Laylee: Mom. Magoo and I are hunting. We’re shooting cows to get milk.
Me: You don’t shoot cows to get milk. You only get milk if they’re still alive.
{PAUSE}
Laylee: What can we get if we shoot them?
Education
School Rulz
“That guy’s DEAD!” Laylee blurted as Beethoven’s 5th symphony came on our car stereo.
“Who?” I asked.
“The guy who made that song. My music teacher said he’s dead and this song has themes.”
She proceeded to tell me that she “loves that guy.” She loves him because his music is beautiful. She loves him because he wrote a song for a woman he loved but never married. She loves him because he must’ve started composing music when he was really young to get all those songs written before he was dead. She loves him because he has hearing loss just like her.
There’s something amazing about sending her off each day and then having her come home with her little brain overflowing with knowledge. I have never seen a kid who loves school the way Laylee loves it. She loves everything about it. She can’t get enough.
It’s a little disconcerting at times to know she’s being taught things by people who aren’t me but it’s also exciting because she comes home and shares what she learns.
I decided today that helping out in the classroom is one of the top 8 best things of ever. I got to see what they do all day, things that Laylee explaaaained… sort of… in a language resembling English. Now it all makes sense. And I got to spy on Laylee. I’ll tell you what she does all day. She stares at Ms. Sweetsie with a look of absolute adoration and intense concentration and tries to follow her instructions with exactness. She bubbles over with joy. She is loved.
And she’s not the only one who does those things. Ms. Sweetsie has the entire class eating out of her hands. I have never seen such a well-behaved group of 5-year-olds in my life. And they’re not scared of her. They just want to please her SO MUCH. I’m sort of hoping that when she retires she’ll set up a Super-Nanny-style empire of parenting improvement courses. She could come live in our computer room and I would be her padowan.
I’m pleased to say though that as much as Laylee lerves Mrs. S, she’s even crazier about me. She bounced out of the classroom today holding my hand and squeezing it. “I’m so lucky to have you for my mom. You’re the best mom in the world. I’m so lucky that my mom comes to school and I get to have you all day at home and all day at school. This is the BEST!” When Dan asked who her special visitor was in class today, referring to the firemen who came to teach a safety lesson, she said, “MOM! She’s a room mom and it’s awesome and she got to spend the WHOLE DAY WITH ME!”
My heart could detonate.
In the classroom I observed that the other kids are not a group of miscreant crack heads, which is a great comfort unto me. For the first time in Laylee’s life she’s making friends independently of me. No longer do I drive her somewhere, plop her diaper bum down in front of another drooling toddler and say, “Behold. Your new friend.”
When she came home a couple of weeks into the school year twittering on about her new friends, I was skeptically pleased for her. “Hmmm…. Who is this Janie character? Really? Does she have any egregious offenses on her rap sheet?
Sparring
I’ve decided there are ways I can make money off this whole preschool gig. [read more]
NoFAP
Laylee’s loving school. I’m loving school, if for no other reason than that I now get to write NoFAPs now. MWAH-ha-ha-ha! [continued at Parenting.com]
Back To School Haiku
Kids are both at school
All is quiet and lonely
Sanity is nice
That’s Me in the Corner
That’s me in the hall. way. sending my daughter to kindergarten.
This week Laylee has a kindergarten “soft start.” Today she met with her teacher one-on-one for 20 minutes to discuss important matters like the sounds a “G” makes and whether or not she knows her own phone number.
From what I’ve heard, the teacher is an angel of heavenly joy and ever-lovin’ beauty blessedness. I’ve been hearing her name for 2 years, usually accompanied by sighs and gasps and mumbles about wonderfulness… absolutely amazingosity… and… freakin’ sainthood. I had more than one person tell me, “You have GOT to make sure Laylee gets in Mrs. Sweetsie’s class.” And I’d say, “Oh yeah? How do I make sure she gets in there?” And then they’d say, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t request a specific teacher but you’d better hope she gets in that class. Mrs. Sweetsie is an altruistic alchemist of magical teaching genius who belches fairy dust and has celestial light streaming from her fingertips. Having Timmy in her class has been the single best experience of my life. Good luck.”
So, needless to say although I’m going to say it anyway, I was more than pleased to find out Laylee had been put in her class. And she does seem like a keeper from the 20 minutes I spent with her today… er Laylee spent with her today while I filled out paperwork in the hallway outside the door and cried my eyes out because Laylee’s growing up so fast and for the love why did I ever stop breastfeeding her. If she were still on the teat, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make me send her off into the world.
Not that anyone’s making me. I know I could homeschool but this feels like the right decision at the moment, even if it’s tearing my heart out through my left nostril. I sat in the hall filling out forms.
How many hours per day would you like to volunteer?
What bus will Laylee be taking home from school?
How many siblings does she have?
What are some of Laylee’s personality quirks or issues?
What is your biggest dream for her this school year?
And then I lost it. My dream for her? My dream for her? I have a dream. I have many actually. I dream that she will learn to stop calling me really loudly from the backseat of the car, only to mumble in an incoherent whisper once she has my attention. I dream that she will grow to love broccoli. I dream that she will ever begin a sentence to me without using the word “MOM!” at the front of it. I dream that she will learn things that thrill her and cause HER to dream big. I dream that she will grow in self esteem this year and have good friends who help her be better. I dream that she will always know how special she is and how much I love her.
I cried as I wrote down a couple of my dreams for her, none of which have anything to do with academics or book knowledge and then quickly wiped the tears away. I didn’t want to be THAT mom, although I’m pretty sure that nearly every first time kindergarten mom is THAT mom. It’s a special sorority of puddlehood that binds us all together.
And then I overheard Laylee and Mrs. Sweetsie talking in the next room.
Mrs S: So, what does your dad do for his job?
Laylee: He does all kinds of hilarious stuff and goes to parties.
*Mrs S: He just does fun things at work all day?
Laylee: Yeah. Oh man. This one time they took his boss and shoved his face in a BOWL OF WHIP CREAM!
Mrs S: And what does your mom do for work? Does she stay home with you or go somewhere else?
Laylee: Well sometimes for work she does gardening or just watches us kids and sometimes for work she types things on the computer so people will pay her money so she can buy us stuff.
I actually think she got my job pretty dead-on, minus the Cinderella triumvirate of the mending and the sewing and the laundry, and of course the Dr. Mario and the eating of the bonbons. It’s obvious who brings home the bacon in this family. While Dan’s off doing “hilarious stuff” and partying with whipped cream, I’m slaving away at home to make a few bucks. Sad!
Here’s a video of a work party a while back where Dan’s co-workers paid their boss $50 to let them dunk him in the creamy white goodness. Dan showed it to the kids and apparently it made quite an impression, erasing Laylee’s every memory of visiting him at MegaCorp, hearing about how he writes code all day and fixes bugs. No. Whipped cream is all-encompassing now. Not a bad job if you can get it.
*I’m not sure exactly what Mrs S replied. I was too busy listening for Laylee’s next enlightening tidbit of information to be added to our permanent file. I really think all teachers should write books about all the fascinating things their young students tell them about their home lives.
Kindergarten is Scary
I am TRAU-MA-TIZED!
Last week I took Laylee to pick up her registration packet for kindergarten. [read more at Parenting.com]
Also, how do you like the new look of the blog? Any problems viewing it in your browser?
World of Words
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.
Don’t Make Me Open Up a Can of Civil Rights on Your Racist 4-Year-Old Butt!
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.
Lessons From Harriet Carter — Part 4
And now for installment 4 of The Series:
Finally a shelf big enough for my VCR!!
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After Gandalf was reborn, he invented his own line of cleaning products.
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The trees are lonely.
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Whoever said faux sheepskin covers were just for your high school hoopty obviously didn’t have a lounger worth modernizing.
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Who needs Orkin when you can simply hang a glowing sensor owl to scare away garden pests? I’m pleased to read that it is approved for indoor use and proven to amuse guests. I’m so sick of coming up with dinner conversation. This could solve at least half of our family’s current problems.
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