Results For "Month: September 2012"

Saturday Break

Saturday 29 September 2012

We woke up to rain today. “We probably won’t be going for soccer,” I think as I poured my first cup of coffee. And the thought didn’t break my heart. Still, knowing the Girl had the second game of the day, I decided to drive over to the field, only four or five miles from out house, to see if there were indeed games. I’d heard somewhere that the general rule for determining whether or not to play a soccer game is if the ball bounces when dropped from the waist. If it bounces, the game begins. But I wasn’t sure what it would be like for four- and five-year-olds. I arrived at the field in a drizzle to find everyone playing as if nothing were happening. Still, the Girl has a way of getting a nasty cough very easily, so K and I decided it would be best not to go.

We were fairly certain the Girl would be a little disappointed. I saw the patch of dry pavement on the road and thought L would surely see that and certainly use that as justification. “See? It’s drying.” And so I was a little surprised when the reaction to “Sweetie, we’re not going to be able to go play soccer today” was “Yippeee!”

We ended up staying home most of the morning, with Nana and Papa coming for a visit and then L going to spend the afternoon at their place — after a math lesson in the kitchen.

For E, there were very few changes in the routine. Eating, giggling, pooping, sleeping. Repeat.

After some weeks, such a Saturday is just fine.

Punctuation

Friday 28 September 2012

As a teacher, I see all kinds of creative use of punctuation. Some of it makes me smile at its novelty; some of it makes me groan. Each punctuation mark has its own difficulties.

The semicolon is something mysterious: students are a little in awe with its presence and slightly intimidated. The more ambitious students want to use it, and indeed try to use it, to varying degrees ofÂ proficiency. “It’s a bit like a super-comma,” I sometimes explain, “and kind of like a weak period.” We do some work with it every now and then, but it’s a little like taking young divers to the 10 meter platform when they’re still nervous at 3 meters.

The comma is exhausted. It pops up in places where one never expects it. Sometimes, it appears after a form of be, lingering there to reflect the writer’s reflective pause: “The problem is, I don’t know what to say.” And in between “is” and “I,” the tell-tale comma lets us know what went through the writer’s mind: “WhatÂ isÂ the problem? I’m not quite sure how to express it, or I’m not even sure what it might actually be.”

The period is unreliable. Sometimes it goes AWOL for thought after thought, with a comma occasionally taking up the slack. Often it disappears without a trace. Every now and then, it gets over eager, jumping in at the end of prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses to create fragments.

The colon really is a phantom, a boogie man only rumored to exist and used to scare children into grammatical submission. “It’s like a big arrow, a big pointer,” I sometimes try to explain.

Quotation marks occasionally hang around, apostrophes are overly possessive, em- and en-dashes run about, and silly jokes abound. But most days a properly placed punctuation mark can make my day.

Over the Shoulder

Wednesday 26 September 2012

It used to be something of an obsession. “What was I doing around this time X years ago?” I’d ask before opening up my journal for that month some years earlier and reading to see what happened. Yet what if I’d had a way to thumb through pictures the way I thumbed through my journal entries? For most of my life, I had about as much interest in photography as I had in basket weaving. Then I moved to Poland. And a couple of years after returning to the States, I moved back to Poland, then armed with a digital camera. And so I can open up a photo viewer and easily look over my shoulder.

September 2001: I’d just moved back, and I was still taking daily walks in the fields behind the house where I rented a room. Such pictures now seem almost unreal: did I really live there?

September 2002: The fascination remained. I was still talking almost daily walks in the fields, heading up to a small patch of trees known to locals as “Cats’ Castle”, watching the sunset from various locations, impressed that the church was visible from almost every point in the central part of the village.

And then an empty year. Did my computer crash? Did I not take many pictures? Whatever the cause, September 2003 is void of pictures.

September 2004: K and I had just gotten married. We’d brought all our lovely wedding gifts — the glass paintings and various prints — to my apartment which was then our apartment. We looked through pictures of our wedding and spent lovely afternoons creating photo albums.

September 2005: Back to the States, to Asheville. “This is where I want to live,” K said the moment she saw the small town surrounded by mountains. It was understandable: it looked so much like her own home. And have a few lovely parks about didn’t hurt either.

September 2006: The Girl was just a few months away. We’d heard all the stories, but who can really prepare for how a child is going to change one’s life?

September 2007: The Girl was with us, and already showing her precocious nature. She sat only to roll; she crawled only to crash; she lived only to giggle and fuss.

September 2008: L, able to walk, began asserting her independence. The innocence would surely linger?

September 2009: Independence increased.

September 2010: We learned quickly that owning a house is owning a project. A never-ending, always-bank-account-draining, eternally-exhausting project.

September 2011: Where did that baby go? Certainly she’s somewhere around here?

September 2012: If I could have glanced forward in time from 2001, surely a wife, two children, a house, and a cat on a tired Wednesday night would seem just as unrealistic as the fields of Lipnica Wielka seem to me now?

Down

Tuesday 25 September 2012

Routine is everything. Naps come like the tide: they’re regular and predictable, and there’s no stopping them. We come home for the day, and fairly soon, the fussing starts. The tired fussing.

And soon enough…

Homework with the Girl

Monday 24 September 2012

She sits at the table — fewer distractions — and draws. “Draw three pictures each of things that begin with the letters P, Q, R, S, and T.” It’s getting close to the Girl’s bedtime, and as we know she is a perfectionist, we encourage her to choose examples that are easily drawn.

For “P” she settles on pot, pencil, and potato. “Q” seems tricky, but the Girl thinks of quilt, question mark, and Q-tip. “R” yields red (my own idea that got the Girl giggling), ring, and rain. For “S” she ends up with snake, sun, and star. At three objects per letter and twenty-six letters in the alphabet, we’re looking at more than seventy-five drawings over the next few days.

A bit much?

Autumn Sunday

Sunday 23 September 2012

The sky always seems somehow a little richer, a little deeper blue in autumn. I suppose it has to do with angles and refraction as the Earth tilts the northern hemisphere away from the sun and the southern hemisphere toward it.

Somehow, though, the light just feels more relaxed.

We in the south finally begin coming out to play at this point in the year. Triple digit heat indexes don’t do much to encourage the average South Carolinian to spend time in the park, kicking a soccer ball around or playing on the jungle gym. (And even if one wanted to, the equipment would be much to hot to touch, and forget about the sliding board.)

So today, with temperatures only in the mid-seventies, the four of us went to a favorite park for some swinging, sliding, and soccer practice.

The Boy sat briefly in a swing for the first time. The seat seemed still to swallow him, and his general inability to support himself combined with his love of peering forward made the prospect short-term at best.

But there was always the grass. Fascinatingly green,Â unfamiliarly scratchy, generally puzzling for the Boy. He’d likely have put some in his mouth if he’d realized how easily it could be done. The whole world would go in his mouth if it could fit, piece my piece, chunk by chunk.

L and I, though, were ready for some practice. With her speed, she can easily outrun most of the players on the field in her Saturday soccer games, so we worked on a new tactic: running as fast as possible while still kicking the ball.

“Just kick it out in front asÂ far as you can,” I explained, “then run — run as fast as possible. You’ll beat everyone to the ball. Then just do it again.”

We also worked a bit on defense.

And the Boy finally got a closer look at that grass.

First Loss

Saturday 22 September 2012

It had to happen. And perhaps it was good that it did: L’s team lost their first match today, 8-2. With a point difference like that, it was a stinging first loss. Things just weren’t going as they usually do.

“That team was the best team we played,” L explained. Three young men in yellow managed consistently to stop red team’s offensive charges while also proving themselves to be exceptional ball handlers when on the attack.

“There were some boys on that team that were really good,” L explained later in the day. It gave her, I hope, a view of what’s possible.

Boosterthon

Wednesday 19 September 2012

It’s half bet, half bribe. It’s a fundraiser, an exercise event, and certainly for some, a bit of a pain.

I suppose one might argue that it’s an exercise in school spirit and self-confidence. Elementary school activities, we’re finding, tend to combine several elements like that. Show, exercise, fundraising, dance party — I suppose it covers several state educational standards.

For “the biggest fundraiser for the year” at her school — so it was explained at a recent PTA meeting — L had to gather pledges for a run around a small, 1/16th of a mile route set up in the field behind the school. Nana and Papa pledged a significant amount per lap, adding a cap as assurance of not having to mortgage the house to pay their commitment.

Sure enough, when it came time to run — and hop, skip, walk, dance — through the boosterthon, the Girl did the maximum 35 laps.

Which amounts to just over two miles, which is fairly impressive for a five-year-old.

Ritual

Monday 17 September 2012

It is late, and K is trying to get the Boy to sleep. He tosses and moans, turns and groans, rolls over — his newest trick — and seems reluctant to cooperate.

“If I feed him one more time,” she asks, “will you be able to hold him?”I stop grading papers.

“Of course,” I say.

Soon after, I’m making laps, walking a now-well-worn path through our living room, past our front door, through our kitchen, past the carport door, and looping back into living room. Repeat.

The Boy’s head rests on my shoulder. His arms dangle to the side. When the Boy was a newborn, K or I walked this lap every night, every morning. Eleven PM. One AM. Sometimes three AM. Five AM. Still shuttered in sleep, our consciousness had difficulty doing little more than counting the steps in the hopes that we could ultimately transform the exercise into a variant of sleepwalking. It has grown easier though he has grown heavier: the body grows accustomed to less sleep with time.

Now, all nineteen pounds rest in the crook of my left arm while my right hand holds an iPod into which I whisper this evening’s post. These solitary laps in near-darkness with a sleeping child on my shoulder lead to contemplation unlike anything else I know.

The floor creaks at a certain point and as the summer as progressed, the area which creeks seems to have expanded deeper and deeper into the living room. Every night when I make my rounds, I think to myself, “I need to look on the internet how to fix a creaking floor,” but I’m afraid the job will require more work and time than I am able to devote to it now. And so I simply keep walking, listening to the creak grow quieter, counting the steps it takes to reach silence, wondering if I’ll ever be able to fix it, doubting that the time will ever come. It’s just one of the countless projects that hangs over my head like Damacles’ sword. I know I must get there are some point. I know that while I’m building up the life of my son, I’m allowing other parts of life deteriorate. But it’s easier to fix a squeaking floor that has overtaken the entire downstairs area.

On the kitchen side of the round, where the floor doesn’t squeak and squak, E’s shallow, slow breathing marks a counterpoint to the padding of my feet. Perhaps we are establishing a rhythm between us, the rhythm of all fathers and sons: never quite in synch but like counterpoint, ultimately complementary.

Sitting

Sunday 16 September 2012

The Boy so wants to sit. If only he could keep his balance.

« Older Entries

Matching Tracksuits

Fun in Fours

Results For "Month: September 2012"

Saturday Break

Punctuation

Over the Shoulder

Down

Homework with the Girl

Autumn Sunday

First Loss

Boosterthon

Ritual

Sitting