The big day

Sparky the Fire Dog prepares to rescue a baby

 

She later said the hardest part was the high step up  into the truck. (Please note that this picture may disappear, at Edith's request, when she's fourteen.)

 Turn down your volume a bit: 

 The kids I panned to on our right as the truck passed were Edith's  cheering classmates.

After her part was done she cheered from the sideline with some of her closest buddies so far this year, the girls two and three to her left.

A Mayberry moment

In the past year at least two people have noted to us--proudly--that Manitou can be a bit small-town, cozy, Mayberry-esque. We'd noticed that ourselves and weren't entirely sure how we felt about it. Today we were sold.

Edith came bursting in the door from school just after 4 pm, trying to suppress a smile but looking important, as she breathlessly waved a couple of sheets of paper and a small goody bag in the air. The top sheet informed us that the school had held an art contest for the best Fire Safety posters, and Edith's poster of Sparky the Fire Dog had been awarded the prize for the first grade. One of the few reports I'd heard from her in the first week of school was that they were drawing fire safety pictures in art class, and Emily, a girl in her class, had admired Edith's fire dog drawing. Apparently a few grown-ups did, too.

The second sheet of paper was a slip for us to sign, granting Edith permission as one of the contest winners to be excused from school to eat lunch with the firefighters at the station on Friday, before riding on a fire truck in the town homecoming parade. Faithful readers will recall our surprise last September at learning that elementary school students are let out of class to watch the homecoming parade. This year, of course, we're shameless converts to the tradition. We'll be there with bells on.

(Meanwhile, to appreciate the total Mayberry-ness of it all, you should know that the overall winner of the contest, the fifth grader whose poster was judged best of all, will be picked up from school on the fire engine--it will make the 1 1/2 block trip just for him--and made honorary Fire Chief for the day.)

As Edith was telling us how the intercom had come on at the end of the school day to announce the winners, how surprised she had been to hear her name, and how her classmates had started giving her high-fives, our doorbell rang.

It was the three girls from across the street on their way home.

"We just wanted to tell Edith congratulations," they said. And then the protective third grader in the bunch, a second-generation Manitoid whose parents throw a huge homecoming party for all their old friends, assured us that she knew Edith was shy about some things, and  we should know that if she really didn't want to ride on the fire engine in the parade she didn't have to. But she probably would.

As this reassurance was being offered, another group of siblings passed on their way home from the bus stop and the oldest brother called out, "Congratulations, Edith! Good job!" Then he turned and told his dad that his very own neighbor had won a prize in the fire safety poster contest and would be riding on a fire engine in the parade on Friday. The boy's dad cheered and asked for her autograph, making her giggle.

It was great to see her feeling happy and confident around other kids. More heartwarming for me, though, was to see what genuinely nice children we're lucky to have all around us.

Earlier in the school day Edith had had a special moment, too: It was her turn for Show & Tell. Her class does Show & Tell every day but only one kid a day. A note comes home the night before announcing that the child's turn is the next day and that she should choose an object and practice what she wants to say about it.

Edith had surprised us with another sign of her maturing when she picked an item for Show & Tell that, from an adult perspective, seemed legitimately interesting. Instead of a randomly selected Matchbox car (Alice, last Friday) or teddy bear or dime-store trinket, Edith chose to bring in her collection of foreign money. She practiced reciting the list of where it came from: Haiti, Congo, Hungary (Mor-mor's orchestra tour), and Israel (Tom and I got stranded at the Tel Aviv Airport for a day on our return from Congo).

Apparently the presentation went well. One friend wanted to know how she'd gotten money from those particular places. Then another shouted out, "Wow, Edith--You're really rich, even if the tooth fairy did only leave you two dollars!"

Rich in all kinds of ways. And for a day, supremely happy too, in the best of small-town ways.

CROP Walk

Hey, people! Get going! It's time to help stop hunger. I'm trying to get people to give me money to do the CROP Walk. The CROP Walk is a walk to stop hunger. It is very important. You can walk one mile or three miles; I will walk one mile. Last year I walked one mile, too. When I was a baby in Princeton, my mommy pushed me three miles in my stroller in the CROP Walk. 

Can you help sponsor? My dad went to Haiti a few days ago. He met kids who were hungry. Can you help us raise money for people like them to stop being hungry? 

If you want to sponsor me, go to my CROP Walk page: http://www.churchworldservice.org/site/TR/2011FallCROPHungerWalk/TR-Fall2011?px=1522666&pg=personal&fr_id=13378

Thanks for helping out! 


-Edith

Helicoptering, the inside story?

I felt I had to follow up on the Monday morning story. Daycare schedule is still up in the air, but the bus situation has been resolved--intriguingly so.

Monday afternoon I walked up to meet Edith in the afternoon at the bus stop she/we prefer. A couple of  parents welcomed me, asking why they hadn't met me before. I explained, still rather grumpy about the whole thing. People began weighing in: Of the six mothers, one father, and one grandmother at the stop, several seemed vaguely sympathetic, but the most vocal either (1) registered their disapproval of my laxness as a parent, or (2) kindly tried to solve the problem for me. Let us walk your daughter home for you, several suggested. Call one of us to babysit your toddler if she's napping at bus stop time, offered a husband-wife couple. Another mother planned to contact the transportation department to get the route changed, so the stop nearest our home would come earlier. Today's parents are nothing if not problem solvers.

But as for the idea that letting a child walk alone is inherently valuable, neither Teaching Independence nor Showing Trust seemed to be a conversation starter. Among the contemporary parenting priorities weighed in the balance, they don't seem even to register on a scale tipped so heavily toward Safety.

Or so I thought. Apparently a few other parents secretly think it's okay for a first grader to walk half a block alone after all. Or they're busy at 4 p.m., too, and see the sense in not racing up to the corner to hang around but in letting their children come to them. When the bus rolled up to Edith's stop the next morning, the driver got off, beckoned the adults over for a conference, and announced that multiple parents had called the director of transportation the night before to say they wanted their children to be able to use two different bus stops without direct supervision. (I wasn't one of them--though I had emailed the principal, who cited Stranger Danger and mountain lions as the school's first priorities.) The bus driver didn't like it at all, he said, but he had been overruled. We'd better realize we are responsible for our kids once they get off the bus. We do. (Though I fear Edith is just as screwed if she meets a mountain lion with me as without me. Fortunately, no one who grew up in the neighborhood has ever seen one.)

The result is that much of the afternoon route seems to have evaporated, as about half the neighborhood is now getting off at the stop four doors up from our house. (It's smack in the middle of a maze of streets that otherwise make for a looping, circuitous route.) Many parents are still waiting for their kids on the curb, but not all. So far everyone seems to have found their way home.

Here's hoping all your children find the mixture of safety and challenge--and you, the blend of care-giving and sanity--that works for a happy, healthy family.

But if anyone's interested, I'm still happy to consider the commune.

Monday morning kvetch

Have been rapped on the knuckles twice before 9am today, once for being too lax a parent with regards to my child's logistics, once for being too overbearing a parent with regards to my child's logistics. Argh. I want to go raise the kids on a commune.

1. The schoolbus driver called me over and told me he can't let Edith off the bus without a parent waiting at the stop.

Oh, I say, I thought that rule just applied to kindergartners. That's what he told us last year.

No, he says, he's responsible for seeing that all kids get to one of their parents.

But other kids get off the bus without parents there, I say, confused.

Yes, but they get on and off at the same stop, morning and afternoon. He can't let a child get on at one stop in the morning and off at a different stop in the afternoon, unless a parent meets her. Then he knows that that's what we want her to do.

But we wrote down on the bus schedule that that's what we want her to do, get on at X stop in the morning (it gives her 20 extra minutes to eat breakfast) and off at Y stop in the afternoon (it gets her home 20 minutes earlier). Wasn't that why they gave us a form on which to choose a morning stop and an afternoon stop? I'm affirming now that that's what we want.

It doesn't matter.

Apparently Edith can safely get off the bus one door down from our house at 4:15 without a parent standing on the curb but cannot safely get off four doors up from our house at 3:55 without a parent on the curb. Unless she also gets on four doors up from our house at 7:35 a.m., rather than one door down at 7:55. In which case it's okay. I'm irked.

So why not just go out and meet her, ask my reasonable readers? We probably will. Often we'll leave a sleeping toddler alone in the house to do so, which is, of course, much safer.

But even if Alice is not sleeping, and more to the point in my mind, is that Edith takes pride in walking herself home from the busstop, and we are working hard to instill in Edith a sense that she's capable of doing things independently. I resent being told I have to helicopter parent. I am nostalgic for my own days walking two blocks home from the bus stop on a busy road with the other neighborhood kids, our moments of freedom between the classroom and home. (Never mind the number of us who were latch-key kids, for which you'd probably be arrested today. And no, the world was not "so much safer then.")

I am constantly agape at college students who can't come up with a paper topic or figure out whether it's important to schedule their flight home after the final exam without bringing their parents into the equation. Maybe it doesn't all hinge on the first-grade busstop, but I think we're bringing up a generation of sheltered kids who may be bright and have had many opportunities but are often ill-equipped for basic daily challenges.

Yes, I know that many kids are neglected and abused for lack of proper attention. I understand that different circumstances in different situations or neighborhoods might make for different judgments about what's appropriate. But that's the point: It used to be a matter of judgment.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a rule follower. Tom and I readily do lots of things by the 21st-century rules: sign forms left and right, offer three back-up contact people to respond to every sneeze. We're active in the school, develop a relationship with our kids' teachers, respond promptly to all communications, are aware of what's being taught, and help and encourage our child to get her work done. We like doing most of that--indeed, it's why we signed on to be parents.

So don't make me feel like a heel because I think 1 minute of unsupervised time walking home in her own neighborhood is appropriate for a six year old who, despite years of patient encouragement, is still reluctant to go the bathroom alone or fetch her shoes from her closet by herself.

It may even be critical.

2. Alice's daycare class used to have 14 kids in it. Then a bunch of them aged out, and now they have 6 kids. Tom has slightly different work hours now, including a mandatory weekly staff meeting during hours when he had been caring for Alice in the past. We're hopeful that we can adjust our daycare schedule to get coverage on that day, since the class is under-subscribed. We ask, and the director looks frazzled and says she'll have to see. We understand, we assure her. Scheduling must be a nightmare, and we realize you can't make special exceptions. Only if it works.

The word comes back: They need to hold those spots for kids who will be aging up in March. March? We can't have it until then? At this point she says abruptly that the business office needs consistency in the schedule, and they can't start meeting the exact needs of each individual family. Of course.

I'm not used to rocking the boat. I'm a good girl. I follow directions and don't annoy people. Now I feel embarrassed and ashamed.

And I still need Tuesday childcare.

Right foot forward!

Day One, Grade One

One parent called for a bus stop picture to pull out when they're sixteen

And the day's end verdict? "It was both good and bad. The good part was that I really like first grade, and it's really fun. The bad part was -- it's kind of hard to explain. Did you ever feel, not like you were nervous to go to school, but like you missed the grade you used to be in last year, and how school was then? Yeah, that's how I felt."

Simple gifts

Between all the moments of peak excitement--visits, trips--were some smaller moments this summer that reminded us of the joy of simple gifts.

We returned to the college farm a few times to help out, and Edith got to help inaugurate their new composting system. A couple of months after pony camp, she was still a fan of shoveling poop.

Her favorite activity at the farm, however, was hanging out with the chickens. She could spend upwards of two hours in their coop, observing, playing, and hunting eggs.

In July Edith got us to go green and start drying our clothes on a line. It proved really easy to rig up, and so far Edith enjoys helping with the hanging. As for energy savings, check out this Slate quiz on domestic energy use that Uncle Peter put us onto. How sharp is your sense of the relative energy use of different household appliances? (Mine was pretty bad!)

Then there's always hanging out with pirates.

Not that these everyday pleasures were always enough to keep us cheerful. Edith has been out of school for 3 1/2 months now, and the summer admittedly got long there at the end of August, as we started getting out of bed a bit wearily each morning, wondering how to keep everyone happy and occupied for yet one more day, and how to get any adult work done around the edges.

But our last summer hurrah was the overnight camping trip Edith had begged for, a one-night trial run for us, and by and large it was a success. That is, we pitched a tent, slept in it (or at least, lay down in it through the dark hours of the night), kept ourselves dry, and fed ourselves over a campfire. Fall arrived on cue for Labor Day weekend, however, so after an evening thunderstorm cleared out, the weather dropped to about 40...and it hasn't risen above 72 yet. While it has been delicious, our crowd perhaps was a bit underprepared for wet and cold together on the night we were roughing it. Double sleeping bag layers didn't entirely do the trick, though hand-knit woolens were useful. But we made it through, and a majority of the family wants to do it again.

Once again, the church ranch proved a boon, as we camped at one of their primitive campsites on the property. It was really pretty--and we enjoyed good company from the ranch manager and his son during our campfire, too.

The ranch folks also loaned us a shmancy tent, tall enough to stand up in and wide enough for the girls to roll around

At some point during the night, Alice tried every sleeping bag in the tent, empty or occupied.

We enjoyed a woolens fashion show as the temperature dropped.

***

With Labor Day behind us, Edith will finally relinquish her self-declared status as a "nothing grader" and start school tomorrow. Last week we went in for Meet Your Teacher afternoon, a.k.a. Fill Out Forms afternoon and Parents Stock the Classroom with Supplies That Taxpayers Are Unwilling to Fund, Like Pencils and Paper, afternoon. On the latter I'll probably have more to say later. On the former, how is it that we are a highly advanced technological society in which people can call almost any information into their palm at the press of a thumbprint, and plenty of people out there could download all of a stranger's personal information with a few minutes' work...but when dealing with the education system, one still has to write out by hand one's name, partner's name, child's name, address, parnter's address, child's address, multiple phone numbers, child's birthday, insurance policy number, dentist's personal phone number, dog's allergies, and neighbor's cousin's back-up social security number...eight times over, when all of those things are already printed on the first sheet of paper--every friggin' year? Can an operation as large and established as a public school system really not come up with a way to store and retrieve this information as needed? There seems to me to be an obsessive, almost talisman-like quality to the ritual: as if someone hopes that if the main office, and  and the nurse, and the classroom teacher, and the phys ed teacher, and the bus driver, and the playground aide, and the lunchroom staff, all have their individual copies of all identifying information about every child on their individual clipboards at all times, maybe nothing bad will happen.

But I digress. Edith got good vibes from Meet Your Teacher Day, and despite all the forms, so did we. Mr. Pletsch is a new hire--and who am I to doubt first-year teachers?--who shook Edith's hand solemnly and welcomed her to first grade. In one of those fifty-steps-in-place/one-tiny-step-forward moments that made a mother's heart sing, Edith looked Mr. Pletsch in the eye, smiled, and said clearly, "It's nice to meet you."

For our own nerdy part, Tom and I were excited about what we learned is coming down the first-grade pike (pipe? I've never known, both seem to make sense). In addition to previous years' activities, the class will have Spanish three times a week, drama, public speaking practice, and recess before lunch so the restless kids don't throw all their food in the trash in a race to get to the playground. There's morning and afternoon recess, too. Homework for the first time, but only on Fridays, due by Tuesday, which seems just right--and congenial to the family schedule. Lots and lots of reading and math, and--a new one for Edith--spelling! I assume that means the conventional spellings on which the greater-English-speaking public agree. We'll see what Edith thinks about this push for conformity in an area in which her creative spirit has heretofore run free.

The morning after Meet Your Teacher, Edith was scheduled to go in for a few hours of pre-testing, which they do with all the kids at the beginning of the year. The schoolbus was due at 8am, but she was outside at the bus stop at 7:15. She sat there singing happily by herself (all the neighbor kids had other time slots) for 45 minutes. And she returned at lunch brimming with excitement at having gotten to read her teacher three books, define the word zucchini, draw a fairy in the woods, and get her vision and hearing checked. I think the kid is ready to go back.

Alice, of course, is just one step behind, not missing a thing. In fact, the first thing she said when she woke up in the tent on our camping trip was, "Mommy, I'm going to tell Mr. Pletsch I like camping."

She has also been just a step behind in our Very Harry Potter summer. Although no one has been reading the books to her directly, she has picked up plenty, after a fashion. The other day I came on her perusing a tome on the bed.

It's not uncommon these days to see our two year old, being nagged or teased by her big sister, stick out an arm holding a spoon and yell, Expelliarmus! (Tom and Alice also came up with a new spell -- Exsmelliarmpits! -- which you should hope an enemy doesn't use on you at the wrong moment.) The other day Alice overheard someone being mean and announced, "I'm going to send him to Oscar-bon." Thinking Sesame Street, it took me a moment to figure out what she meant. And one night at dinner she told me, "Mommy, I'm never going to kill you." Oh good, I said. "Yeah, and I'm not going to poke you either, because we don't do that to our friends. That's not nice." I nodded. "I'm just going to curse you!" she shouted with glee.  Er, I'm sure she meant that in the nicest way possible.