fun in threes, sometimes fours
"'I cannot go to school today,' / Said little Peggy Ann McKay." So begins one of the Girl's favorite poems, the famous "Sick" by Shel Silverstein. Yet in our case, the sickness is real, and the truism shows itself to be more than mere cliche: When Mama is sick, everyone suffers. Mama is the glue that holds everything together, and when she's down with the flu, the rest of us start coming apart.
And priorities shift, like this silly blog.
Dear Terrence,
I heard today: You’ve been tossed out of alternative school, with your latest offense being the proclamation to a teacher that she could just “– off.”
It’s time I took the gloves off, so to speak. That’s stupid. That’s simply stupid. Look back over your long, checkered school experience: when has something like that ever made a situation better? When has such behavior ever helped? When has such behavior ever brought about anything but more trouble from a teacher? When has a teacher ever replied along the lines of, “Oh my! I’m so sorry to have offended you. Please forgive me!”? When has such language ever helped get you out of trouble? When has that language ever done anything other than get you into more trouble?
I swear, sometimes I think you guys simply don’t think.
Annoyed and saddened,
Your Frustrated Friend in Room 302
WordPress's automated permalink creator tells me that this is the fourth time I've titled a post "growth." I suppose the real surprise is that, given the fact that we have two kids, I haven't used that title more often. It's a constant refrain in the house, among friends and family, even acquaintances.
"How she's grown!"
"How he's grown!"
Still, for K and me, that growth is gradual. Parents get used to seeing their children daily and the incremental changes disappear into the blur of everyday reality until we suddenly see something that shows, pointedly, how much a child has grown.
Like stumbling on an old picture.
At six months, he spills out of the chair he barely fit into at six days.
The Girl has always been a bit nervous about spiders. For a while, she thought ever spider she saw was a Black Widow. Her choice of books at the Book Fair reveals how much she’s grown. Her decision to spend her own money to buy a copy for a friend shows it even more distinctly.
The Girl tried an experimental paper boat as she'd seen in Curious George.
Sadly, it didn't work.
There are few things, I think, as joyful for a lover of books to attend her first book fair at school.
We never made it to Falls Park during our walk yesterday, so the family decided to start there today. I would have guessed, were someone to ask me, that we were too late to get much of an autumnal view, but I was happily mistaken.
This time, though, we took the whole family, including our one-and-a-half tooth Wonder Boy who seems willing to smile at just about anything.
The Boy's smile probably had something to do with my wiggling fingers and silly face, but with colors like this, though, who could resist a smile?
As we headed into the main downtown area of the park, the sun came out fully and consistently, making the Peace Center glow. We, though, were less glowing, especially the Girl, who had by then adopted an all-too-familiar refrain: "I'm hungry."
Nothing is quite as filling on a fall day as an ice cream cone,
and it never tastes as better than when outside. Or so someone told me.
The Girl and I decided to go downtown this afternoon and explore. After a visit to the library, we wound up at Springwood Cemetery in downtown Greenville. It was there; we were there -- why not?
I couldn't remember if the Girl had ever been in a cemetery before. I recalled a visit to a cemetery in Rock Hill, but she stayed in the car.
"But I've been in a cemetery in Poland," she assured me.
We quickly learned this cemetery was different, really a cemetery worth visiting. It wasn't one of those modern graveyards with flat grave markers to make mowing easier. This cemetery had worn stones and wrought iron fences.
And a number of plots for unknown Confederate soldiers.
The past is truly never too far away when you're in the South. Those of us from the South face a lot of stereotypes as a result, not all of them completely unearned. I've never had much of an accent at all, let alone a southern accent, but I still felt somewhat out of place during my two years in Boston. As we walked around, words from that modern, proud redneck band, Drive-by Truckers, came to mind:
You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the southern thing
I can't say I've ever been proud of the glory, but I've done my share of staring down the shame.
Perhaps that's the modern southern thing?
Whatever the case, I didn't have long to settle on those thoughts: we were soon walking down Main Street (literally), weaving in and out of fellow Greenville-ites also out to enjoy the warm Saturday, snapping pictures here and there. The Girl has begun requesting pictures -- and posing -- so I willingly complied.
I wanted to walk all the way down to Falls Park, but with K and the Boy back home, we decided to head back.
It's one of the highlights of the year for me as a teacher. After working (some might say "struggling") our way the Odyssey, I surprise students with the culminating project: a board game based on Odysseus's adventures. They think it's fun; I design the details of the assignment to require some real problem-solving practice, legitimate "technical" writing (they have to create instructions for their game, and they must be clear enough that other groups can play without their help), and some creativity.
Today, they played the game.
I walked around, snapping pictures, listening in on conversations, smiling when they get so involved in the whole procedure that they don't even notice me, don't even remember they're also supposed to be evaluating the projects as well.
It's a good day to be in the classroom.
With some help, the Boy can now sit. He casts his eyes here and there, his attention drawn to this sound or that motion, and his arms or legs are constantly in motion. It seems like it would be a good match for the hyper Girl.
They sit together, banging anything and everything, both delighted with the racket.
The difference comes later, when the Boy has a moment alone and sits silently, almost contemplatively, for a seemingly impossible length of time. The Girl wouldn’t last three seconds.
The Girl has learned how to play dominoes -- at least, a version of Mexican Train from a set with missing pieces. She generally tends to place her tiles on the table face up because, as she explains, she needs help. I tell her that perhaps it's best if I don't see what she has because it's tempting to make decisions based on that knowledge.
Still, she does need the help. She often overlooks playable tiles and tends to draw without really thinking. And then there's her tendency to get ahead of herself -- a less magnanimous father would say "cheat" -- and slip another tile down before I play.
In the end, the Girl wins, semi-fair-and-square. I'm fairly sure there were a couple of times she played twice while I was wrestling the Boy. Then again, I know of at least one time she missed a tile and I said nothing. Perhaps I was desperate to make a decent showing.
Then again, when I draw these three tiles toward the end of the game, one can hardly fault me, I think.
The Boy is ready to eat; K doesn’t have his food ready yet. There’s only one thing to do.
The Girl and I keep him happy.
