Matching Tracksuits

Month: April 2012

Spring Saturday

Saturday 28 April 2012

Saturdays have set-in-stone morning rituals: a talk with Babcia and Dziadek in Poland; coffee (for we’ve given it up during the week); ballet lessons. Once it’s all done, we have time to play.

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And time to work.

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We have several bird pairs nesting in our Leyland Cypresses that block off our deck from the sides. One builder seems more industrious than the other, though. I watch this fellow make at least half a dozen trips in the space of five minutes.

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But I have my own work to do: a backyard that’s been neglected since the end of last summer, with enough twigs and branches to make five piles throughout the yard. Plus there’s more tomatoes to plant, stakes to arrange, hedges to trim, grass to mow.

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Most of it gets done, but by dusk, I’m ready to put the tools back, lean the wheelbarrow against the house, and call it a day.

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Cartoon Time

Friday 27 April 2012

We don’t want to be draconian with our rules, but television certainly must have certain limitations.

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Thirty minutes a day.

Rainy Thursday

Thursday 26 April 2012

You’ll never hear us South Carolinians complain about the rain. Ever.

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Southern Requirements

Wednesday 25 April 2012

When you live in the South, you have to learn how to bake cornbread. And since the Girl has developed a taste for it, K decided it’s time to add it to her repertoire.

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The response from L? Squeals of delight. I suppose it’s to be expected: I grew up in the South; K grew up in southern Poland; we live in the South. There’s simply no escaping it.

Changes

Tuesday 24 April 2012

It was sometime during second or third grade, I believe, that I first realized I wasn’t seeing the same things my classmates were seeing. I’d somehow discovered that if I pulled on the corners of my eyes, I could see better. The teachers noticed, said something to my parents, and shortly after that, I had my first pair of glasses.

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The Girl, it turns out, has the opposite problem: she’s far-sighted.

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The optometrist tells us it’s something she could outgrow in a few years.

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There are some things, however, she’s likely to retrain for several years to come.

Wants and Needs

Sunday 22 April 2012

Wants and needs are easily confused. Birds, for example, need water like all creatures. They don’t need berries, but their sweet flavor and high water content makes berries particularly attractive. Our recently-installed netting, however, frustrates our flying friends from fulfilling both wants and needs (though it does little for alliterative flourishes).

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Flowers need attention, as do little girls (and, I would imagine, little boys, though we won’t be collecting anecdotal evidence for a few more weeks yet). And the best attention is often so seemingly slight: a pat, a hug, a kind word.

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Spring Work

Saturday 21 April 2012

Spring is a time of expectation and rebirth. Or simply birth. With four weeks remaining until the Boy’s due date, it’s time to complete the final preparations: clothes need washing, cribs need assembling,

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and final days as an only child need enjoying. We’re all bursting at the prospect of a new member of the family, but I suspect that it won’t take long for the Girl to start remembering how peaceful a Saturday afternoon could be when she was flying solo.

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But there will be things only she can help with for several more years: her place as the special helper is secure for the foreseeable future.

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So is mine.

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Sunset

Friday 20 April 2012

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Sunset on a Friday of one of the toughest weeks in memory.

Parsley

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Growing one’s own herbs — if only we had the time to use them…

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Hypothetical Exchange

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Cell Phone
Photo by Mike Fisher

Girl 1: Did you lose your phone?

Girl 2: Yeah.

Girl 1: What for? For cussin’ out your mama?

Girl 2: My mama don’t care if I cuss her out.

Girl 1: Then what’d you lose the phone for?

Girl 2: I don’t know.

Canvas

Monday 16 April 2012

When your medium is chalk, the world is your canvas.

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When your family includes a rambunctious five-year-old, escape is your standard.

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Bike

Sunday 15 April 2012

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We’ve been working on it for some time now: riding a bike. It’s something K and I take for granted, one of the shared interests that helped in its own little way to solidify our relationship years ago.

The Girl didn’t take to it immediately. She was scared of everything: going up hill; going down hill; turning; going straight; starting; stopping. It all scared her. “I was beginning to think she’d be like Babcia,” K remarked today.

It’s been a long time coming…

http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=109786

Inviting In, Keeping Out

Saturday 14 April 2012

It’s not something we experience daily: we’re often on our way or long gone when the sun shines through the kitchen/dining room window like this. That makes weekend light unique: we know it’s a day off when we tumble downstairs to see something like this.

Morning Light

We invite it in, making sure all the blinds are open and even turning off a few lights to enjoy the warmth of early morning spring light.

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We aren’t the only ones glad to see the spring light.

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The raspberry and blackberry canes are bursting with excitement, literally.

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And so while some spring guests are welcome, others aren’t: last year, birds ate every single berry long before they were even ripe. This year, we’ve put up netting — a polite “Keep Out” that has me curious about its ultimate effectiveness.

Greater Expectations

Friday 13 April 2012

It’s the end of the year, which means the English I students are tackling Great Expectations, having just finished a brief overview/review of clauses and sentence types. “To understand Dickens,” I explained a couple of weeks ago, “you have to break apart some of his incredibly complex sentences into manageable chunks.” So we practice: every day, students entering class are greeted by a few sentences of from the previous evening’s readings. The bell-ringer, starter, whatever you want to call it:

At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously saying, “You are to come this way today,” and took me to quite another part of the house.

Students cross out unnecessary phrases — prepositional, gerund, participial — and try to find the gold: a single subordinate clause. “If you find a subordinate clause,” I explain, “you know it’s either a complex or compound-complex sentence; if you don’t, you know it’s a simple or compound sentence.”

The results are improving daily.

Blossoms and Satan

Thursday 12 April 2012

Our lone rose is blooming.

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And with our holly cut back, it’s easy to see why the sweet gum that continually plagued me was so difficult impossible to kill, other than it being a sweet gum tree.

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It wraps itself around all that’s good and perverts it to its own nefarious ends. Sounds familiar…

Keeping and Surrendering

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Trash can
Photo by Lauri Rantala

“Hey L, come help me take out the trash and recycling,” I call as we finish up playing tag in the front yard, our new daily tradition. I pull into the laundry room the wicker basket we put our paper recycling in during the week and have her help me transfer the paper from it to the tub we’ll take out to the street. And then she sees it: one of her drawings. There. In the recycling.

She gasps.

“What’s this doing here?!” she asks, confused. “Are you throwing this away?”

I think fast and answer truthfully: “Well, we went through everything, and we’re saving the best.”

She looks at one of her crayon drawings and asks incredulously: “And this?!?”

Truthfully, it is quite good.

“Well, we can take that,” I admit. “It’s a good drawing.”

“And this?!” she exclaims, pulling out another. “And my subtraction work?!”

Soon she’s pulled out every single item of hers, each time accompanying the delicate removal with a gasp of shock and horror.

I explain to her that we can’t keep everything, making a mental note to check with K before having the Girl help sort recycling again. Still, it’s not a lesson she’ll learn quickly: most of us tend to hold onto things more than we should.

Work

Tuesday 10 April 2012

One class began working on Flowers for Algernon.

Another class continued with Great Expectations.

Still another class began looking at the notion of voice in writing.

Busy day back.

Preparing

Monday 9 April 2012

Bibliography

Photo by Alexandre Duret-Lutz

The day before school starts again, I always get a bit nervous. What’s the return going to be like? Is it going to be like pulling teeth to get them to work? What will their attitudes be like? What will my attitude be like?