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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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?!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We haven’t really tried to force the Girl, as she gets older, to learn how to cook. She’s learned how to clean her room, to dust, to wash a window, to clean the hardwood floors in our house, but cooking, we just didn’t really make her. I don’t know about K, but I figured that she’ll learn when she’s interested. That’s how it was with me. Still, as she nears middle school, we’ve been talking about how, at the very least, she needs to begin making her own lunch for the day.
This weekend, she decided she wanted to make chocolate chip muffins. She didn’t want help other than buying the ingredients and going over the recipe with her. The rest, she wanted to do. So when we went to bed last night, it was with the plan of making muffins in the afternoon after school.
Little did we know that school had already been canceled in anticipation of a front that was supposed to bring ice and freezing rain but never really materialized. We woke up, went through our normal morning routine, and somehow, though the local news was on, missed that Greenville County Schools had canceled everything for the day. We found out when L and I arrived at her school only to find an empty parking lot. “It can’t be a two-hour delay,” I thought, “because there would be some cars there. Someone would be there.” We returned home to find that there was no school, so afternoon muffins became morning muffins.
She began cooking, and I, still not feeling 100%, took the opportunity to lie down for a while. I went to the kitchen occasionally to check on the progress, but overall, she seemed to be doing well, with a little help from the Boy. His help with her was much like his help with anyone: only slightly helpful, often less than helpful, but always eager.
L called me in to help her when she was filling the muffin forms. I looked at the dough and had my doubts.
“Did you follow the instructions very closely?” I asked.
“Yes,” she assured.
“And you mixed this very well?” I asked, wondering how she could have done it without using the mixer. It was thick and not easily budged: it would have been a nightmare to do it by hand.
“Yes.”
I took a spatula and found most of the sugar and a good bit of the flour still sitting at the base of the mixing bowl, untouched.
“Oh,” she laughed.
We threw it in the mixer, combined the ingredients thoroughly, and got put everything in the muffin forms.
“Now put it in the oven,” I said.
“Me?!”
The Girl doesn’t deal with heat well. Things that seem only lukewarm to K and me threaten to scald her, to send her to the emergency room with third-degree burns. But with a little encouragement, she was able to open the door, put the pan in, and pull it back out in twenty minutes when the buzzer went off.
And the result? For a first attempt, utterly amazing. For any attempt, really very good. Moist, chocolatey, and perfect. A hit for the whole family.
The upshot of this: the Girl was eager to cook again. When it was dinner time, she wanted to learn to make the rice. Instead of just plain old rice, though, I taught her to cook a quick and easy risotto. After looking through a cookbook and finding a recipe for lemony broiled chicken, she’s ready to cook a full dinner next week.
And the rain and ice that shut down schools? Nothing. The ground was dry until early afternoon. A district spokeswoman explained it to a local news outlet:
“When an alert of that magnitude is issued we have to consider the problems it would present not only for our bus riders, but also car riders, including high school drivers, who travel over bridges and on curvy roads,” Brotherton said. “We considered the circumstances that occurred in Asheville on December 31st when even small amounts of fog and drizzle quickly turned to ice on roadways and led to treacherous road conditions and multiple wrecks. After a week of freezing temperatures and already cold roads, asking parents, students and employees to travel in the predicted conditions was not a risk we were willing to take. Safety always comes first.”
It’s not the first time something like this has happened; it won’t be the last. But we’ll always make the most of such days.
The Go Fish obsession continues. Someone plays with the kids every night, and they occasionally play together by themselves. We’ve yet to tackle a four-player game, though I’m not sure why. The kids don’t seem to eager for whatever reason, and so perhaps that’s why we haven’t tried.
Tonight, as I was playing with them, I stood to get something from the other side of the room, and I accidentally glanced at the Boy’s cards. (He has them spread out in a chair beside him, so the natural gesture to avoid seeing someone’s cards — looking down when passing — doesn’t work.) I did notice that he had a yo-yo (we play with a picture-based card set), and since I had a yo-yo, I thought I’d do a little experiment.
“L, do you have a yo-yo?” I asked during my next turn. E was set to go next, and I was ready for him to ask me if I had a yo-yo. He had been a little distracted, though, and asked instead, “L, do you have a yo-yo?”
L looked at me; I smiled back at her.
“E, I just asked her that,” I laughed. “You should have asked me that just then. Now, I’m going to ask you for it next turn.”
He just smiled.
“Daddy, I don’t understand. On Sid the Science Kid, the teacher calls all of the children scientists.” The Boy paused for a moment: he’s learned how to pause to heighten the moment just a bit. “That can’t be right! They can’t be scientists!”
We were on our way home from shopping, leaving the girls at home this last day of break. K stayed home because of a lingering illness, so we were together for the morning, but the Boy and I headed out after lunch to do the week’s grocery shopping.
“Why can’t they be scientists?” I asked, wondering what he had in mind.
“They’re just kids!”
“So?”
“To be a scientist, you have to have a job. That’s your job. A scientist,” he explained still frustrated, though sometimes with him it’s hard to tell if the frustration is real or just pretend, as if he’s trying it on for size.
I thought about his definition and reasoning for a few moments, thought about why the teacher would be calling children scientists — obvious for an adult, not so much for a child.
“Well, E, it’s a question of scientific thinking. She’s calling them scientists because they’re behaving like scientists. They’re thinking like scientists.” This satisfied him for a few moments, but it didn’t satisfy me. I was wondering if he would ask what it means to think scientifically, hoping he would ask. He didn’t, so I prompted him. “Do you know what that means, to think like a scientist?”
“No.”
“It’s a process. You observe. You think about why things happen. You make predictions about why things happen; you check those predictions…”
I fear a lot of Americans really have no clue what it means to think like a scientist.
The other night, while on a walk, I was listening to an old sermon by a religious leader, and he was railing against “intellectualism.” He never really defined it. He never really explained why it was so bad other than to say it was vanity. He was upset about how some Biblical scholars will spend so much time picking at the smallest little detail, and as he said that it occurred to me that he really didn’t have a firm grasp of what those scholars were doing, how they were examining the text, their methodology and the justification for it.
I think this is a common thread in America, this anti-intellectual position, and it’s directed at all sciences. People dismiss all sorts of things they, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they likely wouldn’t dismiss, and they accept things that, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they would dismiss out of hand.
So I was very pleased when E later spoke of thinking scientifically. And as he played Go Fish with the girls, it occurred to me that here is a perfect opportunity for some basic critical thinking: observe (listen to what others are asking for); test (ask for a few things in a systematic way); repeat.
The plan was simple: we were all going to bed early. Waiting for midnight on December 31/January 1? In the grand scheme of things, an arbitrary time in an arbitrary day? Whatever for? But L, who’d napped yesterday because of a lingering illness, really wanted to stay up.
What happened to my early bedtime? I decided to have a beer and watch another episode of The Same Sky, a great German mini-series set in Berlin during the Watergate crisis. There’s an East German spy, there are interrogation scenes in Hohenschönhausen, the main Stasi headquarters, there’s a family dealing with the effects of the East German doping sports machine — everything you could want in a series about East Germany. L appeared at the top of the steps and asked plaintively, “Can we stay up together?”
Of course, I agreed.
We went to the living room and spent the last forty minutes watching a bit of a documentary about the Russian revolution. Stalin got a mention early in the film, and I pointed out that he’s one of the most destructive figures in history.
“I know,” she said simply, explaining that in one of the books she recently read, Bombs for Hitler, one of the characters is Ukranian. And if anyone knew how evil Stalin was, it was Ukrainians at the end of the 1930s.
About ten to twelve, we began looking for live coverage of the ball drop in Times Square, but since we never watch network TV and don’t have cable, I’m really clueless about what local channels are, and we couldn’t find anything. By the time we decided it was no use, it was 11:59. Off went the television, and we waited for a few moments. Hugs, kisses — “Happy New Year.” And now it’s time for bed.
