Goldilocks

..had purple socks and a big, red bow in her hair.

According to this script, at least. Tom and Alice spent 2 hours tracking down the red bow (or bow substitute) at a local store. I spent 12 hours knitting the purple socks (most of them the wee hours of the night before, of course). Edith's class spent 6 1/2 minutes putting on the production.

It was all good fun.

Rockin' the curlers the night before

Then there's always the issue of how to keep them secure overnight

So curly is a relative concept for those with Boger-Lank genes, but at least she had enough body in her hair to let me clip it off her face. Edith had been challenging the notion that Goldilocks necessarily has curly hair and I was sympathetic--but my main goal was to make sure our increasingly shaggy sheepdog could see on the tightly packed "stage," lest she trip over one of her classmates while skipping through the forest.

Purple socks. The 12 hours were worth it when (1) Edith happily agreed to wear them, and (2) a classmate's mother approached her and threatened to steal the socks, because she liked them so much. Her husband agreed that they were just her style. The woman is probably ten years younger than I am. Chalk up some hip points to my oh-so meager total.

The show:

The cast takes a bow

Goldilocks mended fences with the bears and joined them for more porridge after the show.

While I'm continuing to think about liberal elite condescension, including my own, I should note that the parents of Edith's classmates collectively sport more missing teeth, prominent tattoos (girlfriend's name around the neck, etc.), and used clothing than any set of class parents we'd ever have met in places we lived back East. Unlike the latte liberal crowd, many parents of Edith's friends tend to be shy when I introduce myself and invite their daughters for a playdate. 

But contrary to the images of middle America propagated in places I've lived before, marginal dental care, tattoos, and blue-collar jobs go hand-in-hand here with active parent involvement in the schools and dedication to kids' education. Almost every child in the class of 28 kids had a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle who had made time on a weekday morning to come to this 7-minute production. The parent volunteers for the class are so numerous that the teacher has had to devise a complicated schedule to assure that each of them gets at least two chances to volunteer in a semester--and that's with a parent in the classroom four mornings a week.

Tom and I have been touring elite private schools in various parts of the country. They've seemed like good schools. But none of them has a curriculum appreciably different than the curriculum at Edith's school. One school had a swimming pool in the basement, and another had a code of behavior that they proudly referred to as "the Rockingford* Way." (*Not the school's real name)

And indeed, I saw two little girls at that school run smack into each other on the playground, and a boy in their class hurried over, offered each a hand, and asked if they were okay. But it's not just parents with $20,000/year to spend on their children's education who value human decency. Even schools without a fancy name for common courtesy seek to instill it in their students.

At another school an administrator, whom I liked very much, was telling me about the students' projects on the experience of war. (Note: This was not an elementary school.) Each student had to find and interview someone who personally had experienced war. Because they lived in New York City, the administrator told me proudly, they were able to find an incredible range of people: a New York Times foreign correspondent, a couple of journalists who had been embedded in Iraq, a physician with Doctors without Borders. Once upon a time I would have been similarly impressed with this list. Instead, I sat there as she numbered the interviewees, thinking about who students in Colorado Springs would interview for a similar assignment. They would start with their parents and their friends' parents and the folks at church who had been on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan--that is, if they weren't already intimately familiar with the effects of multiple deployments, traumatic injuries, and PTSD. Everyone knows what's close at hand, of course, and Colorado Springs kids aren't morally superior because they live near (or on) an army base. But it was striking that the New York administrator never thought to acknowledge the glaring gap in her list: that her students, as much access as they had to certain kinds of professionals, didn't interview any active-duty military for a project on the experience of war.

Not sure where all of this musing is tending, except toward the observation that everyone has valuable insight and experience to offer, and I'm not sure many of us are good at recognizing it in people who aren't like us.

My husband is a striking exception, if I may say so. I was humbled the other day when we were walking together downtown and a man asked for change. As I prepared to shake my head apologetically and hurry past, Tom stopped, got out his wallet, handed the man as many small bills as he had, introduced himself and asked the man's name, then began a friendly conversation. It was only two or three minutes, but the man was soon talking about his alcoholism and the daughter he missed, while Tom listened actively, without embarrassment, as if he were meeting yet one more new neighbor out on a dog walk. 

Tom can tell you just how much that kind of human decency is worth to those who control the institutional structures in our society: exactly $0 a year. But I think working harder to cultivate such openness to others may be the only thing that will give us half a chance of surviving many more generations as a society and a species. We all say as much; we plaster such sentiments on our bumpers and embed them in our email auto-signatures. But the rapidity with which we then walk out the door and throw up defenses against the subtlest of differences, using those differences to justify our own indifference to injustice or pain, makes a mockery of our platitudes.

...

I'm trying to bring this back around to Goldilocks and failing. So.

***

Plenty of other stuff happening around here. Posts to come about the fun spring break visit from frequent blog comment author RLB and about Alice's delight at a 36-hour sisterless trip to the Big Apple with Mom and Dad. More visitors coming soon, too, and who knows when we'll next be traveling ourselves. Perhaps we'll soon offer a survey inviting reader comment: Where on the planet should our family live next?

Rejected by the 99%

I've been getting used to rejection in the last few months, developing a rapid sympathy for populist resentment of the liberal elite.

But today I tried to register for a local direct action training being put on in April as part of Move On's 99% Spring, attempting to mobilize and train 100,000 non-violent activists of all types. It sounded good to me. I submitted my form online and then contacted the local organizer to confirm and to clarify that I'd have charge of my children that Saturday, and would it be okay for them to sit in the back of the room and color?

I didn't actually expect a negative response. After all, this is a democratic mass movement, trumpeting cuts in funding for education, children's health, and daycare as among its top issues.

But back it came. A swift, curt, and dismissive, "No, a three year old and a six year old are distracting. Very sorry." And then I was told condescendingly to try to find way to make a difference--despite the crippling handicap of having children, I guess.

Ouch. Solidarity forever...union makes us strong...lift every voice and sing--unless that voice belongs to a child. Then she and her mother can both forget it.

So where do you go when you're kicked out of the 99%?

How does that work, George Foreman?

We've been accustomed for awhile to Alice's toddler envy of Edith's things: Edith's experience of first grade, her miniature horses, her colored pencils, the plastic crap that seems to multiply in her room. We try to persuade Edith to share those things that can be shared (she's really quite generous) and counsel patience to Alice on those things that can't.

But in the last few weeks Alice has begun requesting that she get the name Edith, too. She likes that name very much, she says. She doesn't like the name Alice. When she asks, I find myself wondering why I've never before heard of siblings envying a brother or sister their name.

I try logic. What would happen if they were both Edith, I ask, and someone called on the phone asking for Edith. How would we know which sister the person wanted?

She thought a moment. "You could ask if they wanted Alice-Edith or Edith-Edith," she suggested.

There may still be a few kinks in the scheme.

It turns out that...

...you can live at 6,400 ft. year-round and still get altitude sickness when you go skiing at 10,700 ft.

Badly enough that after one run down the bunny slope (it's your first time on skis), you spend the rest of the afternoon at the ski hill and then the whole 2.5-hour ride home in a neighbor's car vomiting, requiring six stops on the way home, the first time to clean out the car and re-seat all the kids, and the next five times to pull over to the side of the road every time you're getting sick. Meanwhile your little sister decides she hates skiing because the boots hurt her feet and it's scary to slide downhill like that when you're tiny, your dad forgets to put sunblock on his face, and he's totally exhausted and dispirited after the much-anticipated neighborhood Dads & Kids day at the ski slopes.

Cross that one off the Colorado Bucket List.

***

...you need not have curly hair to play Goldilocks in the school play, as Edith had imagined. 

And it turns out you can put down Mama Bear, Chair #2, and the Bee Chorus as your top three choices for parts and still get cast as Goldilocks.

***

...if you fly between Denver and New Orleans in the month of March, you could be surrounded on the plane in one direction by a crowd of Colorado students headed for Bourbon St. for spring break and in the other direction by Louisiana students headed to the ski slopes for spring break. As one passenger said, we might consider more spring breaks as an economic stimulus measure.

Yikes, kid

1. Edith was drafting plans for a Harry Potter Club. She proposed having each member adopt an alter ego from the Harry Potter series for club meetings.

Alice leaned in eagerly. "Oooh, Edith, can I be a baby Death Eater?"

2. The girls have been constantly at each other's throats, arguing, teasing, nagging, yelling, and physically fighting in a round robin that is no end of tedious. Finally at bed tonight, having tried various routes to greater harmony with little effect, I announced that I would be devising set punishments for any further physical fighting or yelling at each other.

Silence. Then Alice smiled. "Mom, did I ever tell you that I like punishment?"

3. At lunch, Alice and me. Over her scrambled eggs: "Mom, can we make up a story about someone who is very mean and gets killed for being mean?"

Have I mentioned that age 3 has been hands-down the hardest stage in our household, twice over?