matching tracksuits

fun in threes, sometimes fours

Eleventh Time

Saturday 20 January 2018

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

Friday 19 January 2018

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

Thursday 18 January 2018

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

Wednesday 17 January 2018

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

Monday 15 January 2018

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

Sunday 14 January 2018

Kwasnica for lunch, pinewood derby in the afternoon, date night.

45

Saturday 13 January 2018

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.

Dickensian Afternoon

Thursday 11 January 2018

It was so foggy this afternoon that I could think of only one thing: the opening to Dickens's Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

The dog and the kids spent the day indoors. A miserable day if you want to go outside. Dzien barowa.

On the Proper Use of Time

Wednesday 10 January 2018

1

At times, the school year seems to extend endlessly, a pile of days that stretches beyond our sight, under which we all seem to be crushed slowly. If there's a class that's an inordinate challenge, the weight of that pile seems to double, and somehow, no matter how well things are going in the year, a few more days seem to be tossed carelessly on the pile as third quarter approaches. "What?! I'm this exhausted, and we're just now in the back half?!"

Decorating his pinewood derby car

Other times, the year seems entirely too short, something requiring calipers to measure. The list of standards the state requires teachers to cover seems to require twice the days the state allocates for the challenge. Some standards seem as if they might take a lifetime to master in and of themselves. "Assess the processes to revise strategies, address misconceptions, anticipate and overcome obstacles, and reflect on completeness of the inquiry." I'm still working on that one. "Determine appropriate disciplinary tools and develop a plan to communicate findings and/or take informed action." Ditto.

An unusually-attentive Clover

In between those two, the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, allocate a certain number of days to testing. In the decade-plus I've taught in the States, that number seems to grow every year. In the case of the hard-to-handle classes, it's a relief in a sense -- for the obvious reasons. It's tiring keeping them focused and engaged every day, and a test is just the right mind-numbing exercise to make the period pass by fairly painlessly. They get little to nothing out of it, and they put little to nothing into it, and everyone knows that's what's going to happen, but we do the dance anyway, and everyone goes home with their dance card happily filled. And yet for those same classes, it's a nightmare, for teachers already feel we're trying to cram too much into to little.

It just doesn't seem like the proper use of time.

2

Wednesday afternoons are often when I catch up with school work. The Girl has choir practice, until five and K and the Boy are out doing the grocery shopping as they wait, and so when I arrive home, the house is empty and silent. I make a cup of coffee, get out some papers to grade, or more likely, load this or that website that now holds my students' work and begin assessing, or I start sketching out my plans for the next week's activities.

Frustration at the difficulty of cleaning up after an experiment

Today, however, I had a thought: I don't have anything to do for school that is terribly pressing; my school is quite near the Aldi where K and E are shopping; I could easily pick up the Boy and take him home for a bit of playing. I called K; she asked the Boy; he was thrilled. Home we went, talking all the way about what we might play.

Said clean-up

We settled on cars, with a bit of blocks. And in the midst of it all, out of seemingly nowhere, we ended up building jails for the misbehaving cars. E designed one, which meant he placed the blocks, and I hunted them down for him if he couldn't find them. Then we tested it, which meant he rammed a big car into the jail to see if it stood. It didn't; the bad car escaped. So we did it again, alternating who designed the jail. No jail held the prisoner for longer than a few moments when the Boy really set his mind and muscles to the task.

The final jail

We made a big mess. The Boy got semi-hurt as he crashed his car into the pile a bit too hard. I accomplished absolutely nothing for school.

It was a proper use of time.

First Day Out

Tuesday 09 January 2018

It's been cold here lately -- ridiculously cold for South Carolina. The majority of the nights over the last ten days have been below freezing, which is something here; a substantial number (a majority of that majority?) have been below 20 degrees. In Poland, nothing out of the ordinary; K and I are used to such things. Here? It's ridiculously cold.

Add to it the tragic fact that we've all taken turns getting sick over that same period of time and it's obvious why no one has done much of anything outside these last few days. The dog is the only exception: she doesn't really care. The rest of us have done our best to stay warm.

So when we all were home and it was 59 degrees this afternoon, there was only one thing to do.

The Boy and the Girl were happy to jump on the trampoline again. The new trampoline, which should actually have some bounce to it, is still in parts on the basement floor.

"Let's wait until it warms up," K encouraged. That was Christmas. It's still on the floor.

"Daddy! Today it's warmed up! Can you work on the trampoline?" was the refrain from both the kids, but I was too busy laughing with K as she jumped out of the swing like a teenager.

The dog was thrilled to have someone to play with her again. She's really such a gregarious dog. She'll play outside by herself for a while, but she's always happy to have a companion. And don't even think about doing something outside the newly fenced area: she'll stand at the fence and whimper like she's being abused.