tuckova

dear people with children (or with opinions about children)

How do you handle your child's holiday giving? Because I am lost. I think that up until about (some age) you tell the kid the list of people to whom they should give gifts (which is sort of sadly correlated with "people from whom they can expect gifts" but here we are), and you discuss those people's interest, hobbies, etc., and then you take the kid shopping. Or, even better, you make the kid create something for each person. But this year I left Squire to his own devices and he did nothing for anybody. Whoops.

I think it makes more sense in terms of the "spirit of giving" for him to MAKE something, something personal. For the last couple years I had Squire make the Christmas cards with his own sweet hands, and that was his contribution to the gifties. But this year he didn't want to make the cards himself, and I didn't want to stand over him screaming. He also didn't want to just pick out gifts for me to buy and ship, nor did he want to take credit even when he helped me pick, which I appreciate in a way although it left him sort of stranded. I suggested alternatives (draw a picture? write a letter?) but I feel like, dammit, it's not MY GIFT. In retrospect I think I cut him loose too soon, but I really don't know.

Understand that I am not talking about epic gift giving. I give Christmas gifts to family only, for... well, complicated reasons. Of course also there's the "husband who doesn't do Christmas" element to consider. The man just doesn't. And what I "just doesn't" is pretend to buy individual presents from other people. And why should I nudge a kid when there's an adult in the house modeling the very behavior I'm saying isn't okay? And why isn't it okay? (I know why I think it isn't, and it's to do with "fairness" but really: if some people don't celebrate a holiday, why do they have to give gifts to the people that do celebrate that holiday, right?)...

So I dunno. All gifts this year that went outside our trio came from me, and I signed them as being from the three of us. And now Squire is in minor anguish because he didn't really send anything, and he SHOULD be in anguish, in my opinion, because people sent him things. I like to hope that this anguish will translate into him moving off his butt next year and doing something for the people who do things for him, but... am I supposed to be driving, still? Did I take my hands off the wheel too soon?

Your thoughts?

phone conversation

SQUIRE: Hey Mom.
ME: Hey.
S: What are you doing?
ME: I'm talking to you.
S: You sound sad. Are you sad?
ME: No, I'm okay. A little tired.
S: Well you can be honest with me if you are sad like you sound sad, and I think you do really sound sad for real. I trust this phone's transmitting capabilities to the full extent of... to the hilt.
ME: I... I'm fine, sweet. I'll see you soon.
S: Your laugh sounds good, now.

school in nature and books

Pretty much every year the elementary grades spend one week of school out "in the nature"-- it's camp, basically. Squire's first grade teacher didn't take them because she was afraid they'd all drown in the lake or get eaten by bears (that one did wonder for the fears of a number of students, I am sure, since she saw no situation without seeing a positively Gothic ending). But anyway, Squire's enjoyed the camps he's been to: he comes home with a dozen adventure stories, rich with the smell of campfires and unwashed boy.

He decided he didn't want to go this year because they're combining the two fifth grades and he doesn't like the other fifth graders and he particularly dislikes their teacher. He decided so firmly that he didn't even bring the forms home, so the first I heard of it was at the parent/teacher meeting when everybody was talking like they knew all about it. Awhoops: CAUGHT.

So anyway. The last week has been kind of a battle of him trying to put his foot down and me insisting that he doesn't have a leg to stand on. It is school. If he doesn't go there, I still have to send him to school every day to be babysat by the fourth grade teacher, and he still has to do the work. So. I've told him if he has a compelling reason, a logical articulated reason, then I will consider his REQUEST to not go, but he cannot REFUSE to go on the basis of "don't feel like it". We've gone rounds.

Don't get me wrong; I am not unsympathetic to disliking people. I myself dislike wide swaths of humanity. It's just, I ground my dislike in actions and outcomes. I dislike people who drive through crosswalks without checking for pedestrians because they hit me. I dislike people who are sloppy because other people have to clean up after them. I dislike teachers who talk about everything in terms of fear and danger because they frighten children into paralysis. So if he can say he dislikes this other teacher because of some action that has affected him in some way, I am behind him. But I suspect that the reason he doesn't like her is because she is the teacher of the rival class, which is the elementary school equivalent of being the coach of the opposing team: they make good lightning rods.

Since the classes will be combined next year, the sooner the two groups of students get over this rivalry and start learning to exist in each other's spheres (and respect each other's teachers) the better. I wish I knew more sports cause I bet there's a handy metaphor in their lexicon somewhere. Here: Imagine an apt sports metaphor for me, and I'll meet you in the next paragraph.

Anyway, so today he came home and said he'd decided to go because however bad the other kids would be, it wouldn't be as tedious as my constant harping on logic and reason, and the kids from his class would probably be enough fun to balance it out, and resisting it was taking the opportunity for fun out of it. He is smart, no?

So.

In other news, we're reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is just a great book to begin with and is enhanced now because I'm really enjoying Squire's interpretations of it as we go. Understand: this is a child who has not lived in the States, so on the one hand he's reading it as a foreigner would: it describes a past world that is not the world he knows or even an ancestor of a daily world he knows. On the other hand, he goes to school with a bunch of Roma kids, so he does understand what racism looks like (and xenophobia too of course) and the amount of sense it makes and what it's like to batter your head against it. And then plus there's sentences that are so simple and delightful, and the secondary characters (especially Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, who I would like to have run my house and garden respectively)-- they're like snapshots of a person you know or you'd like to know better, and it's a pleasure to read a book like this, that makes my head hum.

Practical Math

For Easter we dyed a whole carton of eggs which white eggs are not always easy to find here but we found a whole carton of them and dyed them with fantastic colors and then ate one just to see of course and took the rest to the cottage and Saturday night the Easter Bunny who had had perhaps a bit too much of the stuff with the human face hid the eggs all around the inside of the cottage, had to hide them inside because there was a snowstorm outside, and left a note telling Squire he had to find all eleven (because 12 made - 1 eaten = 11 left; Easter Bunny does math real good!) before he could get any of the chocolate; Sunday morning he was hunting and hunting and only found nine, which is amazing, because the cottage is like 9x9 feet and nearly no furniture. How hard can it be to find 2 eggs? The Easter Bunny in mufti was counting on her fingers frantically: one in the coat pocket, one in the tool box, one in the... no, we found all those! So we all got dressed and the fire was tended to and glasses were donned and the eggs were hunted ... but to no avail. Then Friar pointed out that a carton of eggs only has 10 in it here. HAD SQUIRE FOUND ALL THE EGGS? SHOW YOUR WORK.

Squire writes:

Oh, my G-O-D!
I got no real I.D.
But I say that I got one
to pass through the agencies

But no one really knows
That I like CD's
Like the rapping one's
And the Hip-Hop one's.

And then someone knows
that I got no RID
probably from the agencies
But it's too late!
I passed those stupid agencies!
Into another country-ry-ry-ry...

And when I come home,
I see a little tree,
A little Christmas tree,
Standing all alone,
In my living room,
And then I know,
That my real place is
home-ome-ome.

clearly, it's a poetic and somewhat metaphorical approach to the immigrant experience with an emphasis on the demands of paperwork, addressing the issues of identity and the definition of home in a culturally complex environment. right? or maybe he just wants to be sure we get a tree?

freedom of choices vs. freedom from choice

NIGHT 1
ME: Tonight, instead of arguing, let's vote for which game we play.
FRIAR: Catan!
ME: Catan!
SQUIRE: I want to play Clue.
ME: But we voted.
SQUIRE: I don't care.
[argue argue argue; we play Clue]

NIGHT 2
ME: Do you want to play Clue or Carcassone tonight?
SQUIRE: I want to play TransAmerica, it's my favorite.
ME: But I offered Clue or Carcassone.
SQUIRE: [heavy sigh, with drama] I guess we'll do what you want to do anyway.
ME: Well... I want to play a game.
[we play TransAmerica]

NIGHT 3:
ME: Okay, how about if you narrow it down to two games you want to play, and then we can choose one of those two.
SQUIRE: I don't want to choose only two games. I want to choose five and then you choose one of those.
ME: O... kay?
SQUIRE: Catan, Carcassone, TransAmerica, Risk, or Clue!
ME: Any of those... I guess Catan or Carcassone.
FRIAR: Catan!
SQUIRE: I don't want to play Catan.
[we play Clue and Carcassone]

Whereupon it was determined by me, who is tired of this Every Single Night, that games shall henceforth be played in alphabetical order. HA! It's a very democratic approach the games, albeit not to the players. But it is more democratic than the dictatorship we were sliding into, and sometimes in a democracy we have to do things for the common good, and it's to everybody's benefit to not have a stupid argument over what game to play every. single. night. Amiright.

11/44 = 1/4

We had the quarter-year parent/teacher conference at Squire Tuck's school. BOY do I like his new teacher. She just does so many small subtle things that I think are correct. Like she offered either individual private consultations or she said she could talk to us as a group. Offering to talk to us as a group says: We're all adults here. We're all working on the team that wants our kids educated. This runs circles around standing out in the hallway shifting our weight from one foot to the other for one or two hours, wondering what the hell was going on, and the teacher exhausted by the end. So we sat together and we all heard about little Vaclav and little Martin and little I don't know, some other kids' name that isn't actually a kid in the class. And then some parents stayed behind to talk about private concerns; I stayed behind to tell her I appreciated her approach and how much happier Squire was this year, and that I hoped she'd let us know if there was anything we could be doing.

It's always interesting to hear the parents' side of the story, isn't it? You learn so much. The mother who is defending her child's behavior is the one whose kid is a bully. The one who is surprised to hear that her kid is flailing is also the one who just had a baby. I am the only parent with a notebook for writing down what the teacher says, and I think at first that it is because one of my superpowers is Preparedness! but then it may also be because I'm the only one who can't hold a thought in her head for more than 5 minutes unless it's printed in front of me. I wonder what correlation that will be found between me and my kid, as I sit doodling in the margins of the notebook I brought and listening to the other parents.

No, yeah, I get it.

Out of the nine boys in the class, two have not yet been to the principal's office for discipline problems; one of them is our boy.The teacher says he's in his own world, and existing in that world keeps him from learning as much as he could, but he's not dragging anybody else away with him. It's both good and a little sad. The endless renderings of detailed spaceships, each window perfect, hold him drifting in orbit away from grammar and division; if he didn't have a tutor 3x a week, I doubt he'd be pulling in the Bs and Cs he's getting now. But it seems to me that now he's doing this because the schoolwork is boring and he'd prefer to draw, rather than because he is confused or because he needs the escape, so it's quite an improvement over last year. Baby steps, you know. And you could do worse than be a drawer of starships.

Last month the applications came around for the kids who want to transfer into college prep schools beginning next year. You were supposed to pay for the applications, and we didn't know, and I kept asking him about it and he didn't know, and we went rounds, and the date passed. I spent about 5 minutes being upset about it. Well, maybe a whole day. It's a door, closed, which always makes me want to kick at it. And Friar said: You cannot honestly think he could handle the workload college prep school when he can't even remember to tell us to order the applications. Which is: yeah.

This has been a Squire Tuck update.

2/44 = 1/22

Two weeks of school down. Squire's already lost his locker key and missed a couple homework assignments, but he seems to be holding onto the lunch card, which is impressive. And I think the school supplies thing went okay. Ah, the school supplies thing: I promised Julia I'd tell.

In June, the teachers hand out a list of supplies. This list is all the things the students will need in addition to the previous years' supplies, so you have to remember what all that stuff was (i.e.: the special little white shoes for gym class that became cottage shoes in the summer? remember you need to replace those now; they're not on the list) and also get the stuff that's on the list new this year ( i.e.: four paintbrushes: three large and round, one flat. The large and round ones have to be different sizes, which you didn't know, so Day1 you'll be back at the store getting different sizes). And you also have this stack of notebooks to buy, different sizes and different lines. And even different pens with different ink colors. And each notebook is supposed to have the kid's full information on it, AND a plastic cover. No store is going to have all the notebooks, all the right sized covers, all the pens. So the week before school starts is a mass of parents running around the stationery stores and already resenting the school for all of this, the purpose of which is as far as I can tell to rob you of the last week of summer.

This year I asked Friar to do the shopping with Squire, because last year I nearly had a nervous breakdown in the "tea egg and sugar company" trying to find 6 each of four different kinds of notebooks with the corresponding plastic covers. When facing a nervous breakdown: Delegate. They went to three different stores and still didn't get everything, but finally we got the whole list checked off.

And then in September you drop the kids off at the school, marching bravely through the doors in their new backpacks (when Squire started first grade, his backpack was full of so many supplies that he actually tipped over backwards), and 45 minutes later they pop back out. And the list has changed over the summer, it has always changed, and this year I realized that a Clever Parent would have waited til Day 1, asked for the list on the 45 minute day, and then gotten the stuff, because the first week of school is a JOKE and I feel like a PD Eastman dog: The parents are going around and around. "Go around again!"

Anyway, two weeks. We have the tutor again, so that's going well. And we're remembering this year that life exists beyond school. Last night we played Catan, and Squire and I worked to sing all staccato like Regina Spektor and we worked on dinner together, because it's fun, and because I maintain the hope that through cooking he'll come to appreciate a more balanced diet. Thursday night as Squire piled his plate with the third helping of pasta and cheese (our ironic nod to the Italian pasta strike), bypassing the homemade primavera sauce and the juicy chunks of chicken for which the pasta was supposed to be a side dish, I realized that he eats like a college student. First, there's the stunning quantities, with no parallel weight gain. Also, there's the fixation on white foods. In college, you gravitate towards white food cause it's easy to cook, but Squire genuinely loves the stuff. Toast! Awesome, my favorite! Pasta and white cheese, mmmmm. RAMEN NOODLES ALWAYS YUMMY. Maybe when he goes to college he'll have a love affair with vegetables just to continue in his bizarrosity.

We're doing well, I hope you are, too.

Some people think it helps to slap your forehead

We went to the beer garden yesterday to play Scrabble, which we've done nearly every night for the last week. School starts Monday, so spending every possible evening out of doors, especially for Squire, seems necessary and important. Although it was the same even temp in the apartment yesterday as it is every day, it was colder outside, and my sleeveless dress meant I was unable to spell words other than "freezing". As Squire was anyway not playing, I called him over & begged him to run back to the apartment to get me a sweater. The apartment is less than 15 minutes' stroll from the beer garden, and I thought that Squire, running like the wind, could solve my chattering teeth in about 20 minutes. Bribes were offered. Specific sweaters and their locations were mentioned.

Slightly over 30 minutes later, he ambles back. He was delayed because he went to the bathroom at home. He has a letter from the mailbox. He has his magic wand. You totally know where I'm going with this, don't you.

I myself suffer from recurrent destinesia. I will walk into the bedroom to get my glasses, stand there for a minute, dumbfounded, and wander back out again with no glasses. Did I walk in there to blink myopically at the dustmotes, or what? Ten minutes later I may even do the same thing again. However, if I say the word "glasses" before walking into the room, it kicks the brain over the barrier with ease. How could someone have a clearly described item in his mind, go for the specific purpose of getting it, have a bribe dangling at the end of the line, and ... forget?

Anyway, he went back to get the sweater, and this time it only took 20 minutes. I do understand that it was entirely my fault for forgetting to bring a sweater (I normally do, even in the hottest months), and I understand that my physical unease today is a result of my behavior, not his. However, I am a little worried about this whole "back to school" thing. Between the early onset destinesia and the new "different teacher for every class" system, I think we may have a very long year ahead of us.

The Legend of the Magic Bed

Squire Tuck returns from his week away at camp today, and I told him I'd clean his room while he was gone, because it is beyond the skills of a ten-year-old to handle the mess in there, and sometimes you need a fresh start.

As payment for my cleaning, I am stealing this story that I found in one of his notebooks, which I believe he wrote last year, and which is totally him in a nutshell. Two pages and he's nowhere near the point, and he seems to have abandoned or forgotten that he was even writing a story, and yet it has a certain undeniable charm for me anyway.

When I was in third grade our schooll took a field trip to a place very close to a very old castle to witch we one day went and I there learned about "The Legend of the Magic Bed."

The castle was very old, probably used in the 16th century, in witch Legends, Myths, and Folk Tales were once the true warmer of slaves, beggers, and other people.

Here Beggins the Legend:

In the 16th century when the castle was full of people, a servant ran to the King with a letter in his hand, and gasped: "Your Majesty, Your Majesty! A moment please." So the King folowed the servant into the "Imperial Letter Office" and read:

Dear Oulac the Imperial,

I was just going to ask my trusty servant Ivan to make me some strong coffee when he reminded me that I was to visit you for three days expect me in four hours.

Love,
Mistress Lentantribe

The servant looked at the king.