Mind boggling

 

What's an eight year old to do when there are 15 minutes before the worship service starts, and she's stuck in the pew without a book of her own?

Grab her mother's purse, take out the book there...and read Act 1, Scene 1 of Hamlet.

Did you understand any of it, we later asked? No, not really, she said. All I figured out was that there were four men, and one left, then two of the men were telling the third that they had seen a ghost. The ghost reappeared, and they tried to talk to it, but it disappeared. Then it came back a second time, and they almost got it to talk, but the cock crowed, meaning it was morning, and ghosts can't be out in the daylight, so it disappeared before they could find out what it wanted.

Yep, pretty much didn't get any of it.

***

What's an eight year old to do when Daddy is supposed to take her to Barnes & Noble to exchange a Christmas gift (a Calvin & Hobbes book she already had), but he and Mommy have gotten absorbed in a household task and clearly are going to be awhile?

She sits down to write two Christmas thank-you notes. Then she picks up another book she got for Christmas, a 210-page Kate DiCamillo novel she hasn't read before. 

An hour later she stands up and stretches, offering to recount for her mother the good book she just finished.

At this rate she'll be through her Christmas haul of new reads before 2014.

Misoverheard Lyrics, Vol. 42

Alice, singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town":

He sees you when you're sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows if you've been good in bed,
So be good for goodness sake!

For your partner's sake, too...

Snow day

"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..." Or what Christmas looks like in all the lore and literature anyway, if rarely in my lived experience.

We all enjoyed an unplanned Tuesday at home, complete with a wintry trudge to the grocery store on foot for breakfast supplies (G), an annual physical (A), movie time, Christmas-card writing, a board game, and more playing in the snow. Unfortunately an anonymous spoilsport in the administration decided some time in the last 48 hours that sledding is no longer permitted on campus, but the girls contrived to have fun anyway.

At the doctor's Alice was deemed small but growing steadily and healthy in all respects. She bore up well under shots and hopped on each foot satisfactorily. We feel lucky only to have seen the pediatrician once each in May and December this year -- we like her a great deal, but it's a blessing to have healthy kids.

With the neighbors

Our resilient (almost) 5 year old

 

It was supposed to snow or sleet up to an inch this afternoon, starting around 2 pm. In our experience, that kind of forecast means no precipitation at all, or a sprinkling of rain.

But today was different. It started snowing at 10:30 am, while the girls and I were in Friends' Meeting. We hurried out quickly at the end to pick up Alice's birthday cake from the bakery, and the snow was sticking to our windshield and then to the streets by the time we got home.

From our cozy fourth-floor perch we kept an eye on the wintry scene out the window as the girls viewed "Christmas Eve on Sesame Street," and I prepped for classes. Tom called to say he was stuck on the highway in NJ, awaiting snowplows. He was on his way home for Alice's 4:30 gymnastics birthday party.

As I watched the snow, which was looking more serious than anyone had predicted, I wondered if the gym would close. I called and left a message inquiring. Then I wondered if anyone would show up even if the gym remained open. Only three of the ten little girls she had invited were going to able to attend in the first place; if just two of them decided not to make the trek, it would be a forlorn little gathering (and an expensive one per capita).

At 1:45 the gym called back and said their 12 noon party had hurried to get through so everyone could get home, their 2:30 party had cancelled, the pizza parlor supplying dinner had closed, and we could reschedule with no penalty if we chose. So that settled it. I called the three families planning to attend and told them we were calling it off. No one was surprised.

Then I told Alice, who had been bopping around the apartment making crafts with her sister. She began to cry. I took her in my lap and talked about how we'd be able to extend her birthday celebration this way. And how maybe more kids would be able to come when we did reschedule. Then I suggested that we should go ask the neighbors to have cake with us in the evening. And then I said that yes, I'd stop working and we could go out sledding. And her tears began to dry up.

A little planning had us visiting the Upper School Head first, to see if we could get permission to use the Main Hall for the substitute party. And then we invited him and his wife to the festivities. He said yes we could use the hall, yes they'd come, and he would arrive early to lay a fire for the occasion. Everyone else was also snowed in--all answered their doors, and all said yes, they'd come.

And so it was that we enjoyed a wonderful afternoon of sledding on the front lawn, the first real sledding of Alice's life, which we couldn't have planned if we'd tried. Tom made it home after 3.5 white-knuckled hours on the road. And in the evening, we gathered for a birthday party after all. Instead of three guests there were twelve, plus us. Instead of ranging in age from 5 years - 5 years 2 weeks (Alice's best buddies have been having non-stop birthdays in recent days), their ages ranged from 7 months to 70 years. Instead of a bright noisy gymnasium with lots of bouncing, we enjoyed a 19th-century hotel lobby by firelight, where we played board games and sang Christmas carols. And Alice was happy as could be.

I feel so lucky that our five year old is such a joy-filled, plucky person. I feel lucky that in a pinch, we could summon good-natured neighbors to celebrate with a little girl (they even brought presents). And I feel glad that we could, I think, make those neighbors' snowbound evening that much warmer.

What other kid celebrates her birthday with her mother's boss, her sister's Chinese teacher, her own piano teacher and piano teacher's kids, and the babies next door...and is tickled as can be? What a perfect, unplanned, cozy day for us all.

 

 

Not quite the weather we imagined when Alice asked for a mermaid/ocean theme

 

No, Alice did not have both those beers

 

 

Let it be known...

...that on Tuesday, November 19, 2013, a few weeks before her 5th birthday, Alice Lank started reading. That is, she has been reliably sounding out three-letter words with regular short vowels for awhile. But Tuesday night she lay down at bedtime with her mother and a Berenstain Bears book and labored for half an hour to get through three pages.

Her mother was most admiring of her resilience in the face of irregular phonics. Confronted with said or night she didn't get frustrated with the letters' refusal to obey the rules. Rather, she absorbed the news that they didn't, adjusted her efforts, and kept plowing through.

Not sure which is more admirable: the reading, or the resilience.

Exciting times ahead.

Belated Halloween pics

Somehow we got rather somber pictures this year, but our woodland enchantress and mermaid nevertheless had a good time trick-or-treating in Philadelphia with baby firefighter Evan. Wood...water...fire...guess the gabby grown-ups tagging along were the hot air?

When it clicks--and then some

Saturday morning Edith came in and asked if I felt I needed to sleep more. Oddly enough, I did. So she said she thought that my sleep was important and that she would get herself breakfast. Which she did. She also played with the bunnies, fed them, and gave them water.

Sunday morning she didn't even ask. I heard her in the kitchen, getting her breakfast, playing with the bunnies, feeding them, and getting them water. I finally got out of bed at 8:45 to get showered for church (or rather, Friends' Meeting, which the girls and I have been attending for several months).

When I returned to my room to get dressed, my first impression was that I hadn't remembered making the bed. Then I noticed the aroma and saw that next to the perfectly-made bed, there was a steaming cup of coffee. Next to it was the remainder of a pot and a note from my waiter, urging me to "Drink product while hot."

I asked if there was a fall holiday comparable to Mother's Day or a birthday that I had forgotten. Edith shrugged and said she thought it would be nice.

It was the nicest thing that's happened all year.

Tom and I have noticed a few other remarkable changes of late. We tell Edith it's time to do her homework, and most days, when she isn't tired or overwhelmed, she just goes and does it. No stalling on her part, no nagging on ours, not even help organizing the many pieces and prioritizing. It's all her doing, and we often don't hear another word.

Similarly, when I tell her she needs to take a shower before bed, she disappears and returns about 15 minutes later smelling fresh, hair dripping, clean pajamas on. Edith doesn't like bathing, finding it a tedious interruption of her reading or leisure time, but somehow she has figured out that washing and getting it over with is easier than procrastinating. She no longer needs someone to wash her hair, or hand her a towel when the water drips in her eyes, or sit in the bathroom and keep her company. It just happens.

So you put in unremitting labor, and every 8 1/2 years or so, you reap a windfall return on investment. Non-parents don't realize how HUGE these small changes are for quality of home life. In fact, moments like these--Edith learning to buckle and unbuckle her own carseat at age 5 was another one--remind me of just how hard the labor of daily life has been for so long.

Incidentally, learning what it takes to train children in certain habits, ingrain in them key life lessons, and help them reach the point where they can independently navigate daily tasks has made me a more patient teacher. Or rather, a teacher with long-range perspective. My colleagues and I may kvetch over lunch about the students whose computers always crash before a big paper is due, who arrive late to class and ask in the middle of a lecture what they missed, or who don't know how to construct an email using basic conventions of polite address. But more often now, I find myself viewing it all as part of the learning process. Students are developing these skills, and I'm the parent/teacher enforcing and reinforcing and reinforcing again--not in a defeatist way, setting increasingly significant consequences, but always with the perspective that they're learning these skills and I'm playing an important role in helping shape them as independent, organized, respectful, self-motivated students and human beings. It's a long haul, but it's supposed to be.

At least, so I tell myself. None of my students has left a cup of fresh coffee on my desk yet.

Vermont

With the exception of the calf's birth, we never got around to posting pictures from our wonderful week at Family Camp in August. School started the day after we got home, and life got crazy. But we all loved camp, and the songs and jokes and memories have been woven through our fall.

 

 

 

 

 

 Ringing the camp dinner bell

Our open-air cabin

The bunk was labeled before we arrived

 

Quaker meeting circle

One-week-old bunnies!

We loved it enough that the girls and I went back last weekend to help with the fall harvest on the camp farm.

 

 Eight-week old bunnies!

 

 

 So guess who came home with us? 

Actually, we'd promised the girls a rabbit back in March, as a weaning present for Alice. We didn't find one locally, either in shelters or pet stores. When we met the bunnies in Vermont in August, it seemed time to renew the promise. But the bunnies were too young to leave their mother at that point. So we decided to return for one at Harvest Weekend. In the interim, Edith read assiduously on rabbit care and set up a cage and other accoutrements. She practiced changing the water every day, even before there was anyone to drink it.

Tom has been saying he needs more males in the family, but the girls claimed Hestia (the calico) first and since genetically a calico can only be a girl, that committed us to another female family member. To keep Hestia company we took one of her litter mates, and of course, with one female rabbit we didn't want a male. So we took a sister, who got their mother's angora genes. Luna makes a great therapy rabbit that way--so soft to stroke at the end of a hard day! And she may launch me in small-scale fiber production, too.

So five girls, one boy in the family. And a cozy apartment. But for the girls, some important new responsibilities and good relationships.