Gifts for the Teacher
the girl
A Reading
L spent much of these last few weeks in school working on a book during class writing time. All students were required to write their first book, and K and I were pleased and proud that L’s topic had only very little to do with Frozen.
Dzień Dziecka
We were in the backyard, blowing bubbles, chasing bubbles, popping bubbles — just a bit of outside time between our return from Mass and the Boy’s nap time.
Suddenly, Mama appeared.
“I’ve got surprises for you two!” she said, in Polish of course. “Today is Dzień Dziecka.”
It sounds so much more natural to me in Polish: Children’s Day. Nah. Dzień Dziecka. In the States, we only have Father’s Day and Mother’s Day; Poland adds Children’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Siblings’ Day, Uncles’ Day, Aunts’ Day, Cousins’ Day, Second Cousins’ Day, Cousins’ Twice Removed Day. Well, perhaps not to that degree, but they don’t stop at just two family days.
One could argue that every day is Children’s Day, especially in big families. Still, it’s nice to have an excuse to give kids a little something to make them smile, like new books or a new train for a growing Thomas collection.
Upside Down Girl
Sick Sunday
Sick Saturday
The Boy always stays sick. Or is it a dairy allergy? At any rate, he’s always coming down with something, and so when we took him to the doctor ten days ago, this weekend’s plans wobbled just a little: “He might not be up to camping,” K said. I was optimistic, though: “He’ll get better.” But as he was getting better, K started feeling worse. “Perhaps you and L can go on the camping trip instead of all four of us,” she suggested. Then Wednesday, L returned home from school feeling positively awful and slept from four to seven, then went back to bed at nine and slept till seven the next morning. Three out of four, that meant only one thing: Tata has to step up his game.
Cleaning, diaper changing, cut bandaging, medicine dosing — I usually miss these things on a spring Saturday morning. This or that gardening/hardware/tool store is calling, or the lawn beckons, or the Leyland cypresses stretch out to remind me they need a trimming. It’s always something. This morning, though, it was just an ever-running laundry, new adventures with a fussy son, a cat in the laundry basket, and cold coffee.
Enough to make me appreciate again all the things that K accomplishes inside while I’m outside on a Saturday.
By the early afternoon, the kids had both rebounded almost fully. The Boy and I went on a little field trip while L was up the street at a friend’s house. By the evening, K was once again exhausted — she insisted on cooking dinner — and the kids were tired from their newly-rediscovered outside freedom.
Jazz 2014 and Puppies
Tonight was L’s jazz concert. Greenville Ballet divides the two forms into separate lessons (unlike our former school, which had half an hour of ballet followed by half an hour of jazz), and this year they had two separate shows. If last night’s performance was any sort of standard, it was certainly magnificent.
Meanwhile, at the house, the Boy and I had our own adventure: a walk to the drug store, some swinging time, some up-the-stairs, down-the-stairs time — everything a boy and his father needed to make a perfect evening of it.
Bedtime presented its own challenges. As I was dressing the Boy for a hopefully-long, hopefully-restful evening, I slipped his puppy pajama bottoms on without thinking about the fact that the matching shirt was nowhere to be found. He was fine with it, but started asking a little later about the top: I’d laid him on the bed to slide him into his sleeping sack when he began asking, “Sapappies?”
“We don’t have the top, E,” I reassured him. “I don’t know where it is.”
Despite this reasoned explanation, the protests grew more frantic: “Sapappies! Sapappies!”
I tried explaining again, but it was not no avail: he slid off the bed, marched to his chest of drawers, and began opening them one by one. Look in, he’d exclaim, “No!” before slamming the draw closed (I could just hear the screams if he caught his finger in one) and opening the next. The third attempted was successful. “Tu! Tu!” he shouted (“Here! Here!” in English). He pulled out a pair of socks and cried, “Sapappies!”
(Note to non-Slavophiles: “socks” in Polish is “skarpetki,” so in typical dual-language fashion, he applied a bilingual double-plural to it in addition to the ineffably charming pronunciation.)
Ballet Recital 2014
We changed ballet schools at the beginning of this season: the last recital, rescheduled at the last minute to an old auditorium with no sound system and, worse, no air conditioning, all due to the costumes being ordered too late yet again — it was just a nightmare. Everyone sweaty; no one able to hear; everyone miserable. We’d been having our doubts, but it was the last straw, so to speak.
So we began taking L to one of the two largest schools in the area. A school that stages a full Nutcracker every year. A school that divides the instruction up into ballet lessons (learning the basics, the positions, the movements) and performance lessons (learning a choreographed dance incorporating all the skills from ballet lessons). This is a school that has students from ages four to eighteen. It has a beginner pointe group, an intermediate pointe group, and advanced pointe instruction.
The difference was striking this evening.
The program was arranged so that we began with the pre-ballet kids (four- and five-year-olds) showing their basic moves to the cliche clunky piano music one always associates with basic lessons and ended with the advanced ballet group put on quite a show to a piece by Ravel.
After the show, all smiles as usual.
Independence and Responsibility
The Delicacy of Sharing
Teaching our daughter to share has been a constant challenge, as I’m sure it has with most parents. L likes and even expects others to share with her, but getting her to return the favor — that’s always been a trick. A few events of the last few days, though, makes me think we’ve made real progress.
Friday, we were to meet a friend of hers from her first grade class at the end-of-the-year school party, a carnival with a few rides and some games scattered about the school ground.
“We’re supposed to meet at six at the silly string!” she told us, countless times.
We arrived at the silly string area — a roped off portion of the field where kids ran about spraying aerosol string on each other — at the appointed time, but no friend. We got a ice treat, went on a few rides, and then suddenly discovered L’s friend, also Lilly.
With her mother’s blessing, Lilly went off with L and me, but before long, she’d run out of tickets.
“Daddy,” L said with a grave expression. “Give me the rest of the tickets. I want to slip them with Lilly.”
The second episode: today, during L’s preparation time before ballet portraits, I sat with E at the table to do his albuterol breathing treatment, but he was having none of that.
“No! No! No!”
No amount of cajoling, explaining, or begging could help.
L came to the rescue, offering the Boy use of our family Nexus so he could play his favorite game, a vehicle-based shape-matching game.
He sat patiently for the treatment, playing his game and clapping furiously whenever he finished a round.
“Bravo!” he cried, as did I, though for both L and E.
Finally, in the evening, mowing the yard after almost two weeks’ neglect, I came upon a patch of matted grass, so I headed in for the dethatching rake. As I returned, I noticed a curious patch of dry grass with bits of gray about it. I walked over, pulled the grass aside, and found a burrow of baby rabbits.
L came over to get a peek, and Papa brought the Boy over.
“What an odd place to burrow,” I said. Indeed, for it will be a disaster if our cat finds it, which is not as likely as it might seem given her age and general laziness.
Still, I’m happy to share our yard — for once, it’s an animal that seems harmless.
I Rote A Poem
Sick at Home, Tired at Rehearsal
The Boy, in one form or another, stays sick lately. Or so it seems. Today was my turn to watch him, to take him to the doctor, to help him with his newly-prescribed breathing treatment. We started the morning playing with cars on the sofa. It ended quickly.
That was the morning. Afternoon and evening were spent in an auditorium as the Girl prepared for her two (count them: two) dance recitals coming up, jazz and ballet. I took my little laptop along with the intention of returning to a recent writing idea that seems promising but got off to a wrong-footed start that I only really realized how wrong-footed 25,000 words into it. While writing, though, two random thoughts:
Random Thought One
The girls running across the stage, somewhat stumbling occasionally, reveal the irony of grace: in learning to be graceful, we’re often anything but. We watch a professional company’s performance of the Nutcracker, and the dancers seem positively to float across the stage. The lifts look more like the man his keeping the ballerina from soaring of into space rather than supporting her. These little girls look more like kids in the playground playing cowboys and Indians, galloping about like mad, than like ballerinas–when judged against that standard of near-perfection that professionals seem to achieve. But grace and elegance comes in many forms and is in itself somewhat relative. After seeing how spastic L can be, in the completely natural, seven-year-old way, it’s an act of supreme grace just for her to tiptoe onto the stage, hands on her hips, and slide gently into first position.
Random Thought Two
I once made the analogy with a professor that for me, faith was like watching people dance from a sound-proof chamber. “I see the unity, the ritual, the sequence, but not hearing the music myself, I only suspect what is choreographing it all.” Dr. R said that was a very positive view, and perhaps he thought then what it took me almost twenty years to figure out for myself: my professed atheism might give way to something more musical.
During the last few months, I’ve experienced the opposite: while sitting in the Greenville Ballet and Jazz waiting room as L took her weekly lesson on Monday afternoons, I heard the same song over and over. A few moments here, then stop; a few more snippets of the song, then silence again. Muffed voices as the instructor presumably corrected this or that dancer, perhaps the group as a whole. I had no idea what the whole might look like. While waiting for L’s group’s performance, it finally all came together: an older group of girls, probably just a bit older than my students.
Back home, I check on the song, apparently a band called Capital Cities:
The Girl got a little snack while the Boy got a final breathing treatment.
Busy, random, odd day.
Monday Afternoon
We take the Girl to jazz dance and return to play with the Boy’s new toys.
Pre-Party Saturday
Tomorrow is the Boy’s birthday party. His actual birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but who really throws a birthday party on Wednesday when we can do a double-duty birthday/Mother’s-Day party on the preceding Sunday?
The upshot of this plan was simple: K kicked everyone out of the house in the early afternoon to work on the cake. It was one of those moments really to make me realize just how ineffably wonderful K is: how many would make a Black Forest cake as opposed to simply buying a cake at this or that bakery? In the end, it’s not important how many would bake versus buy, it only matters that E and K are lucky enough to have a mother who bakes.
So the Boy and I headed to a park while the Girl went to a neighborhood friend who recently got a puppy. Everyone was happy. K had a quiet house in which to bake and clean; E had a playground to overwhelm him; the Girl got to play with both a friend and a puppy.
We all returned afterward for cake decoration, which doesn’t go quite as planned, and fresh fruit with whipped cream — as in heavy whipping cream that’s been whipped — and some last-minute playing in the yard.
The whole time, the Boy was thrilled.
“Who has ‘happy birthday’ tomorrow?” we all asked in turn.
The Boy points to himself and shouts, squeals, or barks, “Happy birthday!”
After School
The Boy goes for his farm set.
The Girl plays with her kitten.
On the Bed, on the Couch
Spring Planting
Another unbelievably sunny morning. Perfect for what we’d planned for the day: spring planting, which the weather and our schedule has put off for two weeks.
First task: purchases. We drove across town to our favorite nursery to pick up veggies and flowers, but the Boy decided that he must — simply must — run like a maniac.
“E, if you don’t stay with me,” I explained, wondering how much he understands. At what point can a child understand cause and effect? Certainly not his age, but we must begin at some point. “If you don’t stay with me, we’ll go to the car.”
He ran off; we headed to the car.
The Boy spent the rest of the visit fussing in his car seat; I spent the rest of the visit listening to the Magliozzi brothers on Car Talk with accompanying screams, cries, and general tantrum-related noises from the back seat.
In the meantime, the Girl picked out flowers with K, always drawn to the most expensive flowers: six, seven bucks for one. In the end, K bought her one expensive flower — a lovely blue and white blossom that is completely unknown to me and will be for all time, as inept with flowers as I am — and several less expensive but equally lovely varieties.
The rest of the day was a furry of preparing the raised beds (which took most of the rest of the morning), and planting, planting, planting. Then came the grilling, grilling, grilling. And more time with the grandparents.
And finally, after the bathing, bathing, bathing, some relaxing for K and me.We finished up a Coen brothers’ film (Inside Llewyn Davis — how can a protagonist be so utterly unlikable?) and then just sat on the couch, TV off, the sounds of the evening pulling us to bed, though for me, not so directly.
A good day.
Science Test
Story Time!
The Girl had an idea: record herself reading a story. Unfortunately, her little Leap Frog system wasn’t the highest quality, and she had no way to support the camera while she filmed.
Tata, of course, saved the day.
Spring Break 2014, Day 1
The day started in L’s room. The Boy loves being with his big sister, and she’s matured to the point that we know she’s not going to do anything crazy — too crazy — with the Boy, so I left them upstairs to their own devices while I finished some grading, but the laughter and sounds of an impending mess drew me up the stairs.
Of course the kitten had her own entertainment. The Girl talked the family into a cat tower: that term doesn’t do it any justice at all. What we have, in fact, is a sort of feline Burj Khalifa. But she likes it, and the Girl likes that fact, and today, they were both thoroughly entertained,
though for different reasons.
We ended the morning, the Boy down for his nap, with the Girl recording a story. For whom? For you, of course.
But I never took the time today to transfer it from camera, so perhaps tomorrow?