of practice he had never recited it perfectly, but I didn’t need to be. He nailed it, needing only a small prompt in the last stanza. I was very proud, muy orgullosa, I told him later.

I think it was a good snapshot of Noah’s day. There were times his head seemed to be in the clouds, but when it really mattered, his feet were firmly on the ground.

This story would not be complete, however, without noting that later in the day, as he left his afternoon class he forgot his backpack, went back for it and missed the bus. Beth went out to the bus stop right after our perfectly timed holiday afternoon DVD finished and he wasn’t there. The school called moments later and she had to drive over to the school to retrieve him.

In His Own Head

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Steph

A little over a week ago on a Thursday evening, Noah’s math and science teacher Señor S called. Noah had lost the homework packet he’d passed out on Monday and then the copier broke and he couldn’t make another one for him so Noah didn’t bring home the packet—which contained four nights of math homework– until the night before it was due. Señor S wanted to know if Noah would be able to get it done. Beth said it wouldn’t be a problem; he was almost finished. Then the conversation turned to more general matters. Beth says he had “that bewildered tone they all have.” I knew what she meant. Noah either charms or puzzles his teachers. He has since preschool.

“He doesn’t seem to be paying attention…he doesn’t do his classwork…but he understands everything anyway,” Señor S reported. This is what they all say. The telling part is whether they focus on how smart he is or how poor his work habits are. That usually tells us how his year is going to go with this particular teacher. The ones who are better at engaging him gush about his creativity, his vocabulary and the speed at which he learns and then they say, oh, by the way he really could be focusing better on completing his work. The others reverse the emphasis. Señor S wanted to know if Beth had any tips on how to get him to focus on his work. She didn’t. This is something I struggle with as I supervise his homework every day. Some afternoons he cruises through his assignments. Other days, he crawls along at an agonizingly slow pace. I’m not sure anything I do makes a difference.

Later, on Facebook, Beth mused, “The problem is that what Noah wants to think about isn’t what MCPS wants him to think about. Not much to be done about that.” She asked him why he gets distracted in class. She wanted to know if it was something in the classroom environment or the thoughts in his own head. “It’s all in my own head,” he responded quickly.

We’re applying to a magnet elementary school for the “highly gifted” in our school district for Noah’s fourth grade year. Noah’s teachers have been mentioning this school since he was four years old. I’m torn about where he would be better off. Attending the gifted center would mean leaving the Spanish immersion program and I think fluency in another language could have lifelong benefits for him. I’m also wary of having him leave friends behind because he doesn’t make new friends easily. Of course, if some of his friends are accepted and attend the new school, he will be separated from friends whether he goes or not. (He and Sasha have a pact that neither of them will go unless both are accepted.) It’s also possible Noah might make friends more easily in a school where more of the kids were more like him. I also don’t know if a heavier workload would be a disaster for him, or if he’d encounter more creative teaching there that would inspire him and improve his work habits.

This isn’t really a complaint about his elementary school teachers. For the most part, they’ve been skilled and devoted professionals. Some have connected better with him than others, but that’s part of life. I’m more concerned with the teachers’ ability to teach to kids at all different levels. He’s had a couple teachers who did a really stellar job here and others who struggled. His school was tracking students in their math and science classes last year and abandoned the practice this year so while he’s supposed to be doing accelerated math, he’s not in an all-accelerated class as he was last year. I have mixed feelings about tracking, but it was working for him. For the first few weeks of the year this year, both his English and Spanish teachers (both of whom are new to the school) assigned homework that was years below his skill level. Then they seemed to have gotten their bearings and he had more appropriate reading and math to do for the next couple weeks. And then the color-by-numbers and ridiculously easy reading comprehension worksheets started coming home again. I honestly don’t know what’s up. Noah seems happy enough with his teachers, but he’s not chattering on about school the way he did last year, so I don’t know as much as I would like to about how third grade is going, six weeks in.

I found out from the mother of one of his classmates that Señor S gives them daily quizzes. The girl in question finds them stressful, especially as they are getting letter grades for the first time this year, but Noah never even mentioned the quizzes. He’s either confident that he’ll do well or he doesn’t care too much about grades. I think it’s probably both.

I walked both kids to school on Monday because Beth was out of town and I needed to be walking June to school at the time he and Beth are usually waiting for the bus. Luckily their schools are close to each other. I asked him about the tests, and he said they weren’t tests, but “exit tickets.” He said they have to finish them to be allowed to proceed to recess or their afternoon classes. I was surprised to hear this. He’d never mentioned it. I asked if he was missing recess very often. Never, he said, though he was delayed going to Ms. M’s class one day. Again, I was surprised. I wondered why he was finishing these assignments but not whatever other work, Señor S wanted him to complete. Next I asked him which class he likes better. He said most years he likes his English class better, but this year he liked his Spanish class best. Was it the material or the teacher, I asked him. The teacher, he said. He confided that when one student misbehaves, Ms. M gets grumpy with the whole class. It was an enlightening conversation.

I need to talk to him about school more often, I resolved.

I started when he got home from school Monday afternoon. I asked about gym and he didn’t have much to say. I tried recess and hit pay dirt. He’d mentioned earlier he’d been playing with a boy he was close to in kindergarten and with whom he’s had an on and off friendship ever since. He said Sasha and the other boy both wanted him to play with them and not the other and it turned into an argument between the two boys. Noah sounded annoyed at both of them and it sounded like no one ended up playing at all. I was sorry to hear it because I know the other boy has been frequently excluded from Noah’s circle (and sometimes by Noah himself, though it doesn’t sound like that was the case this day). I tried convincing him that the boy really needs a friend and that he should know how it feels because sometimes he has trouble finding people to play with at recess, too, especially when Sasha’s playing a game that doesn’t interest him. Noah said the other boy “takes it more seriously.” All the more reason to be kind to him, I suggested. At the same time I was remembering befriending an unpopular girl in elementary school and quickly finding out how difficult she could be. It’s easier to give advice about childhood friendships than to navigate them, I think.

Tuesday night Beth and I attended an information session about the gifted centers. I saw a lot of familiar faces in the audience, including Sasha and his dad. It looks like several of Noah’s classmates may apply. The pros and cons raised by the presenters were mostly issues I’d already considered so I didn’t feel too swayed one way or the other. But after the meeting, Beth and I discussed the potentially long and circuitous bus route he would have to take and she sounded pretty discouraged. Transportation logistics are complicated for us since I don’t drive and the bus would not stop in front of our house, but at a central location where I might need to be around the same time June would be dismissed from preschool (the 4s/5s class meets in the afternoons).

Wednesday morning was International Walk to School Day, so Beth and Noah walked. They ran into Sr. S and he told her he was concerned about Noah’s handwriting. Specifically, he was worried that Noah’s test scores might not be counted on the standardized writing tests the third graders take at the end of the year if he doesn’t write legibly. Sr. S is new to the county and understandably nervous about these high stakes tests by which the teachers are judged. He asked Beth to have Noah practice his handwriting on the weekends and Beth started to wonder if all the coloring Noah finds so tedious is supposed to improve the students’ hand-eye co-ordination and their handwriting.

Noah had a lot of homework this week. There was a math packet on different kinds of averages (mean, mode and median) that was right about at his level. He had to draw a duck and write a story about it in Spanish. He had to fill his English vocabulary words into the blanks in a story. What took up the most of his time, though, was the twenty-four line Spanish poem he needed to memorize. It’s about how plants reproduce, which is what they’re studying in science. I think there’s value in learning to memorize poetry but it wasn’t a particularly well-written poem, which I had plenty of time to reflect on as I read it to him and listened to him recite it to me over and over four evenings in a row.

So it was a relief that today was Friday and other than his daily reading, he didn’t need to do any homework. We finished the last book in A Series of Unfortunate Events (#13 The End), which is sad for me, because I’ve really enjoyed reading it with him over the course of the past four months. And because we only had a very short chapter left in it, he picked up the Bunnicula series where he’d left off and read it on his own, curled up in the sky chair. I watched him reading for a while, thinking that even though I don’t know as much as I’d like about his school life, I do know he has an active life of the mind. Some of what’s in his head we share, such as the adventures of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire that we’ve been discussing for months. Some only he knows, but I’m pretty sure the inside of his head will be a pretty interesting place for years to come.

Look at the Sunflower

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Steph

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust…

Yesterday was a strange day, happy and sad all at once. June had her first day in the Leaves class and my father had his second round of chemotherapy for throat cancer. I only found out he had cancer last week so it’s been weighing on me. He’s made it clear he wants his space right now, no phone calls or visits. So I sent a bouquet of sunflowers with a quote from Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179382) and I’m contemplating what to put in a care package and taking comfort in the fact that my stepmother says his prognosis is good. We haven’t always had an easy relationship, but I don’t want to go into all that now.

June came into our room yesterday morning at 6:05, asking me to come lay down with her, just as she had at 3:15 and 11:55. Alert readers may be thinking “came into our room”? at this point. Over the Labor Day weekend, Beth and Noah cleared all the toys he’d been storing up on his top bunk, put them in bins inside the drawers under the bottom bunk and drilled holes for a hasp and combination lock into the drawers and locked them up. (He was put out that Beth insisted on knowing the combination to the lock.) Now Noah’s room is officially Noah and June’s room. They were just in time with the toy relocation, too. June learned to scale the back of the ladderless bunks on Sunday after almost two years of trying. We put the ladder back and she is constantly going up and down with and without it.

On Sunday night June slept on the lower bunk and Noah slept on the top bunk for the very first time. The first night June went right to sleep (after I’d reminded them to stop talking to each other a few times) but Noah tossed and turned, unused to sleeping on the top bunk. The second night they both fell asleep a little more quickly (after I’d admonished Noah a few times to stop trying to amuse June with beams of light from the flashlight he keeps up there so he can read in the mornings if he wakes before she does.) Two wake ups during a night is within the realm of normal for June, so I think the transition is going pretty well. Now we’re all trying to call it “the kids’ room” instead of “Noah’s room” and thinking about getting some wooden letters that spell out her name to put next to Noah’s name on the wall and putting up some of her artwork on the door.

When June got up for the third time, just after six, I let her into our bed in hopes of getting a little more sleep, but she was wiggly and wide awake. I pretended to sleep while she crawled all over me. Around 6:50 I gave up the pretense and we read a couple books and got out of bed to eat breakfast. Around 7:40 I broke up a fight between the children by telling June it was time to get dressed and asking her to choose between the purple and blue striped dress and the blue and green one. She pointed to the purple one. Then she wanted to know if she was going to a party. (It was reasonable supposition since she’s only worn this dress three times and always to a party.) No, school, I reminded her, much to her delight.

Her delight turned to dismay, however, when I mentioned that she was going to wear underwear to school. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” June said. She seemed surprised, too, as if we’d never brought up this bizarre requirement before. I told her she could wear a diaper until we got to school, mainly because I wanted her to at least arrive at school in dry clothes so I could jump into my co-oping duties without having to change her. Then she surprised me by saying she wanted to put the underwear on right away. I decided to throw caution to the wind and said okay. The pink underwear, she specified.

Once she was dressed and her hair was combed, she was satisfied that she looked “good and pretty” (a recent concern of hers). After a last minute scramble for my keys and quick photo session at the front gate, we were off.

We arrived at school at 8:20. When we came in I asked June if she wanted to use the potty and she declared she wasn’t “old enough” to use the potty. (This is what she says whenever she doesn’t want to do something.) Lesley asked how old would be old enough. June held up four fingers.

“Hmm…” Lesley said in a neutral tone.

I was expecting to be the only experienced co-oper so I was relieved to find out the Yellow Oak’s (aka Ladybug’s) mom was subbing for one of the new co-opers. I thought it would be easier for two of us to show the ropes to one new co-oper than for me to show them to two. It was actually a really easy day because only half the class was in attendance. (The others will start tomorrow.) I showed the Yellow Holly’s mom how to record the kids’ journal entries and between the two of us we did journals for all seven kids. All three co-opers pitched in and did the housekeeping jobs together while Lesley led the kids in dramatic play and for the first time in my two years at the school it wasn’t a mad rush to get it all done.

During Circle Time, Lesley introduced the concept of daily jobs. One of June’s jobs was to stick the number 8 to the calendar that had the numbers from one to seven already on it. Then everyone counted to eight and Lesley asked for predictions about tomorrow’s date. No-one answered but I could see a few of them were thinking about it and from the looks on their faces when she said nine, I think they knew the answer. Next Lesley showed them the talking stick, decorated with beads and the words “Talk” and “Listen.” It gets passed from child to child as they sing their morning greeting to each other: “Hello, Name. How are you?” June was sitting immediately to Lesley’s left so she had the stick first. Lesley explained what she was supposed to do.

“I’m not old enough,”June said softly. Lesley explained again that the singing was optional. Making eye contact and passing the stick is enough. June passed the stick to the next child wordlessly. Either June’s a trendsetter or this singing greeting is really scary for three year olds just getting to know each other because they all passed the stick without a verbal greeting, though I think one of the returning girls did answer “I am fine, thank you,” as Lesley sang the question. (Almost half the Leaves class is new. Leaves is a bigger class than Bugs and we had some last-minute vacancies come open this summer so we have eight returning students and six new ones.) As the stick went around I watched the new children, June’s new crop of friends, with a warm, curious feeling. They will be together for two years, which is a long time when you are only three. I’m eager to get to know them.

When the singing was over, I had the pleasure of hearing Lesley read The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher (http://www.librarything.com/work/629786), a book Noah’s whole class loved. I remember reading it to little groups of them over and over, or rather showing them its eerily illustrated pages and talking to them about what’s going on because it has no words. In between her observations and questions and the children’s, Lesley hummed in a suspenseful way.

“Is this a scary book?” someone wanted to know.

After a snack of peaches, apples, hummus and whole-wheat pita, a session of dramatic play followed. Lesley took the kids on a magic carpet ride to the bottom of the sea and over a mountain range while the co-opers cleaned. Once I peeked in and saw June wearing a blue gown from the dress-up rack. “Let’s go to a party,” she said. Around ten-forty when I needed to go to the bathroom, I realized June was still dry. I’d been asking her frequently if she wanted to use the potty, but every time she said no.

Around eleven, the kids went out to play on the playground. I stayed inside to finish a few last-minute housekeeping tasks since I was the official housekeeping person, but every now and then I looked out the window. Every time I did I saw June tearing around the playground, the skirt of her purple dress flying out behind her. When I finished and came outside, June and two other girls were playing at being cats. This consisted of running around and meowing. Lesley said she foresaw two years of meowing, because a class’s play patterns are often established early. (Noah’s class was all pirates all the time, at least among the boys. The girls were often fairies.) During a quiet moment, Lesley asked me about my father. Before I knew it, it was time to line up and go to the front porch for dismissal. The first day of Leaves class was over.

Once we got home, I asked June if she wanted to use the potty. She did not, but minutes later, as she was standing on a stool in the kitchen, watching me make a grilled cheese sandwich for her, she announced nonchalantly, “I’m peeing.” I looked down at the stool and saw she had.

In the bathroom as I changed her out of the wet pink underwear, I told her that although she would not go back to school this week, she’d go three days next week. She grinned and held up three fingers. “Can I stay until night?” she asked. I think she had a good day. I hope June has many more days like today this fall and that my father has as few as possible.

This afternoon I went to the backyard to pick a tomato for dinner. I surveyed what we have left in the garden: a lot of green tomatoes, herbs, zinnias and black-eyed Susans, some carrots, a handful of green beans and a little bit of lettuce. The cucumber vines are still flowering but there aren’t any cucumbers growing on them. I can’t tell if they are finished or not. And then there’s the sunflower. Most of our sunflowers were toppled by a storm in early August, but the granddaddy, the one that grew to a height of eight feet or more is still standing. A week ago I thought it was dead, but now it has a few new blooms on it. I expect it to stick around a while longer.

We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside…

Yellow Dogwood

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Steph

Last Saturday evening, June shouldered her backpack and filled her doll stroller with stuffed animals. Then she announced it was her share day and she was going to school and asked me to come with her. We walked to the living room with the stroller. She addressed me as “Teacher” and showed me the stuffed bush baby my mom bought her earlier this summer. Then she showed me the stuffed cat that meows to the tune of “O Tannenbaum” if you squeeze its tummy. Then she did a dance for me. This must be how share day goes in June’s wildest imagination. Last year whenever I was there on her share days she could barely bring herself to speak she was so shy with everyone looking at her. The entertainment value of the whole scene was enhanced by the fact that she was stark naked at the time. As far as I know, there’s no “clothing optional day” in the Leaves class, but Leaves is a whole new frontier for us. (Noah started in the Tracks class, which is the pre-K year).

The Leaves class actually has the reputation among parents as being the most challenging class. As experienced one dad put it, the first year the kids don’t really try to play together and the last year they’ve more or less figured out how to do it but the middle year, when they are three and four, is the year they learn how to play together, and that comes with predictable conflict.

The next day was the Purple School ice cream social, held at a local playground. The kids played, the grownups chatted and signed up for shifts at the school’s booth at the Takoma Park folk festival later this month and the street festival in October. There was ice cream cake– peach ice cream with lemon cake and coconut ice cream with chocolate cake. I couldn’t resist trying both kinds. I would have liked to talk to people more but I spent a lot of time chasing June around the playground, pushing her on the swings, watching her go down the slides and spinning her on the spinning toys and throwing rocks down by the creek. This activity didn’t last long because, informed that she could not go into the creek because she had insisted on Mary Janes with socks instead of crocs, she made a few half-hearted throws and decided, “This is not working out.”

The big hit of the playground equipment, though, was the wobbly bridge. Each plank is suspended from a single chain so it tilts when you step on it. Before that day, June always insisted we go across it together, holding hands, but she got impatient waiting for me while I was talking to another mom and she went across herself. She was so thrilled she did it over and over and over. Then the child formerly known as the Squash Bug came over after June had been at it for a while. She, too, started crossing the bridge over and over and looked pretty pleased with herself. She asked me to go get her mom so she could see. It may be a challenging year, but I think the Leaves are up for any challenge.

School starts on Tuesday and this morning Lesley came by the house for June’s home visit, bearing a pink balloon for her. June informed us prior to the visit that she would not speak directly to Lesley, but only through me, since “I am going to be shy of her.” At first, June would only nod or shrug in response to Lesley’s questions, but after a while she started to get little smiles out of her, and pretty soon, June was talking. She shrugged when Lesley asked if she’d like to wear underwear at school, which Lesley took as a yes. She listened to Lesley tell her about what to expect the first day–they will pretend to go under the sea during dramatic play–and June chose the Yellow Dogwood as her symbol. In case you are wondering, there is no such tree. (Neither is there a Yellow Wooddog, which is how she reported her symbol to Beth when she came home tonight.)

I have always liked the Bugs and Tracks class symbols better than the Leaves class symbols because they refer to real bugs and animals. Hornworms are real. Painted turtles–Noah’s symbol his year at the school–are real. But the color/tree system allows the teacher to divide the class up different ways, by color sometimes, by leaves other times, so there’s a reason for it. And from June’s perspective, any leaf is a great symbol because while she’s actually frightened of most bugs, she loves leaves. Every time we leave the house, she collects them– dead leaves off the ground and live leaves she pulls off trees and weeds. Just this morning we went to the playground before Lesley’s visit and June came home with a fistful of ivy leaves she swiped from a neighbor’s yard.

As the meeting drew to a close, June took Lesley outside to show her a spider’s web, then she showed her toys to Lesley–the doll stroller, the elephant, the two pigs sleeping under blanket on the porch– and finally she demonstrated how she can stand on one leg. Considering she spent much of her teacher visit last year trying to hide from Andrea, I think June’s making progress with her shyness.

After Lesley left, June was keyed up. We bounced the balloon back and forth to each other and she made four finger paintings and kept changing her mind about for whom they were intended, sometimes Lesley, sometimes Becky (her music teacher) and sometimes Andrea. But in the end, she told me they were all for Andrea. Here I have to admit June has been making finger paintings for Andrea and Becky all summer and I have not made any effort to deliver them (or even remember which ones were which). I figure a couple painted tributes are a sweet gesture, but I don’t want to overwhelm them with piles of art from June. I might just deliver these, however. June’s been snubbing Andrea whenever she sees her (when we took Noah to art camp– which Andrea’s daughter also attended–and at the ice cream social). I think she’s been mad about Andrea not being her teacher any more, and at the same time wanting to reach out to her with the paintings. Once she fully recognizes Lesley as her teacher, I think the paintings for Andrea might stop and she’ll just be happy to see her around the school and when Andrea subs for Lesley in her class. I hope that’s how it goes anyway.

While June painted I looked at the dogwood tree in our yard. Most of its leaves are green, of course, but a few are tinged with red at the very edges. (It’s the first tree in our yard to change color.) When I looked even closer, though, I noticed there are a few yellow leaves hanging from its branches. We’ve lived in this house almost seven and half years, but I never saw that before. It made me wonder what else June’s Leaves year will make me see. We only have five days to wait.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

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