Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson
This week I went to the aquarium with Laylee’s preschool class and a group of helpful high school students who received extra credit for accompanying us. While they ran around after my kids, I experienced something strange and wonderful.
Personally I prefer the chaos of the little people over the peace of the little fish but it was nice to have a break in the middle of the week.
A prescription for her restlessness and boredom.
A key to becoming a knower of all knowledge.
A magical device to transform the gibberish that surrounds her into useful language.
A ticket to travel anywhere in the world and meet anyone who’s ever lived in reality or recorded imagination.
Pure joy.
I feel quite certain that learning to read is the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to Laylee and I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be a part of it.
I thought I’d take a few minutes last Monday and teach the kids about Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights in general.
We had a good talk in the car about who Martin Luther King was and what he stood for. Laylee could not get enough. “Tell me another more story about him,” she begged so I told her all about the civil rights movement. I explained how bad it was for people who were treated differently just because of the way they looked and I told her how much better our world is now because of the sacrifices made by so many people who worked to make things equal for everyone.
Magoo didn’t get much of what we were talking about and when we got out of the car, he began running around jabbing a stick at people and yelling, “I’M THE MOOTH ER KING! PUME! PUME!!!” I suppose we all have the right to celebrate the holiday however we choose. I do have a dream that some day he will get on the clue bus though.
When I ran out of the 4-year-old-appropriate stories I knew about the civil rights movement, I started to make up scenarios to apply racism to Laylee personally, leaving Magoo to his own devices.
“What if you tried to go to preschool and they told you that you couldn’t go to a good school because you were skinny and they thought skinny people were bad so skinny people had to go to a yucky school? How would you feel? What if people threw stuff at you or wouldn’t let you use the restrooms because your skin was that peachy color?”
We talked all about how we should treat everyone with kindness and how even if people are mean to us or others, we should stand up for what’s right without being mean back. I asked her what she would do if she saw someone at preschool being mean to another kid because of the way they looked.
She stopped, thinking so hard you could almost see the thoughts popping out of her ears and then she said, “If I see anybody being mean to somebody at preschool… um… I guess I could do the civil rights on ”˜em to get ”˜em to stop. I wouldn’t hit ”˜em. I’d just sort of do the civil rights.”
“What do you mean by that?
“You know, just, like, do the civil rights to them.”
With her word choice, it sounded to me like code for some sort of brutal playground hand to hand combat move. “Well, Jimmy likes to use an uppercut or just whack the other kid over the head with a Little Tikes folding chair but I personally prefer to mix it up by giving ”˜em a quick civil rights to the solar plexus.”
I suppose she could be planning a sit-in or something. At dinner later that night she told Dan that for civil rights you mostly just sit places and sing songs. This description could apply equally well to a peaceful civil rights protest, Woodstock, or a class at Gymboree.
Maybe we’ll try this again next year.
The prophet and president of my church died tonight at age 97. He has served as the prophet for the last 12 years and as an apostle before that for longer than I’ve been alive. I was honestly surprised by my emotions at his passing.
I love him and I wasn’t sad, even for a second. I surprise myself with how little doubt there is in my mind that he’s with his Marjorie, the wife he’s been missing terribly for years. They are together now. He gave amazing service right until the end. He is one of my greatest heroes and examples. He did more good in his life than most people will ever think about doing and tonight he got his ticket home.
He died surrounded by family and he emerged on the other side surrounded by family. I don’t fear a death like that.
I kinda sorta thought that once my children were born and weaned, my body would be my own again. [read more at Parenting]
I know what you’re doing. I’ve done it myself… repeatedly. The thing is — I’m much better at it than you are. If I were currently stalking someone for their Costco parking spot, I would not choose the mother with two small children pushing a cart overflowing with groceries. I would choose the man in the track outfit carrying the single case of rocket-propelled fitness water on his left bicep.
The mother with two small children pushing a cart of overflowing groceries will need to drive the cart very slowly over every single little yellow speed bump so her children’s brains will rattle around with glee. She will swerve from side to side across the parking lot so as to catch every rain puddle with her cart wheels. At some point her male child will casually toss one or more asphalt-colored shoes overboard onto the asphalt. She will then need to backtrack and look for it. When she finally makes it to her van, she will need to unload both kids from the cart where their knees will have become semi-permanently lodged. She will yank and pull from several different angles to free them.
Then she will load them into the car, buckle all 5 points of their harnesses, check the buckles, load all 50 boxes of groceries into the back of the car and then return her cart to the cart return because she’s a good citizen like that.
In this time, you would have been able to steal track guy’s parking spot, eat a chicken bake and a very berry sundae, do all of your shopping, try every free sample in the store and read half of Oprah’s latest book club selection in line. As it is, you chose to drive slowly behind the mother of 2 until she reached her parking spot and then sit with your blinker on for 10 minutes. I would have gone with track guy.
Do you ever dress yourself using items you find on the floor of your car, only to look in the rearview mirror an hour later and wonder why you’re wearing a costume?
I woke up this morning feeling slightly less plagued by the raging viral plague of death than I have for the past few days, feeling so well in fact that I even showered, wore clothes (of a sort), went to the gym and did some grocery shopping. It was a glorious day to be half alive again.
There was only one problem with today. The sun was shining. That might sound like a good thing but not to a family of little vampires. My kids are so used to the cloudiness of the northwest that on bright days like today Magoo walks around with his eyes squidged shut and one hand out in front of him yelling at me, “The sun is ON! Turn it OFF! Turn it OFF!” His little pale face winces and he slams into things repeatedly because he refuses to open his eyes.
Today as we walked out of the gym, he clutched his beloved Dixie cup of goldfish, the kind of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers from Costco that they give out at the gym that taste so much better than the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers from Costco that I have at home. The sun was on and so was Magoo’s self-induced blindness. After a few steps he tripped over an air pocket or more likely a sunbeam and fell flat on his face where he lay immobile except for his pouring tears and quivering lip. I ran over.
Me: Are you okay, buddy? Where does it hurt?
Magoo: My… my… my… MY WISHIES!!!!!
Laylee: It’s too late buddy. They’re all covered in GERMS!
Me [picking the crackers up off the concrete and dusting them on my stretch pants]: Nope. I think we caught them just in time. Look. These wishies are perfect!
Magoo [pointing to the last goldfish, lying under a car tire]: But I want THAT ONE!!!!
Me [hesitating and looking at Laylee’s raised eyebrows]: Uhhh… I think that one’s all covered in germs.
He clutched my hand and his rescued wishies and hobbled to the car sniffling and catching his breath. Oh the HUMANITY.
Then this evening we headed out to the grocery store, Laylee dressed in a lovely sheer pink flowing dance skirt over stretch pants a different shade of pink and a floral shirt in yet another shade of the beloved color. She topped this ensemble off with a pink parka, pink light up shoes and she’s never looked lovelier.
As we were headed into the store, she tripped on her skirt in the center of the driving lane of the parking lot, went down on her knee and started wailing like a banshee who’s just banged her knee on the pavement and is now screaming about it while blowing an air horn. I tried to calm her but she would not be calmed. I tried to stand her up but her legs were like limp painfully-loud noodles. I tried to carry her but I was holding a purse and my cloth grocery bags (did I mention I’m helping Al Gore save the planet?) and Magoo’s hand and she’s too darn heavy. And the screaming. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to attempt to frighten her.
“Laylee get up! We’re right in the middle of the road and some car’s gonna come along and smash us flat if we don’t move!”
At which point she made no reaction at all but Magoo, well Magoo crumpled into a heap on the ground, dropped his lower lip farther than it had any business being dropped and joined in bawling a minor third below Laylee’s remarkable bellow. Tears were streaming down his face as he choked out, “I NO WANNA GET SMOOSHED!” He would not budge.
So I tried to pick them both up, failed miserably and then did the only thing I could do, knelt down right there, dropped my purse, stroked their hair, looked for cars and laughed my guts out. Literally. I no longer have any guts.
It’s okay that I don’t have the strength to shower because I’ve also lost my sense of smell.
It’s okay that I don’t have the strength to work out because all food has lost its appeal for me.
It’s okay that I’m totally breaking out because I have a nice red nose to match the nice red dots all over my face.
I’m a little bit sick still in my throat but I’ve been working out anyway. Somebody came over and left a crusty comment about how I should be working hard instead of railing on a reality TV franchise and I just want to tell you all that there is such a thing as humor and that I am working hard and I feel at least 1.7% better about the health of my body after one week of serious exercise. Yipee!
For those of you who asked, the book I’m using is The Biggest Loser Fitness Program intermediate routine #1 with cardio on my off days. I’m also supplimenting with Super Paper Mario for the Wii for thumb strength and map-reading skills. For those of you who didn’t ask, that was probably too much information.
While I’m doing all the working out, Laylee is occupying herself well. The latest is up at Parenting.