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.