It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

With the last day of school quickly approaching, I thought it would be cute to make autograph books for my kindergarten students so they could write little “have a nice summer” and “I’ll miss you” messages to their friends.

But that was before I discovered that Caleb, our precious son, signed the book of every girl in class the same way:

“Your one Hot MaMa!  lovE, Caleb”

*headdesk*

I expect the parent phone calls to begin any moment now.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure what to address first: the appropriate way to talk to girls, or the grammatical difference between “you’re” and “your”.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

The Cat in the Hat visited our school this morning.  His arrival capped off a week long celebration of the amazing works of the Cat’s beneficent creator, Dr. Seuss.  Students and staff were encouraged to dress up as characters from Dr. Seuss books, resulting in a colorful invasion of Grinches, Cindy Lou Whos, and Thing Ones and Thing Twos.  The Cat himself handed out prizes to the winners of the coloring and trivia contests, and every child received an autographed bookmark to take home.

Even though they knew it was a costume day, several of my students seemed taken aback when they walked in to find their normal teacher replaced by this strange creature:

I’m not sure who I intended to be, but one of the other teachers dubbed me Mrs. Grinch, so let’s go with that.  All I know is that when life hands you the opportunity to wear a neon green beehive wig, you don’t pass it up.

A Pox on Thee, Dav Pilkey!

This morning after recess, we took a few minutes out of class time to practice for the talent show.  With the big night only two weeks away, the kids have been buzzing with excitement, visions of their own American Idol moments dancing through their heads as we work on our bring-down-the-house kindergarten musical numbers: Magalena Hagalena, Grandpa’s Farm, and the class favorite, Fishy.

“Have you ever seen a fishy on a hot summer’s day?

Have you ever seen a fishy out swimming in the bay?

With his hands in his pockets and his pockets in his pants,

Have you ever seen a fishy do the Hootchie-Kootchie Dance?”

We’ve sung it a thousand times, but during today’s practice session, the giggles and squeals grew progressively louder, exceeding the usual gleeful enjoyment that accompanies each child’s personal interpretation of the “Hootchie-Kootchie Dance.”

I looked around for the source of the uproar, and there he was.

My son.

His jeans were puddled down around his knees, his Disney Cars underwear boldly flashing back and forth as he clapped in time to the song’s rowdy chorus.

“Caleb!” I screeched.

The note of hysteria in my voice finally penetrated the cloud of delighted chaos that had overtaken the class at the sight of one of their classmates in his underwear.  A hush descended as they all waited to see what hideous repercussions might befall the perpetrator of such a shocking act.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.  “Pull your pants up!  Why are you doing that???”

He did as I asked.  Finally, nearing tears, he explained, “Mom, I was just showing everybody the Underpants Dance!”

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no.

I recognized that dance.  Somewhere inside, I had always known that my carefree, lackadaisical attitude toward juvenile reading material would one day come back to haunt me.  As it turned out, today was that day.

My baby, my precious little boy, had been hopelessly corrupted…by Captain Underpants.

I tried to continue with the class, but, as with a natural disaster or a cataclysmic world event, there was no going back to normal life without a pause for closure.  We finished singing our other songs, and I looked around to see Caleb, dejected, staring at the floor, barely moving his lips.  As the class took their seats, I gently asked him, “What’s wrong, bub?”

“I’m embarrassed about myself, Mom.”

“It’s okay, buddy,” I reassured him with a hug, having had enough time to recover my own composure.  “You didn’t know.  And everybody in here still likes you just fine.  Right, class?”

“Right!” they echoed dutifully.

“For future notice, though–and this is a rule for everyone,” I emphasized, raising my gaze to take in the entire room, “Underwear is private.  You’re not supposed to show it to anyone else.  Okay?”

“Okay!”

And just like that, it was over.  We moved on to math, and the incident wasn’t mentioned again all day.

Still, a part of me is waiting for that phone call from an irate parent demanding to know just what kind of talent show we’re running here.

Sick Day

Well, it was bound to happen.  I’m only surprised that it took this long.

After five months of inexplicable good health, I finally caught the Kindergarten Krud.

In a room full of kids just learning the ins and outs of nose-blowing and hand-washing, germs abound.  Today, for example, I caught one of my students using a Kleenex she had just sneezed in to “wash” her desk.  Though I instantly cordoned off the area and hosed it down with hand sanitizer, it made me wonder how many other incidents of inadvertent plague-spreading escape my notice every day.  Kindergarten is a place for hugs and hand-holding and sharing snacks and trading pencils.  It’s also a place where germs meet, fall in love, and have millions of offspring–a roiling, boiling kettle of bacterial diversity.

Apparently, my very robust immune system has met its microscopic match.  It started Tuesday with a tickle in my throat.  By Wednesday, my nose was running and my voice was hoarse.  And today, it feels like a tiny army of dwarves is mining the inside of my skull with picks and shovels and illegally dumping the debris in my lungs.

So tomorrow I’m taking a sick day.

It’s my first (and hopefully only) sick day this year.  Unfortunately, it’s also the school’s annual Skate Party day, when all the students are loaded into cars and driven over to the local skating rink to spend the day skating circles around their less graceful teachers.  I was really looking forward to breaking out my old backwards skating moves and revisiting the Hokey Pokey.  Instead, I’m going to be hacking away in a sea of Kleenex, waiting for the ibuprofen to put the dwarves to sleep.

This is so not fair.

Fortunately, I have an amazing room mother coming in tomorrow morning to save the day.  She’ll be herding kids in my place and making sure the class gets where it needs to go.  So at least if I have to forgo glory under the disco lights, I know my class is taken care of and having fun.

I’ll just have to save my sweet limbo skillz for another time.

Crowning the New Spelling Queen

The spelling bee brought together all the private schools in the area.  Grade by grade, the spellers stepped forward to sit in a row of cold metal chairs beneath the glaring gymnasium lights.  Fourth grade started things off, drawing numbers and sitting in order, nervously fidgeting and kicking their feet while each awaited his moment to stand up and twist the letters of the alphabet into one of their numberless permutations.

In the stands, I was tense.  Not for the outcome, which didn’t concern me so much, but for Katie’s feelings.  Part of her struggle with Asperger’s is an occasional inability to cope with strong emotions, and I was afraid of how she would handle the losing part of competition.  Would she be overwhelmed and burst into tears of disappointment?  Or would she bear up with stoic seriousness until the round was over?  Although I had tried my best beforehand to prepare her for the possibility, I held my breath every time she stood to spell.

Round after round, she spelled each word correctly.  On a couple of them, she asked for a sentence or a definition.  The pronouncer told me later that as he watched her mull over each word, he could see the exact moment when the light bulb went on in her head.  She spoke the letters clearly and confidently, emphasizing each one with a jab of her finger, as if she could see the word hovering in the air in front of her.

Finally, it was down to two.  Both girls did a wonderful job, but in the end, Katie was declared the winner.  A big grin lit her face and she did a silent herky of joy as the announcer congratulated her, then turned to me with an expression of amazed happiness that clearly said, “Can you believe it, Mom?”  The second place winner, who will be the alternate in the next stage of the competition, tapped Katie on the shoulder and, with the beginning of tears welling up in her eyes, graciously said, “You did a good job!”  “So did you!” Katie returned, and a cacophony of congratulations swelled around us.  For the rest of the day, Katie was a mini celebrity at school, delighted recipient of hugs and compliments everywhere she went.

I thought I couldn’t possibly be any prouder of her.

This morning she proved me wrong.

On the day of the spelling bee, the judges had explained the rules of elimination, including the procedure for having two spellers left in the competition.  At the moment Katie won, I had been expecting her to have to spell another word to claim victory.  When they suddenly declared her the winner, the attendant hubbub as I filled out papers and made proud phone calls to friends and family swept that detail to the back of my mind and I didn’t think of it again all day.  This morning, however, I woke up with it nagging at me, and wondered if a mistake had been made.

I dug the rule paper out of Katie’s desk and looked over it again, but it didn’t shed much light.  I paced and fretted, fretted and paced, until Paul urged me to do whatever it took to set my heart at rest.  I couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing Katie and somehow taking this victory away from her, but I knew that it was important to make sure everything had been done fairly, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t be right to let it go without checking.  So I took the matter to Katie.

I explained to her that I was wondering about whether the administrator had made a mistake on the rules.  I pointed out the rule to her and told her what it would mean if we called the spelling bee officials to investigate.  “They may consider the results of the spelling bee fair and binding, or they may ask us to come back in so that you can replay the last round of the competition again.  If that happens, there is a chance you could lose, sweetie.  What do you think we should do?”

She only paused for a second.  Then she sighed a little and said, “Let’s call them, Mom.”

I thought my heart would burst.

As a parent, you always wonder if the lessons you are trying so hard to impart to your children are sinking in.  Treating others fairly, being honest in small things and large, doing what is right even when it is most difficult or costly–these are the hallmarks of integrity, and to see it blossoming in my child made the joyful celebration of yesterday pale into insignificance.

I pulled her up into my lap and told her that.  Later, we called the spelling bee arbiter and explained our concern.  He cleared up my misunderstanding of the rule and reassured us that Katie’s victory was well-earned and would stand.  He wished her good luck and reminded her to study.  He remembered her, he told me, for the smile that lit up her whole face when she got a word correct.  “Like she has a glow inside,” he said.

Yes, I thought.  Yes, she does.

May it shine on.

Prayer Request

I was going to write this whole big blog post about today’s historic inauguration of brand new President Obama (something along the lines of “hoping for the best!”), but events intervened, and now I find myself sitting here aimlessly clicking windows open and closed, wondering what in the world I can do to love my sweet, sensitive student who got out of bed this past Sunday happily anticipating her sixth birthday party only to have her whole world turn upside down when her father suddenly and unexpectedly passed away.

Please pray for my student (God knows who she is) and for her family in the difficult days and weeks and months ahead.  Pray for strength, for healing, and for God’s “peace beyond understanding” as they adapt to the new shape that life has taken.

And please pray for me, that I can make school a place of comfort for her when she returns.  Pray that I will know what words to say and when to say nothing at all.  And please, oh, please, pray that I can help her feel and know the bedrock truth of God’s love for her in this time when everything else is shifting beneath her feet.

Thank you.

Bits and Pieces

*Last night, after sending the kids to get their pajamas on, Paul and I settled down on the couch with our laptops to play a little World of Warcraft together.  Before long, out comes Caleb in his footie jammies, asking, “Can I sit with you guys?”  I patted the sofa next to me.  “Of course, kiddo,” I said.  Only then did I see that he was holding something in his hands.  “I have a computer of my own, see?” he exclaimed proudly.  He had taken a piece of orange construction paper, folded it in half, and drawn a keyboard and screen on it.  He sat back against the couch and set his “laptop” up on his knees to play, just like Mommy and Daddy.  How cute is that?

Dell and Crayola team up to create the ultimate in ultralight computing...

*Once, when I was a kindergartner in Michigan, I spent the entire recess getting dressed in my snowsuit and boots.  The teacher was going down the line zipping zippers and fastening gloves and tightening boot laces before sending each student to the playground, and I happened to be last in line that day.  Just as I was walking to the door to go outside, the bell rang and all the other kids came streaming back into the building, faces red with cold and laughing at their sledding adventures.  I burst into tears from the disappointment.

I hadn’t thought about that memory in a long time, until this year, when we came back to school from Christmas break with three feet of snow still on the ground.  Suddenly, the simple act of sending my students out to recess took on gargantuan complications, and it took me a day or two to realize that I had to make some adjustments in the procedure.  Now, I schedule ten minutes of class time before recess for getting into snowpants and hats and scarves and gloves and boots, and another ten minutes after for getting out of them.  (Yes, that’s twenty minutes of preparation for a fifteen minute recess, but such is life in North Idaho.)  Another lesson came from the K4 teacher in the room next to mine, who has been doing this for winters without number.  She doesn’t spend all that time on zippers and laces and stuffing tiny feet into puffy snowsuits like so many nylon-encased sausages.  Instead, she has a hands-off policy: she’ll talk a child through the process (“sit down and pull your snowpants on like you’re getting into a sleeping bag”, etc.) but she won’t do it for them.  As a result, her students get ready to go out all by themselves, and much more quickly than if they had to wait for her to get around to help everyone.  I started doing things the same way in my classroom this week, and it has helped immensely.

*Katie will be participating in the area-wide private school spelling bee next Thursday.  Knowing my proud history of spelling bee glory, her teacher has kindly invited me to come along and bear witness to the victories and defeats of the next generation of spelling wunderkind.  Kathy has agreed to take my class for a couple of hours in the morning, and I am looking forward to being there with Katie, either to share in her moment of triumph or to comfort her in her disappointment, as my mother comforted me.  Spell on, sweet girl!

*Martin Luther King Jr. Day is Monday.  What a joy it was to explain to my class why we celebrate the birthday of this remarkable man and the impact he had on American society!  His dedication to Christ’s teachings of love and equality burned through our national consciousness like a wildfire.  While we still have work to do to realize his vision of an America where men “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, he made some of the first mighty strides toward that goal, and planted that dream deep in the soil of our country’s soul.  The reverend knew, as many of us today do not, that the first rule of positive change is love.  We can’t get anywhere we want to go without it.

100% Return Rate

Eleven kindergartners went on the field trip today.  Eleven came back.

I feel pretty good about that.

Yes, I’ve survived my very first ever field trip as a kindergarten teacher, a milestone that I looked upon with trepidation in the days leading up to our schoolwide expedition to Carver Farms, a beautiful and expansive patch of land in the heart of farm country.  But, as usual, all my worrying was for naught.  Several parents came along, and I was able to assign a pair of students to each adult, making the hand-to-kid ratio a nice, comfortable 1:1.  We enjoyed a hayride, took a jaunt through the corn maze, picked colorful Indian corn and perfectly plump pumpkins, and filled our tote bags to bursting with festive fall goodies.

Finally, after a lovely lunch break beneath an obligingly shady tree, the whole happy, dusty, disheveled crew piled back onto the bus, covered in corn silk and chattering gleefully to each other about their treasures.  I had a wonderful time, but this was my favorite part–all my little chicks safely tucked back into bus seats for the drive home, counted and accounted for.

Thank you, God!

*I took a lot more photos, but I didn’t want to post pictures of anyone else’s kids without their express permission, so you’ll have to make do with my little pumpkins.

M.M.M.*

As a fairly busy full-time homemaker and stay-at-home mom, I often wondered how women who worked for a paycheck by day and cared for a home and family by night ever found the time to do it all.

Now that I am a member of the legion of working mothers, I can finally and definitively answer that question for myself:

I don’t.

(Apologies to those of you out there who can and have and currently are doing it all and doing it quite well, thank-you-very-much.  Clearly I’m not talking to you.  You are Super Mom.  I’ve heard of you.  You have inadvertently stumbled across the blog of a well-intentioned, intermittently inspired, but *Merely Mortal Mom.  This blog is like yours, but with whining.  Allow me to redirect you: kryptonmoms.wordpress.com.  Be sure to check out their online store for the stylish new Maya Wrap/cape combo!)

Anyway, what was I saying?  Oh, yes…

I miss housework.

Did I type that?  I must have, but I dozed off for a minute there, so I’m not entirely sure.  It’s true, nonetheless.

When I was at home, I did housework every day.  Mostly when I felt like it, with occasional breaks for reading or playing with Caleb or running errands, but with a regularity and efficiency that rendered my weekends completely free for family frivolity and lovely, languid afternoons of shameless vegetating.

Now the dreamlike landscape of my weekends has given way to a strange continent of laundry mountains, flowing with rivers of dishwashing detergent.  I’m playing catch up, but I must not be very good, because I haven’t caught up yet.

When I was working at home, I stayed up until midnight every evening with my night owl husband, nourishing my marriage with long, soulful talks and marathon horde-bashing sessions, knowing that I could always make up for it the next day with a quick doze on the couch when Caleb went down for a nap.

Now I’m the fuddy duddy falling asleep on the couch at nine-thirty, head back, mouth open as if frozen in the act of teaching my kindergarten class the short “o” sound–which is probably what I’m dreaming about.

When I was a full-time domestic engineer, I ran a tight ship.  A place for everything and everything in its place.  Dust was banished.  The toilet was clean.  The kids’ toys were sorted neatly into categorized bins at bedtime.  I cared about these things, deeply.

In recent weeks, I have waded through the contents of an upturned toy box to tuck the kids into bed, stopping only to kick a clear path to the door.  I have been slowly cultivating a science experiment of alarming color in the bowl of the toilet, and yesterday I wrote my To Do List in the dust on the coffee table.

To put it simply, I’m floundering.

I know the most important things are getting done.  I’m teaching, and I love it.  I’m spending time with my children, hugging and playing and reading a little every day.  Paul does help out when he can, and he and I still get some time together every night, even if we are under the gun to get in bed before my coach turns into a pumpkin.  Life is good, and I have absolutely no reason to complain (but when has that stopped me?)

The truth is, I miss my tight ship.  How do they do it, those other moms?

I am such a weenie.

Where’s a super hero when you really need one?

Cute Kids

From the first week of school:

*While reading a story about pythons on the reading carpet, a felt a tap on my knee and looked down into Andy*’s mischievous grin.  “Hey, teacher, do you want to see a python in real life?”  “Um, I don’t know,” I hedged.  “Because if you do, I’ve got one RIGHT HERE,” he continued, pointing with a flourish to his tiny curled bicep.  I tried to look impressed, hoping he didn’t notice I was choking on a laugh.

*Little Kyra was in tears, and I was the duty teacher on the playground.  “What’s wrong?” I asked, and she informed me that she only had “one friend in this whole school, and she’s playing with somebody else!”  I told her that she might only know one person so far, but that there were lots of girls in our class that would love to be friends with her.  As if on cue, sweet, quiet Brandy, who had overheard us, stepped forward and said, “Hey, I want to be your friend, Kyra!  Let’s go play on the slides.”  And off they went.  I just stood there with my eyes tearing up, full of sweet gladness at being witness to such a moment.  I can see already that my students aren’t the only ones who will be learning a lot this year.

*Caleb brought Tiny Tiger to school for Show and Tell on Friday.  He told the kids a little about where he got him, and then delivered what he clearly considered the coup de grace:  “Watch what he can do!”  And with that, he seized Tiny Tiger’s tail and used it to execute a complex series of what I know were karate moves, complete with whipshot sound effects.  The kids laughed (and so did I, I admit.)  Caleb’s face creased in consternation as he admonished, “Guys, don’t laugh!  This is serious business!”

*After school on Thursday, as I stayed to finish up my prep for the next day, Caleb asked me if he could have some more of the Skittles I use to reward the kids for good behavior at the end of class.  I said no.  “Uh oh, Mom,” he said, “You just broke the Number One Caleb Rule.  It’s give Caleb whatever he wants all the time.  You get an ‘F’.”

So I survived the first week of school, but I got an F.  Look at it this way:  At least there’s room for improvement.

***

*Names of kindergarteners have been changed to thwart the papparazzi.