All My Friends Are Starting Kindergarten Next Week

This is the town of "year-round" school.  I talked to my mother earlier, the retired teacher, and she has never heard of such a thing.  The fuuhh?  Isn't there year-round school in every town now, or do I truly live in the asshole of the East Coast, where everything must be revised, redistricted, re-zoned, and repackaged?  How about regurgitated?

Okay, so I can see the benefits of year-round, and I will be eating the words I wrote in the previous paragraph next year at this time when I'm working 15 or more hours outside the home and have to pay for child care for two kids instead of one.  Plus I'll have a supremely bored 6-year-old instead of a somewhat bored 5-year-old clamoring at my heels for more stuff to do.  Hopefully my fifteen-plus hours a week will be able to pay for said stuff, and it'll be a non-issue.  There's also the pesky clinical research that shows year-round educated children to be superior in their test scores, having had less temporal interference between bouts of learning.  Whatever.  I'm such a curmudgeon, being all of 41 years old, and I have my weird attachment to this animal called "summer vacation," like many others my age.  True, the animal has changed quite a bit.  Gotten fat.  Instead of thriving on same-age neighbors, mud pies, cul-de-sacs and bikes, it now enjoys a less spicy mix of back yard toys with the boring siblings, parent-initiated art activities, and streaming Netflix.

Along the same curmudgeonly lines, in the above-mentioned conversation with my mother we talked about our perceptions of relationships with grandchildren.  Av was quite upset when my mom's recent week-long visit ended, and my mom expressed some surprise at this.  She holds that when we were kids, we barely spent any time with her parents, Bob and Helen (Pappy and Grammy, to us kids).  The weird thing is, I feel like we saw them all the time.  Or at least I never felt deprived of their presence the way Av seems to feel about her grandmother.  True, my mom is the only grandparent she has.  I had the full complement of four grandparents until I was ten or so.  But my mom pointed out that the memories I have of Bob and Helen are really memories of playing on the farm with my cousins, with Grammy and Pappy in the distant background putting up with our presence on their property.  To illustrate, Mom reminisced out loud about the time that we went to visit them at their winter home in Key West, and my grandfather's motorbike somehow became broken that week, although it was functional the week before and he was able to get it "fixed" the moment we were on the plane home.  He just didn't want a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old riding it, even though there were less than three miles of paved grounds in their double-wide retirement community, and the speed limit was probably 20.  Yeah, old Pappy was a bit of sourpuss.  But hey, I didn't know that at the time and I had a blast in Key West.  As I did at the farm, and what I remember is not that Pappy holed up in his barn caressing his ancient motorcycle collection until we were gone, or that Grammy stood methodically in front of her kitchen sink waiting for the kids to stop abusing her old piano.  I remember all kinds of fun times, and it seemed to me that our grandparents were a part of it.  I can only hope that Av's twice-a-year visits with her cousins will stretch out in her memory as much more than that, the way mine did.  Thank goodness for the distorted cognitions of childhood.  Or more hopefully, the inaccurate memories of curmudgeonly adults.

El's Words, Etc.

 "Hi!"

"Up"

"Mahhhmmmmeeeeeeeee..."

"Uh oh"

"Ush" (Brush)

"Hot"

"Hat"

"Aaaaaaaaapee" (Happy - her new one)

"Aieee" (Avery)

"Dad-dad"

And of course, the old standby:  "BweeeeeeeeeeeeeedabwapaghakgahkgahkdahgheEEEEEEEEahhhhgh"

Please pardon my excitement over the spewing of nonsense syllables.  I never had this with the first one, who was clear and articulate like Dame Peggy Ashcroft since age 10 months.

And then there's the dancing.  We hear music and we spin around in a drunken circle, la-la-ing along.

We look a tad like Uncle Mike in this pic

Oh, hi.

Hanging out with cousin L. in the pool

I hate this.  Obviously.

Beach.  It's hard work, Brah.

The Graduate, and Summer Kick-off

Av graduated from preschool recently, on May 27th.  Her uncle M., aunt J., and cousin L. were visiting from Seattle, so we all turned out for the big day.  There was a concert, in which the children sang the old girl scouts song "Make new friends, but keep the old....."   I tried not to cry.  Avery bowed during the applause after each song, which has become her signature move at school and she's influenced a couple of her little girlfriends to do the same. The kids went up one by one to receive their "diploma" from their teachers. I can't believe it.  Kindergarten in a few months.  Big, big, big.

So graduation ends and summer begins with our visit from my brother and family. Their toddler is growing by leaps and bounds, talking up a blue storm, and they are expecting their second baby close to L.'s second birthday.  I'd put up pics, because L. is one of the cutest babies ever to walk to planet, but she's not mine to publish.  So the millions of people who read my blog will have to eat their hearts out.  Sorry. 

The main point is that Av and El are freaking awesome, and I'm super-proud of my beautiful 5-year-old girl who is moving swiftly into a new phase of life, ready to take on the world.  I am absolutely the luckiest mom in the world.  I'd qualify that statement by saying that everybody says that, but the truth is that everybody doesn't. 

Polymath, anyone? I'm biased....a tad....

Chalkboard Easel Art, and Fashion (below), by Av

She can also solve just about any addition or subtraction problem using poker chips.  And she knows and uses the word "charcuterie."  Her new superhero name is Ainu.

I know I'm bragging on her big time, but I can't help it, okay?  It's not my fault my kids are smarter than I am.

More Fun Than A Pack Of Hairballs

Av's preschool held it's bazzillianth annual "Spring Fling,"  a huge fundraiser and super-fun event for the kids, this past weekend.  As all of us parents organize, design, plan, create, and run the entire day, she had plenty of time to anticipate it and knew a whole lot about what it was going to look like and what activities were on the docket.  The day before, by way of describing exactly how much she was looking forward to it, she declared to me that she knew it was going to be "more fun than playing with a pack of hairballs."  I replied that I certainly hoped so.

This is Av at a recent beach play date with friends. She looks cold, you say?  Yeah, that's because the water was approximately one degree fahrenheit. Five-year-olds "don't care about being cold," as she is often telling me in order to justify, say, wearing a pretty sundress to school in February, or plunging full-body into the chilly surf in late April.  I feel a moral obligation to point out that this photo wasn't taken by me, but rather by my talented friend E.J.

Ostensibly the beach is more fun than hairballs, as well.

Have Curls, Will Climb Into Baskets Meant For DVD's and Magazines

Today

Today the older one learned to zip her sweatshirt by herself.  And then she spent most of the morning up in a tree, and has the scrapes and bruises to prove it.

The little one got her first bandaid today.  It was pink.  Knee-scrape. 

These two, they're a couple of swashbucklers, I say.