growing | matching tracksuits

growing

Hatchet

Friday 05 July 2019

It’s all the Boy has been talking about for the last few weeks.

“Daddy, can we get a hatchet?”

He was thinking about buying it with his own money; he was thinking about splitting the cost with us; he was thinking about it, talking about it, probably dreaming about it.

Today, we finally got it. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to pay any of his money for it because he’s got his eye on another Lego set, but when, after buying nails, concrete screws, pegboard hooks, and other things on the list, we finally headed over to the gardening section, his excitement brought a smile to both K and me.

The highlight of the afternoon, then, was teaching him how to use it.

Ice Cream, 1973

Wednesday 26 June 2019

More discoveries from the past. Haven't seen myself in baby pictures in years.

Reading with the Boy

Wednesday 12 June 2019

We try to get the Boy to read a little every night. Tonight we worked on L's old book about spiders. I found the place we'd left off, but the Boy insisted that he'd finished with K last night.

"Well, it doesn't hurt to read it again," I said. It might have sounded like I was just being lazy, but being able to read a tricky passage fluently will build his confidence. We learn by repetition, especially recognition of new words.

"The back part of a spider's body is called the abdomen," he began.

"Wow -- you read that tough word like a pro," I added.

"What word?"

"Abdomen."

He sighed. "Daddy, I recognized the word."

"I know. And that's a long word to know. How many letters?"

He counted: "Seven."

"You recognized a seven letter word!"

"No, wait," he said, counting hopefully again. "No, just seven."

He continued, stumbling a bit: "It has the spider's hear -- hear?"

"Heart," I helped.

"Heart and the spinnerets, which make silk," he continued.

"Spinnerets?!" I gasped. "Are you kidding? You read that like a pro as well!"

"But daddy, I stumbled over a" and he paused to count. "A five-letter word." He often stumbles over words, words that sometimes surprise me. And he recognizes and reads fluently words that sometimes surprise me. It's part of learning to read.

"That's okay," I reassured. "You stumbled over that word, but you nailed 'spinnerets.'"'

Many of my students over the years have face similar struggles, and struggling readers are not confident readers. I've sat with kids who were reading, asked them to read aloud, and heard difficult passages come out like this: "It has the spider's hea hear -- whatever -- and the spin spin -- I don't know -- which make the silk." If that's what's going on in their head as they read silently, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be, it's no wonder they don't feel confident with reading: the struggle produces nothing but a confusing text. And they're likely to anticipate all this: before they begin reading, they've convinced themselves that they won't understand it. And all of this builds and calcifies into not a mere reluctance to reading but a positive aversion to it.

Confidence eliminates those "whatevers" and "I-don't-knows." And so I have the Boy read books a second, third, and fourth time.

"But I already know this book," he complains.

"I know -- that's the point," I think.

Sifting Through the Layers

Wednesday 29 May 2019

I spent the better part of today going through pictures, digital and print, looking for images of Nana to use during Saturday's memorial. I scanned about 30 images and found about 60 others in our digital collection, and I'm only through 2013. It was much like looking at old pictures of our children: we always feel like our children have always looked like they do today even though we know they haven't. The changes are so gradual that it takes an image from the somewhat-distant past to jar us into understanding -- realizing -- anew that our children are on an ever sliding spectrum, that they in fact don't look like this for very long at all.

So it was with Nana. I got used to what she looked like now and forgot all about the Nana of my youth, when she was simply "Mom." And then I began going through pictures and rediscovering images of Nana before I even existed, images of Nana when she was my age, images of Nana when she was the Boy's age.

I saw Nanas I never knew. I saw Nana as a young lady, about to go out for a night on the town, looking every bit like someone off the Mad Men series.

I saw Nana as a senior in high school, just a little older than most of my students, and I wondered what she was like in class.

I saw Nana when she was a mother but younger than I am now, with a version of me that's probably about E's age. It's as hard to imagine Nana climbing up into a barn as it is to imagine her bedridden and frustrated.

And now that she's passed, all these versions live on in various people's memories. "That was about the time I met your mother," Papa explained about the Mad Men photo. Her best friend since forever likely remembers first-grade Nana as they went to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

The rest of the day I spent working on Nana's obituary. Ever the English teacher, I examined examples before starting to write hers and I noticed I finally have an answer to students' common question when learning the difference between active and passive voice: "Mr. Scott, when do we use passive voice?"

"In obituaries, children, almost exclusively."

On Monday, May 27, Naomi Ruth Williams Scott, wife, mother, sister, and grandmother, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by her family after a six-month struggle. Naomi will be lovingly remembered by her husband of nearly 55 years, Melvin; her son, Gary; her daughter-in-law, Kinga; her grandchildren, Lena and Emil; and sisters-in-law Laverne Williams, Diane Mathis, Yvonne Van Seeters, and Mary Barnes, as well as many nieces and nephews, and countless friends. She was preceded in death by her father, Lewis Williams; her mother, Ruby Gordon Williams; and her two brothers, Nelson and Wallace Williams.

A native of Indian Land, South Carolina, Naomi graduated from Indian Land High School and married Melvin Scott in 1964. They lived for several years in the Charlotte/Rock Hill area relocating to the southwest Virginia/northeast Tennessee area, where they lived for over thirty years.

Versatile and skilled, Naomi worked various jobs through her life, including jobs in a flower shop, a printing and finishing shop, a travel agency, later in life, her own business. She would have argued, however, that her most important job by far, her only truly important job, was being a mother. She was a dedicated and loving mother who provided all who knew her a clear example of what it really means to be a mother.

Naomi was a very active church member in all the congregations she attended. She served as a deaconess in the Worldwide Church of God, where she also sang in the choir and provided quiet leadership through example for members. A firm believer in Jesus, she never wavered in her faith and leaned heavily on His love and promises.

The memorial service for Naomi will be this Saturday, June 1 at 3 PM at Woodruff Road Christian Church, 20 Bell Road, Greenville, SC. Following the service, there be time for fellowship and visitation with light refreshments to give everyone an opportunity to share with each other their memories of Naomi.

As Naomi felt special tenderness to all children but especially her son and grandchildren, the family requests instead of flowers memorial donations to the Shriners Hospital for Children and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Since her faith was so important to her and because the church has shown so much support in this time of need, the family would be honored with donations in Naomi’s memory to Woodruff Road Christian Church.

But bottom line, I look at these pictures, especially the most recent, of Nana and Papa, and it hits me again and again:

Probably my favorite picture of my parents

I simply can't believe she's gone. I imagine we'll all be experiencing that for many months.

Digging, Mowing, Sealing

Sunday 05 May 2019

We put the new bed in a year ago -- exactly a year ago today.

End of Spring 2018 Soccer

It's tempting to fall into the obvious reflection: the "so much has changed in a year" cliché. A lot has changed in a year, but the majority of it has changed in the last five months, all starting December 4 with a phone call at around 9:30 in the evening while I was out walking the dog. "Nana is going to the hospital." And from that moment, it all changed. No one knew just how much it would change, of course. No one has any real clairvoyance in medical emergencies. But here I am, a day past five months after it all started, exactly a year after we put them in, taking out the last vestiges of a garden.

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then, Saturday work spills into Sunday. We try to keep Sunday as a day for the family, but with the last five months begin what they have, that in itself is a challenge.

Today's job was simple but critical: deal with the recently created drainage issue at the front corner downspout.

Yesterday's mess before it got really bad

Visions of it seeping through the brick into the now newly created concrete-slab crawl that would offer no outlet at all haunted me, and when the rain woke me at three in the morning, I went to check and found the hack I'd created didn't work either and set about digging, in a downpour in my underwear and Crocs at three in the morning, a quick trench to direct the water away from the house.

Today, then, was the day to solve the problem once and for all. The first task: dig up the Crepe Myrtle at the corner of the house. That took a couple of hours. Then, the trenching, including a trench under the newly built ramp. Why not do it before they built the ramp? Simply -- I didn't know it would be necessary.

For now, everything is simply laid out and pushed together. I'm far from done and not even sure how I'll terminate it for effective discharge.

Next, after several hours of digging, I turned my attention back to the yard and the hedges three-quarters trimmed. I'd cut my power cord yesterday and decided to put it off until Sunday -- and the torrents of rain that were by then falling didn't do much to avoid said procrastination.

The Boy for his part was upset and thrilled about it all. Digging is one of his favorite things, and he was disappointed that he missed out on so much of it. Mowing, though, is equally enjoyable for him, and he reached a milestone today: he can now start the mower himself. He ran over the trimmings that remained around the yard, always looking for a reason to turn the mower's engine off so he could turn it back on.

(The hard rain really did a number on our plants -- they're beaten into submission.)

The final task was indoors: sealing up the entry to the new room. The floor guys are going to be here tomorrow, and the thought of sawdust throughout the kitchen and living room was none too appealing.

Crawling in from the back side before it was sealed: "This would make a great little fort..."

Finally, dinner without the girls: leftover soup and a salad. The Boy, being the wonderfully odd eater than he is, was disappointed with the soup (he's grown tired of all soups, I think) and thrilled about the salad.

Spring Monday

Monday 29 April 2019

I was worried that this would be the first of several very difficult days. With no one here to help with the kids (read: E) in the morning, it's difficult for me to get out of the house very early. This week, however, is my duty week: I get to spend thirty minutes before my contracted arrival time supervising kids on the eighth-grade hallway. It's loads of fun, but the downside is that I have to leave much earlier than usual. Which created a dilemma: what to do with the Boy. Two options: ride with the neighbor or leave without breakfast and have it at school.

At around 6:15 this morning, the Boy toddled downstairs, still rubbing his eyes, and presented a third option: "I'm just going to eat breakfast now."

"Are you sure? You could still sleep another half hour."

"Nah, I'll stay up."

And so the Boy proved once again that life is like calculus: there's often more than one (or even two) solutions to a given problem.

Once at school, the usually peaceful morning duty transformed temporarily into one of those moments when, as a teacher, I see a student's future and think, "Wow, if this kid doesn't make some serious changes, do some serious maturing, she's in for a long, tough life." And much of that, in most cases, is due to environment: they're not choosing necessarily to be a disrespectful kid. It's something that works on the streets and/or at home, and they just bring it into the school as well.

That particular exchange foreshadowed the discussion I was to have with my honors English kids, who read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" last week as their article of the week. We began with a review via video:

Then the kids went through a few discussion questions:

To what extent do you find Socrates's point about the human tendency to confuse "shadows" with "reality" relevant today?
What could be the elements that prevent people from seeing the truth, or regarding "shadow" as the "truth"?
In society today or in your own life, what sorts of things shackle the mind?

The common theme that came through in all of these discussions was the role social media plays in creating false realities, in preventing people from seeing truth, in shackling the mind. It's ironic: I see so many of these kids buried in their phones before and after school, yet they're strangely aware of the negative effects.

After school, I hopped out of the car thinking, "So far, other than the little issue in the morning during hall duty, this supposedly tough day is surprisingly enjoyable. After dinner, it was even more so: one of E's choices in his literacy log is to find a pleasant place to sit outside and read for a while.

And after that, a little project: a bird house. Where did this idea come from? I don't know. The Boy simply talked K into buy him a piece of pressure-treated 1 x 6, and although he originally planned on building a tree house from that single plank, he was flexible enough to realize that a bird house was probably more in the scope of that single plank. So he found instructions on YouTube, gathered tools, and together we built a little bird house.

"Once you're done, I want to help with the painting," the Girl declared, and so with twenty minutes to go before the start of E's evening ritual, they began working.

"Let's decorate it with birds," the Girl suggested. They began drawing various silhouettes of birds while I got the dog's dinner ready, only to discover we were out of dog food.

"Alright kids, you'll have to do the actual painting tomorrow. E, you'll have to go with me to the store to buy some food for Clover." I was expecting a small fit, some protesting at the very least, and I was reluctant to stop the work in progress: it's so rare that they find something that really engages them both.

Still, the Boy was surprisingly mature. "Okay," was all he said, and off we went to get some kibble for the pup.

And so at the close of this surprisingly pleasant day that was supposed to be the first of several tough ones, I find myself realizing anew that "tough days" and "bad days" and "rough days" depend more on our perception than anything else, just like Plato's shadows suggest.

Soccer Sunday

Sunday 28 April 2019

This afternoon we had the annual kids/parents soccer game to wrap up another season of soccer.

"Are you going to play?" the Boy asked.

"Of course!" Though "playing" might be somewhat hyperbolic. I have no skills to speak of, and I have no fitness to make up for it either. But I did play at the game.

I learned two things: first, I'm terribly out of shape. Since K has been staying with Nana and Papa to take care of them (alternating weeks since February, then about four or five weeks ago, every week), I don't get out to exercise that much. I use the excuse of not wanting to leave the kids in the house alone, but that's really just an excuse, I think.

The second was something that followed off of the first: when you're in such bad shape and have no skills, if you're playing kids, you can pass it off by playing like all the other parents did when we were up X-0 (can't remember the actual score): just letting the kids win...

Afterward, off to Nana's and Papa's for dinner. There won't be too many more times that we do that, though. The addition is nearing completion. "Two more weeks," we say, but we've been saying that for a month already. But still, we only have a few more times.

The fenced-in drainage basin mystery at the top of the hill

After dinner, we had a little boys' time, as E called it. We decided to do our normal exploring around the drainage basin at the northeastern corner of Nana's and Papa's development's property. It was a little overgrown as spring takes hold, but nothing like I was expecting. Perhaps the last time we go there? Who knows.

Last Saturday Soccer

Saturday 27 April 2019

A brilliant morning -- sunlight everywhere.

Last soccer game of the year. The Boy was excited about it -- not because he was excited to play, but because he was excited to be done.

"Do I have to go?" has become something of a refrain before soccer practice and before games.

"You committed to it," I always explain, "so you're going to see it through to the end. We keep our word; we finish what we start."

When I watch his play, I understand why he's not crazy about soccer: he's among the youngest in his age group, and he's lacking some of the confidence that other players on his team have. He prefers playing defense for this reason: all he has to do is stop someone, which means just kicking the ball away from them (in his mind). That's easier than attacking, when two or three are on you trying to get the ball from you -- not to mention your team mates who, despite calls from the coach to realize that they're "same team!" and instructions to "spread out," are swarming all around you as well.

So after today, a break. Until L's volleyball season starts up again...

Photo Request

Tuesday 23 April 2019

The Girl uses K's Instagram account as a work-around for our reluctance to let her have one of her own. It works out the same, but we have a little sense of added security. Today, she asked me to take some pictures for her Instagram feed.