End-of-block parties

We finished the second "block" at the college on Wednesday. Looking toward a non-teaching third block, I dove into celebrating the end of eight weeks of teaching by joining the rest of our town for the multiple-day celebration that is Halloween around here. I know Halloween proper hasn't even happened yet, but if we want to stay on top of the blog, I figure it's best to document all the pre-parties before we drown in a mountain of candy.

First things first: I need to introduce the main characters in this Halloween post, since they'll be reappearing throughout. You got a sneak preview of one in the previous post, but here they are together.

Oodles of thanks to Mor-mor for making the fantastic costumes happen!

Wednesday I got to take Tom's usual spot volunteering in Edith's classroom in the morning, which was a treat. I was in the back of the classroom helping with paperwork and projects while all three kindergartens were together in the front of the room, watching a Leap Frog reading video as a special treat for Halloween. Even though I wasn't interacting directly with the kids, it was fun to see what they were up to and to get a bit of a sense of the classroom.

Later in the afternoon I returned with Tom and Alice for the school costume parade. I admit that the kids' quick turn around the playground made me miss my own elementary school Halloween parade: a long march past the park, up the hill, and down the road to the senior citizens home, where the old folks waved from their windows as we went by. We left Edith's school before the class party, but I was back at the end of the day to pick her up from soccer so we could attend Maniboo, the kid-oriented Halloween carnival at the high school. Except for the cacophonous echo of a school gymnasium, it was well thought-out for the family crowd, and Edith had fun.

Tossing a cream pie at her teacher in the pie-throwing booth

Identifying guts and eyeballs--I mean spaghetti and peeled grapes--in the booth manned by her friend's mom. Wednesday night was the first time we started to realize that most adults around here dress up, too.

With facepaint, monkey and coconut

When we finally got home, we were surprised to unpack Edith's backpack and discover her first report card. Somehow I hadn't anticipated that milestone yet. Even though it was more of a progress report than a report card proper--in the sense that it didn't include traditional letter grades but instead listed all skills to be taught in kindergarten and indicated where the student is performing at the typical level for this stage in the year, where he/she already demonstrates end-of-kindergarten mastery, and where he/she is somewhat behind what's expected--it nevertheless made me start to think about just how grown-up my child is. Specifically, it made me think harder about blogging about Edith and when that might become a violation of her right to tell her own story of who she is to the world. I am so glad to have documented her babyhood and preschool days--and I'd be very sorry to stop blogging now. But as she gets old enough to read and write for herself, as she starts to get online, as she navigates a social world independently, as she gets report cards...when does it become unfair of her mother and father to record publicly who they think she is and what matters in her life?

Thursday and Friday the elementary school was closed for parent-teacher conferences. We attended one on Thursday, where we saw some of the art and writing Edith did early in the year about Bismarck's death, something she never mentioned much at home. Then her teacher showed us a more recent picture labeled, "I LUT AT UMURCAN DLS WITH MI MOM." Indeed, Edith and I had spent an evening poring over the American Girl Dolls catalog recently, but I had no idea it had made a significant impression. Her teacher was excited about her perseverance in trying to get such sentences down on paper. All in all we heard that Edith is very focused and highly motivated when it comes to academic tasks. But when we raised the issue, her teacher agreed that she is something of a space cadet--and an easily frustrated one at that--when it comes to gathering her belongings, getting on her coat, etc.

Since we had the girls with us, we followed up the conference with a visit to the school bookfair, another fond memory for me and Tom, even if it seems as though the overall quality of the selections has veered heavily toward promotion of  licensed characters over great children's literature.

Friday turned into a lovely day, the kind one dreams about in moving to a new neighborhood. Tom took in the car very early for routine maintenance, but the girls and I had a leisurely morning. We finally were dressed and ready to start the day by the time Tom came home around 11, and we agreed to Alice's demands--issued for some 28 hours straight--to go to the neighborhood playground, stopping along the way to see if the two-year-old down the street, Ellen, could come along. The request seemed typical of Alice in multiple ways: (1) her persistence, once she has settled on a plan, (2) her sociability, wanting Ellen to come, (3) her ability to figure out the whole scheme. As she kept explaining, "I go playground Ellen. Come Ellen's house. I play with Ellen. Elsa play with Edie." Indeed, Ellen's older sister is just Edith's age.

As it turned out, not only did we encounter Ellen and Elsa with their brothers and mother setting out for the playground, but along the way we met the other stay-at-home dad in the neighborhood out with his two-year-old daughter. He came up to us saying he'd been meaning to seek Tom out, having heard of him. Then when we got to the park, the lower elementary set was fully in evidence, and we got to hang with the parents. The kids played on the playground equipment or explored in the ravine below, and the adults rotated through helping the kids as needed and chatting by the picnic tables. We met at least half a dozen people in roughly our age and life stage. For whatever reason, the predominant demographic seemed to be an American father (most often a native Coloradan and an engineer) and a European mother.

It made me feel a bit better about what feels like the dismal homogeneity of this area. I know that almost any place would feel homogenous after New Jersey, but I hadn't realized just how much I would miss the ethnic diversity in daily life--and not just because we can't get Indian food here. Edith's class is 100% white and about half blond, and the school faculty and staff are similar. Tom and I were a bit slack-jawed the other day when a well-meaning, highly educated mother told us she'd picked Manitou Springs Elementary School for her kids because "it looked like the United Nations...there was a kid with a yarmulke." One Jewish kid = United Nations? More upsetting was Tom's encounter with the nurse at his new doctor's office, who was talking with him about how much more diverse a place each of them had come from (she, from Dallas), then commented that it was nice to see white faces everywhere in Colorado. Even apart from instances of blatant racism, raising my kids in such an ethnically homogenous place makes me worried about what it will do for their understanding of the world. Will they have a chance to appreciate cultural diversity and realize that their own experience is relative and contingent? Will they develop tolerance for other worldviews without daily exposure?

So it was nice to discover at the park that even if everyone looks like white middle America, in fact, our neighbors include a number of international bilingual families, many of whom who have spent some time raising their kids abroad. Parents would chat with us in English, then turn and speak to their children in Slovak, Flemish, and Finnish.

It also was nice simply to spend several hours getting to know neighbors, chatting in the sun, while the kids played together. Edith enjoyed playing with Elsa, then ran into kids from school and spent a good chunk of time establishing and defending a cave with Marek and Connor, as well as planning with Marek how to reenact How to Train Your Dragon. It felt like being back at the seminary playground, the first time in several years that we've had such interaction with neighbors and potential friends.

We finally dragged ourselves home at 2:30 because Alice needed a nap, and because Edith wanted to attend the downtown Manitou trick-or-treating in the commercial district. She and I went down there and joined the throngs of kids, big and little, cruising from store to store collecting candy. The street was packed, and we ran into multiple children from Edith's class, our church, and the neighborhood all over again. Although Edith enjoyed it, focusing on who was giving out candy and where was a bit much for her, distracted as she gets by her own thoughts, and after we'd traversed one side of the main drag, she told me she thought she had enough candy. Never mind the kids with buckets filled to overflowing while she had a thin covering on the bottom of her bucket...the next time a storekeeper offered her a piece of candy, she said, "Thank you, but we're full." Then she happily joined me for a lemonade on a bench while we watched the world go by.

I was more excited about the next day's downtown Manitou event, the annual Emma Crawford Coffin Races. I'd seen this strange occasion advertised in the local library when we first moved and since learned more of the lore. Emma Crawford was a young, tubercular pioneer for whom the fresh mountain air failed to stem her illness. She perished in the 1880s in Manitou at the age of 19, having managed before she died to climb the mountain she most loved. Her husband buried her on the side of that mountain to soothe her spirit, but her body was less fortunate. The mountain was rocky, with shallow soil, and in the 1950s a terrific rainstorm unearthed her coffin and sent it sliding down the mountain through downtown Manitou. And thus (some 40 years later), the Emma Crawford Coffin Races were born.

It was unlike anything we'd ever seen. First of all, the town was packed cheek to jowl. The main drag was cordoned off for the races. First, however, came the parade: a series of hearses, followed by the contestants.

Each team had built a coffin on wheels, and each had four runners to push it and an Emma (in a helmet) to ride in it. All were in costume. We learned that some of our neighbors in Crystal Hills, Team Crystal Hillbillies, were actually the seven-time defending champions. (Alas, their streak came to an end today, when they finished third.)

As on the occasion of the balloon launch in September, I'm not sure a big crowd and lots of waiting and watching put the girls in the best of moods, which may be a lesson for next year. But I'm sure glad we saw it. And Tom appeased the girls afterwards with an all-afternoon Dr. Seuss read-a-thon.

Meanwhile Tom and Alice have enjoyed being baseball buddies throughout the post-season. Alice eagerly asks to "watch bayball," even if she then wanders in and out of the room during the game. When she hears Tom shout or gasp, she'll go running back in, asking urgently, "What?" The other night, during Game 2 of the World Series, she ran in on one such occasion, stood looking at the screen with her hands on her hips, then announced with confidence, "Good throw, Phillies." Tom has been trying to explain that we're no longer rooting for the Phillies (alas), and this morning she woke us up by jumping on us and yelling, "Let's go, little Ginats!" I guess she was wondering where the ginats were among all these ordinary looking men, so Tom explained they were little ginats.

The official holiday tomorrow...can our kids handle another round? Stay tuned.

Alice in October

Digging up the flowers

Walking the CROP Walk

Quick funnies from each kid

Edith:

This morning she came in and announced that instead of the clothes Daddy picked out, she was going to choose her own outfit. We agreed that that was fine--great. The result: A long white skirt with tiers of ruffles trimmed in magenta, purple and blue; green-and-blue flowered legwarmers; and a black T-shirt with a sequin-studded skull and crossbones and a bow on the skull's head. With snakers (as she calls them). I didn't dare take a picture lest I make her self-conscious. But it was fabulous.

Alice:

We were up in the mountains this weekend, and on the way home we started seeing flurries. "That's snow! It's snowing!" Tom said excitedly.

"Snow! White! Fall from da sky!" yelled Alice.

Yes, we agreed. She kept announcing it; we kept agreeing.

Then, "I scehhed snow, white, fall from da sky."

Why are you scared, we asked. It's okay; snow can't hurt you.

Then, "I scehhed Snow White fall from da sky. Sleeping Booty fall from da sky?"

We found it surprisingly hard to explain to Alice what snow is, when it isn't a princess.

Drifts and mastery

October 8: Snow on the mountaintop!

We've had sunny, balmy weather since August, but when I woke up to prep for class this morning, I could hear the wind blowing wildly outside. It continued after sunrise and was whipping the tree branches as we stood with Edith waiting for the schoolbus. But it wasn't until we got in the car to head downtown that I saw Pike's Peak for the first time today, covered with a dusting of snow. It was so beautiful! As I got out of the car on campus, I overheard two students passing each other: "Have you seen the mountain?" "Yes: SNOW ON PIKE'S PEAK!" It was gone by the time I got out of class, so I have no pictures. But maybe it's a sign that fall has arrived at last.

Fall in kindergarten has brought the promised week of autumn leaf study--apparently all of the children defaulted on bringing in pretty fall leaves, as there just weren't any. Now they're on to spiders, in anticipation of Halloween. Edith combed over the British costume book that I used to love perusing when I was young and announced, after much weighing of the options, that she wants to be a palm tree. It's a good costume; the only problem is that the mother tasked with creating it is not a skilled seamstress, unlike the professional costume designer who published the book.

But if I want to be an example for Edith, it is probably important to dive in and give it a try. That's the lesson we're trying to impress on her these days...we think. After her initial enthusiasm about a spate of afterschool activities open to her as a kindergartner--prompting us to sign up for ice skating, swimming, and soccer--Edith has drawn up short and balked at each one. It turns out that the kid who worried all summer that she would be mocked in kindergarten because she didn't know how to pump her legs competently on the swings is deeply reluctant to try anything she doesn't know she already can do. So while the first day of ice skating was great, at the second lesson they asked the kids to push forward on their skates a bit, and Edith sat down on the ice and cried rather than try. The third week she put on her skates but wouldn't even venture onto the ice. At swimming she freaked out because the instructor used different terms for the skills they were practicing than any she knew, and she refused to get in the water.

At that point, not knowing whether to cajole, encourage, guilt-trip, bribe, or back off, we told her we were hesitant to enroll her in soccer. Soccer, she insisted, was different: She was loving it in gym class, and it wouldn't involve being on a surface or in a substance where it's perilously difficult to stay upright. So she went to soccer for the first time this week. And stood on the sidelines and watched.

It's really hard to know how to respond. I don't fundamentally care whether Edith becomes a soccer player or masters ice skating or not. And all these programs are relatively inexpensive, meaning that it's not a question of major investment. But when she has voluntarily expressed enthusiasm for an activity and asked to participate, we do hope she'll at least try. (And not only because we've spent 40 minutes early on a Saturday morning driving to the ice rink.) Edith has never had much patience for working things out when she's not already good at them. But I don't think this is about impatience so much as fear. The more I watch these moments unfold this fall, the more certain I am that underneath the sulky, balking exterior, she's very scared. So I don't want to berate her. As someone who was never inspired by the athletic coach's play-tough, fear-based style of motivation I can understand shrinking from heavy-handed appeals. At the same time, I don't want to see my daughter give up on things before she even tries, which seems like a pattern destined to cause trouble if it becomes her life rule. So for now we're thinking we'll go easy, backing off the lessons when they all finish up here in another few weeks. And we just hope she'll find the confidence, or the kindness to herself, to try again at some point down the road.

By way of comparison, she continues to love kindergarten, even though the first few weeks seemed to us to involve pretty easy lessons. But already having mastery--of her letters, of their sounds, of writing her name and knowing her numbers--seems to give her real confidence. Rather than boring her, class excites her. She also responds well to the multitude of classroom rules, proud because she has never had to move her clip to the yellow light on the class traffic light and because the whole group filled the marble jar with marbles this week and earned an extra recess.

Before watching Edith navigate kindergarten, I would have said that lessons on topics one had already mastered offered little in the way of pedagogical value. But in the last month we've watched Edith start from confidence in her academic skills and painlessly move into topics over which she doesn't have mastery...without any balking. Yesterday she came home with her daily journal from September, filled with pictures she had drawn each day, each labeled with words she had written. Most of the words are unintelligible without her interpretation: We figured out the big ROC that she drew, and eventually guessed the HLC behind our house. The FAMAL also was easy, with all four of us drawn in, and the BAB born in a hospital even made a certain phonetic sense. But we definitely needed assistance with I BUIT NO HS ["I bought new horses"] and CS PCIN ["scary pumpkin"], as well as most of the rest. The thing is, she doesn't seem to mind that she hasn't come up with the orthodox spellings. As a child of the phonics era, I used to the think that the whole language way of teaching writing seemed fairly silly. What good could it do a child to allow her to write in a way that communicated no meaning to an outsider? For Edith, though, it's clear that that approach has freed her up to start trying to write independently without angst. She shared her journal with enthusiasm and didn't seem frustrated that we needed her to interpret her words to us. That's a very different, relaxed attitude than we're used to seeing from her, and it seems like a positive thing. Unlike soccer and skating, writing isn't CS to her at all...

A few more quotes from our quirky, sensitive, wonderful kiddo:

Last night at dinner she told me they would be making applesauce in class today. At first she looked excited, but she quickly frowned.
"Actually, I'm sad about that."
I asked why.
"Because, since we don't have a stove in our classroom, we have to use a crockpot. And it plugs into the wall and uses up energy from the wall, which is bad for the earth."
So I pointed out that we use energy all the time in all kinds of ways--stoves use energy from the wall, too--and that it's important to be conscious of ways not to waste energy, but that making food to eat isn't necessarily a bad thing. We have to use some energy. She took that to its logical conclusion. The next words out of her mouth:
"I wish I could die, so I wouldn't do anything to harm the earth. And I wish all my family would die at the same time--my parents, my sister, my grandparents, my great-grandparents--so they wouldn't be here to be sad that I was gone."
Oh, dear. In my mind this is one of the biggest challenges in addressing climate change: How do you present the problem as grave without overwhelming people and making them fatalistic about the prospects? If a five year old concludes it would be better for her to die and stop stressing the earth, based on one or two readings of a fairly upbeat kids' science book about climate change, what chance is there of making adults feel concerned but empowered?

She does appreciate the earth in the meantime. Later in the same meal she told me that she had been getting good at giving silent kisses. I asked whether she had been developing that talent on someone in her class. She smiled and shook her head. "I've been giving the air little silent kisses recently, thanking it for letting me breathe. It's really great, air. So I've been kissing it and thanking it."

***

Unlike her sister, Alice's ever more frequent cry is, "I do it myself!" Among the things she is mastering seems to be potty use. (I don't want to tempt the fates by saying that too loudly.) About 10% of the time now, she tells us in advance that she needs to "peep" or "poop," commanding us to take off her diaper and follow her to the bathroom to watch. She's so pleased with her ability to control her urine flow that a single trip to the potty can be divided into about eight or nine rounds of her sitting, performing, cheering for herself, dumping the content into the big potty, and starting again.

We continue to think, with full parental pride and prejudice, that she's crazy smart. She knows how to count two of something and understands how to apply the word two both concretely and abstractly. She is learning her letters (on her own) and now recognizes B, C, H, and L. When offered an abstract choice, she usually understands and can make a definitive answer, then sticks with that decision. She has some sense of time and when told we can't do something right now might propose, "Tomorrow? Or later?" and then anticipate the coming event without continuing to clamor for it to happen now. (The exception: If I don't nurse her the minute I come out to the car at the end of the day, it's a fraught ride home.) She continues to learn names without our realizing it: On the Walk-to-School-Day she pointed behind us and announced, "Dylan!" on spotting the little boy who had been sitting at Edith's table at kindergarten orientation back in August (and every day since then, but orientation was the only day on which Alice was present).

One thing she hasn't mastered is weight gain: Still eating enthusiastically and developing physical skills that seem appropriate for her age, she nevertheless is off the bottom of the weight charts. We'll see what her new pediatrician says at her two-year checkup. It's hard to be worried when one spends time with her and sees how she's thriving. But then one looks at that number that has hardly edged up this year and at the 6-12 month clothing that fits her, and a little anxiety sets in. Guess we'll wait to hear from the experts come December.

Photojournal of the end of September

The main street in our new town. We were there one Friday afternoon...

a few feet behind Edith and her classmates...

who had decorated headbands...

...for the high school homecoming parade.

Yes, believe it or not, in this little mountain town all the elementary and middle school kids get out of class to go cheer on the high schoolers in advance of Homecoming. If it seems a bit strange (as it did to us), the parade felt in the spirit of town-wide community building more than it seemed to be about rah rah sports. The elementary, middle, and high school all share a mascot (the mustang) and colors (green and gold), and all the schools are named for the town itself. So when the kids cheered for Manitou, it was as if they were cheering for themselves as much as for seventeen-year-old football players.

Today I was reading Bill McKibben's new book, Eaarth, in advance of assigning some of it, and it occurs to me the Manitou homecoming parade may be in the spirit of the small-scale, highly-local community building McKibben insists we all need to cultivate to sufficiently lessen our carbon footprint on the planet. On the other hand, while Manitou has a cute downtown and loyal residents who join together for plenty of parades and festivals, it has about zero commercial enterprises of a practical nature (unless you find medical marijuana practical). So everyone has to hop in their car and head off to the strip malls east of here to get groceries, clothes, haircuts, hardware, office supplies, books, or cosmetic goods or to go to the movies, theaters, bars, or concerts. I've been musing a great deal about what I want in a town, and I think that if Manitou could replace 80% of the hundreds of gifts shops, fudge and ice cream parlors, craft boutiques, and New Age psychic stores along Main Street with a variety of practical enterprises selling things residents need on a daily basis, it would be an ideal little enclave.

While we're on the subjects of community building, living green, and elementary school, Tom and I found ourselves scratching our heads yesterday at the annual Walk-to-School event. A well-meant tradition, the idea is to get all kids to walk to school one day to promote healthy, eco-friendly living, as well as neighborliness and traffic safety awareness. But if you live too far from school for your children to walk, noted the permission slip, you could drive them to the park three blocks from school, from which a big group of children, parents, and teachers would walk together.

So instead of Edith and the neighbor kids getting on the schoolbus together yesterday morning, each family separately drove their car 90% of the way to school, jockeyed for parking, then joined a pedestrian crowd so large that it required a police escort and blocked intersections (meaning everyone was fairly blase about the traffic awareness element). Sure, it was nice to see other parents and kids, but I'm not sure it taught Edith much about efficiency, green-living, or looking both ways before crossing the street.

A beautiful place to play football, no?

Edith and Alice, about to be trampled by the Manitou Mustang

II. Baseball Fantasies

When our friend Dave in Princeton heard that we were moving to Colorado Springs, he immediately invited Tom to sign up for a charity baseball event put on by his boss, Jared Polis, who is a Colorado Congressman. Jared runs a baseball tournament each year to benefit a foundation that helps get technology into schools. Participants--mostly men in their 30s through 50s who fondly remember their Little League careers--get to play a full day of games at the Minor League Sky Sox stadium in full uniforms with professional umpires, enjoying an announcer on the P.A., all the musical sound effects, the official scoreboard in operation, etc. Playing for the victorious Dwarves with Dave, Jared, and a bunch of other nice guys (a couple with Princeton connections), Tom had a blast. Who cares if he could barely walk the next day?

Alice practices her catcher's stance. With full run of the stadium, the girls had a great time, too.

III. Hiking

Speaking of being unable to walk...

To celebrate the end of my first class, Tom and I decided to take a little hike. From all over Manitou one can see a scar up the side of one of the mountains (it appears above in the picture of the girls with the mustang statue) that we knew was an old railway bed now used by hundreds of people as a hiking trail. With no twists or turns, it's just a straight haul up the mountain. Looking at it every day as one drives around, one starts to feel that if one lives here, one should climb it. I told Tom that it seemed to be calling my name, and he agreed that on the last day of my class, we would hike it. We figured it would be brutal but short. We got one part of that right.

Turns out that in looking at it every day, our sense of scale was way off. I thought I rarely saw people on it; in fact, they're specks too small to be seen from the city streets. There were at least one hundred people on the trail the morning we went up, including runners timing themselves, dogwalkers chatting on their cellphones, and other awe-inspiring natives. There were also plenty like us, stopping every minute or so, chugging water, gasping, willing themselves to put one foot in front of another at the end.

It didn't help that there were at least two false summits. See that place that looks like the top in this picture? That's maybe 1/3 of the way. It also didn't help that Alice was unwilling to be transferred from my back to Tom's when the going got tough. We spent about ten minutes with her screaming hysterical, meltdown, bloody murder on Tom's back before deciding that it wasn't a particularly inspiring sort of noise, for us or anyone else on the trail, and switched her back.

It was only after I got home and looked up the stats that I learned we'd climbed 2,000 feet over 1.2 miles. With the old railroad ties still embedded in the mountainside, the whole thing was akin to climbing the stairs of a 200-story building.

So why do it, other than to train for the Olympics or a tour in Afghanistan? For this...

Our town down below, the buildings along Main Street visible down the center of the photo, the highway into the mountains at the upper left. Edith's elementary school is the building with the large roof on the right-hand side, about 2/3 of the way up. The high school is above that, with the athletic field next to it.

Fortunately, the old railbed trail meets up at the top with the Barr Trail, the footpath to the summit of Pike's Peak. So we could hike down a more reasonable path and save our knees.

Incidentally, you readers will have to study these pictures and help us with another puzzle. According to the weather.com foliage maps, the Colorado Front Range is near peak leaf color right now. In church last Sunday there were prayers of thanksgiving for the vibrant autumn color in the trees all around us. Edith's class is going to be studying autumn leaves next week, and each child is asked to bring in a small bag of brightly colored leaves.

As far as we can see, she's going to have to order them from Vermont. We're feeling a little like the boy in the "Emperor's New Clothes": Does this really count as fall color? 

I don't mean to be a snob from the coast, but wouldn't it be better simply to acknowledge that in the absence of sugar maples, this isn't a part of the country that does the leaf-peeping thing? Maybe each region should play to its strengths. Colorado has the 14-ers, for Pete's sake...why not cede autumnal glory to the Northeast?

We'll miss those leaves this year. Send us your photos.