Wednesday Walk
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Yesterday
Icy morning, failed brownies.
Science Fair 2018
Valentine Box
Valentine’s Day is approaching. An exciting time for a five-year-old. The Boy asked K to help him make a box for his cards when the magical day arrives. It had to be “boyish” — his favorite term these days.
At first, he wanted to make a Batman box.
“No, too difficult,” said K. “We only have this evening to work on it while Daddy and L are at gymnastics.” So they settled on a robot.
But what to do about the neck? In the picture online, the neck was a different color than the rest, so they were reticent to cover the neck — made from an old empty matchbox — in foil as well. L, just before we left, remembered she had some red tape in her craft supplies. She brought it down, but K wasn’t initially thrilled about it.
“It’s got sparkles on it. I don’t think he’ll want sparkes.”
The Boy, standing right there, looked at it, thought for a moment, then said, “No, it’s great. It makes it very Valentine-ish.”
Monday Afternoon
Monday afternoon. We’ve all survived work and school. The first day back is behind us.
We run down to the new trampoline and start bouncing like mad.
Clover, too, is ready for some fun.
And then, when it’s time to put the Boy to bed, I fall asleep with him, and Monday afternoon doesn’t get recorded until Tuesday evening.
Baking for the Kids
Theodor Seuss Geisel said it best:
The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All [this] cold, cold, wet day.
We were stuck in the house all day. Rain, rain, rain. The Boy entertained himself with making fans through most of the afternoon.
In the evening, the Girl made molassas cookies. The recipe came from a book about the Great Depression she’s reading in class, and she’s been keen on making them all week. Of course E wanted to help, but what is true for many things is doubly true for baking: his help doesn’t.
The Girl, though, has reached a point that she needs little to no help when baking. With experience comes confidence.
“Maybe I could take some to school tomorrow,” she chimed in the midst of the baking. K emailed her teacher quickly, and L got the go-ahead.
So tomorrow she’ll be taking one cookie each — twenty-four total — for her classmates.
The thoughtfulness of that gesture — a proud little moment for us.
Out with the Old
The day began as all Saturdays do: a conversation with Babcia via Skype. The Boy took to showing Babcia several cars, explaining their significance in halting Polish. Babcia speaks no English, and the Boy speaks no Russian, so he has to use Polish if he’s going to speak with Babcia, which he is really motivated to do. It’s a good way, then, to get him using the language.
I spent the morning working on class materials. I’ve decided to use Quizet to hit vocabulary really hard in the second semester to make up for negligence in the first quarter. I’ve always struggled teaching vocabulary, but I’ve discovered a few online tools sure to make my students’ life more interesting.
In the afternoon, we finally got to work on the new trampoline. The first step was to take the old one down. The plan was originally to try to pass it on to someone else via Craigslist: “Free trampoline! All you have to do is come and disassemble it and get it out of your yard!” But I saw how that would end up: it would sit there forever, looking stupid — two trampolines in the backyard = a decidedly redneck feel. So I borrowed our neighbors’ truck, and the Boy and I ripped the thing apart and hauled it to the dump. He was terribly excited at the prospect of throwing so many pieces of metal into the huge dumpsters at the local dump station, and he was just as frustrated to realize that we wouldn’t be tossing them down into the dumpster below us but up into the dumpster. Still, he tossed a few pieces out of the truck with loud clattering, attention-grabbing style.
Once it was gone, the backyard looked so huge. The fence we had installed for Clover closed everything in quite a bit, and there was a moment when I thought about the time years from now when we’ll finally get rid of the trampoline because the kids are too big for it or not interested in it or — gulp — gone, and I smiled at the thought, but only briefly. Who wants to wish away one’s life for such a silly thing?
The kids came down to help out with the assembly of the new trampoline, which took a lot longer than I really anticipated. We all pulled together, though, and got it done more or less as a family. K was in the house, cleaning and cooking most of the the time, but she came down from time to time to check on our progress, help us out with getting the net up, and take some pictures.
And play with the dog a bit. Which, truth be told, was its own form of help: Clover can be really needy when we’re outside but not playing with her. She wants attention. She craves attention. And when the Girl and I were fighting with the springs and canvas, figuring out how exactly the next support system worked, and keeping the Boy from wondering off with pieces and parts, a worrisome dog was just that.
We finaly got it all together and the expected happened: it began raining.
Still, a great day overall.
Friday Play
Playing
We’ve actually had a winter this year, and we’re all sick of it. We’re all sick of being cold. We’re all sick of being inside. We’re all sick of clouds. (We wouldn’t survive in Poland with this mentality.) Every chance we get, now, we head outside.
I arrived home today to find K with the kids and the dog down at the trampoline. They’d invented a new game of double-keep-away: keep away from the Dog and keep away from the Boy. Usually, I would expect E to get frustrated with such a game, but he seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit. Until the falling started. And the crying. Which was fake crying.
Which is the only reason I would have taken a picture of it. He was laughing within seconds of this shot, and I was laughing at the thought of how similar L was at this age.
The Dog’s new ball has proved a challenge. We just gave her the Boy’s old size-three soccer ball, which is slick and shiny — almost impossible for her to get enough of a grip on to bite down in any meaningful way. She ends up chasing the ball all over the yard as she lunges at it to bite it.
When the Girl tired of the game, she joined K inside, and the Boy and I went to the front yard for some more soccer. Occasionally he would kick it off to the side, and as it rolled down the yard and into the road, he called out, “I’ll get it. It’s my responsibility.”
Sports
Living in South Carolina means that one Wednesday we can be out sledding in the afternoon and the next Wednesday, playing soccer and trying out a new sport.
Stopping by the thrift store today for some thing or another, K let the Boy make some purchases of his own: a golf club. Why a golf club? I don’t play golf; I don’t watch golf; I don’t talk or even think about golf. But there it is — the Boy has a golf club and some balls now.
We headed out to the front yard for some initial swings.
“Let’s get you going this direction,” I said when I saw the neighbors’ cars in their driveway just beside our lawn. The other neighbors’ car was out, too, but the chances of him hitting that car, with the ground sloping upward and the additional barrier of our own driveway and second patch of ground, seemed significantly lower.
After dinner, soccer. He’s going to be playing again this spring, and he’s eager to get some practice — so eager that we have to go through the whole routine he and his team went through, with warm-ups, some passing practice, and finally a game. We don’t have a goal anymore, so it amounted to a game of keep-away — good practice in and of itself.
Washington Trip
Letting the Boy Lead
Dog Park
We took Clover to a dog park for the first time today. It was quite a change for her: she wasn’t quite terrified, but close to it. She’s used to be the dominant dog among the small circle of friends she has, but today, she got a taste of what the cats go through here.
Eleventh Time
The Girl’s birthday, falling in mid-December, is during a most inopportune season: there’s Christmas, school concerts, church obligations, another friend’s birthday (in early December). There’s just no time to have a party, so once again, we put it off. Last year, we turned it into a New Year’s Eve party with two of her closest friends; this year, we waited until today.
The girls started with a little slime-making — it’s an obsession L has had for some time now, and we’ve gone through countless bottles of glue over the last year.
The interesting thing, for me, was that only one of the two girls from last year was present this year. The other has had a falling-out with L. L explains that it’s a complicated social situation, and while I thought such dilemmas would not be appearing in elementary school, I guess it’s just a harbinger of things to come.
But there are always new friends, new adventures.
Snow Days 2018: Day 3
Today we did a lot of cleaning. Too much for L’s taste. But strangely enough, part of that “too much” was something she chose herself. Deciding that E’s closet was hopelessly chaotic, she took it upon herself to pull everything out and reorganize. And then complain that he wasn’t helping.
At eleven, she’s such a contradiction: she’s a mix of child and teenager, switching back and forth unexpectedly. So mature one minute, so childish the next. Then back to mature: she made her own cake for her belated birthday party tomorrow.
K was there to assist, to advise, to do some tricky parts, but even some of the seemingly tricky parts, like removing the cake from the form, the Girl insisted on doing herself.
I look at these pictures and I can imagine what it will be like when she’s older still, perhaps coming home for a visit, cooking with K and chatting about this or that.
Snow Days 2018: Day 2
We woke today to a cloudless sky and a temperature the comes as a direct result. It produces a conundrum: we have so few snowy days here in South Carolina that we want to take advantage of each and every one, but it’s so cold that the prospect itself of going outside is chilling.
Still, we bundled up and headed outside mid-morning. That process needs careful choreography: the Boy needs help getting his layers on, and if I get him all bundled up before I even begin my own layering, he’ll get hot.
“Sometimes, when I’m on the playground,” he explained to me today, “I get so hot that I get cold.” So we try to avoid that.
When we finally made it outside, the snow, now frozen over, was like a skating rink. The kids flew down our neighbors’ hill.
They ride together; they ride solo; they ride feet-first; they ride head-first.
And there were a few quiet moments, when I caught a shot of them walking back up the hill, perhaps not quite aware that I’m about to snap a picture.
They’re both growing up faster than K and I thought possible.
Snow Days 2018: Day 1
There’s a price for everything: a snow day when you’ve already used your allotted make-up days means there’s a chance you’ll lose a day of spring break or have to go to school one Saturday. If it’s just one, the state — because then it becomes a state issue — might just forgive that one day. If it’s more, that’s a litter trickier. We’re out tomorrow for sure (hence “Day 1”), so we’ll be two days behind. That’s not too bad, but there’s a good chance school will be canceled Friday as well, which makes it all the more likely we’ll have to make it up.
But even if we do pay for it, who cares? The kids had a great time; the dog had a great time; K had a great time; I had a great time.
Cue: old MasterCard ad tag line.
Solo Baking
We made chocolate chip muffins last Monday during our unexpected snow day. I helped a bit — not a lot, but a good bit, especially in the middle.
Today, the Girl decided she wanted to make muffins again, this time vanilla. She found the recipe online, checked the ingredients, made a shopping list, called K to see if she needed us to pick anything up for her while we were at the store, convinced me to go (didn’t take much), mixed, poured, baked, and cleaned up after herself.
This is not to say there weren’t moments of frustration. It turns out she didn’t check eggs closely enough, a fact we discovered after we returned from the store. No problem: she went to the neighbors and asked for an egg, taking them some muffins when they were done.
She wanted to go to the store by herself, to walk down to the CVS about a half-mile down the street, but that was a bit much. Still, all these signs of growing up…
First Pinewood Derby
Kwasnica for lunch, pinewood derby in the afternoon, date night.
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We started by taking down all the Christmas stuff. I rooted around in the crawl space to close up a little gap from the unfinished laundry room into the crawl space that the little white cat liked to use.
Then birthday: the Girl did most of the cake. K made the kwasnica. Great day.
