Hector is back in favour

Yesterday I took Hector for a walk round the school playing fields. As I was going home, I came across 11-yo and his class-mates, on the way back to the boys' changing room. 11-yo's face suddenly made it all worthwhile, when he saw Hector, called him, scooped him up into his arms, and showed him off to his friends. "Hector, my puppy", he crooned, to the admiration of the other boys.

He put Hector down, and I turned for home. Suddenly, Hector was disappearing in the opposite direction. He'd found a piece of orange peel, picked it up, and, suspecting (correctly) that I'd take it away from him, rushed off. Heading for the nearest hiding place, he dashed straight into the boys' changing room. He was so quick that I didn't see where he'd gone, but I knew, from the shrieks of laughter and excitement coming out of the door. 11-yo sprinted after him, there was more shrieking and hilarity, and then 11-yo emerged, Hector in his arms.

Hector. You brought mirth to the First Form, raised their spirits, and gave them a story to tell over tea. You elevated 11-yo's status among his peers. Oh, the kudos of having a puppy, and a puppy who naughtily ventured into the boys' changing room!

You can stay. (But try harder on the house training, would you?)

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One wallow at the end of a summer

I've moved continents twice, and that makes me something of an expert. Expert... expat... same difference. And from my expert point of view, here is one tip. You will have days when you just need to wallow for a few hours. Go ahead and wallow. (I suppose this expert advice applies to any move, really.)

I had a wallowy day on Friday. Wednesday had been "new pupil day" for the kids. That was all fun and jollity. Thursday had been the first proper day of school, and they all came home exhausted. Their faces were white and drawn. They slumped. They had homework to do (homework on day one - what kind of unreasonable behaviour is that on the part of the teachers?). Homework is called "prep". I've never liked that. It smacks of a fib. The idea is, I'm guessing, that the children are so enthralled by their school work, that they find out what the teacher is planning on teaching the following day, and prepare themselves for it. Whereas we all know that in reality, prep is either finishing off a task that was started in class, or is an assignment related to what has already been covered. It's only very, very occasionally "prep".

I digress. Back to Thursday night. By the time slumping had been done, dinner had been consumed, and prep had been completed, it was late, the chance of an early bedtime had been blown, and I went to bed as exhausted as my children and hard-working husband, and feeling a bit of a failure, frankly. I mean, they're the ones starting a new school or new job. Friday was their second day, and I packed them off, and then had a good wallow.

I was washing up, and as I did so, I shut my eyes, and I recalled the sounds of washing up at my old sink in my old kitchen in my old home. I missed the mournful hoot of the trains. I missed Diane Ream on NPR. I missed the crickets, made noisy by the heat of the sun. I missed knowing exactly how long it would take to get to Dillons and back. I missed having a diary full of events and people. I missed my job, my MA course, my big fridge...

Then I recalled the early days in America. How I used to wash up, and shut my eyes, and miss the sounds I'd left behind in Scotland. The seagulls, the CBeebies signature tunes, the clinking of a zip against the window of the washing machine the other side of the kitchen, The Archers. I missed the shops on the High Street, the walk there and back with the stroller. I missed the busy calendar on the back of the cupboard door. I missed the sea. Boy, did I miss the sea...

It felt very strange. A deja vue, or a time warp. Memories of memories, re-feelings of feelings. It seems I have come full circle. I'm in Scotland, missing a place, where I used to stand and miss Scotland. But it isn't a full circle. It's two halves of two different circles. Life isn't always joined up, is it?

Anyway, I had a good wallow. And then I felt better. Now those are two halves of the same circle.

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It's been an education

I’m glad you enjoyed my great-great-aunt Bessie’s diary. In answer to those of you who wondered if she kept diaries beyond this one, I don’t know of any, but I will have to ask around in the family.

Now back to 2012, and with the school year drawing to a close, I have been in reflective mood. For us, it’s not just the end of the academic year, but the end of my kids’ school careers in America. Here is a letter to each of them (though only for blog readers’ eyes, not theirs).

Dear 11-yo,

Your time at school here has neatly fitted into and filled the elementary years. You started in Kindergarten and you have just graduated from Fifth Grade. You began and ended our time in America at the same school. I have loved going through the last couple of weeks of Fifth Grade with you, “crazy busy weeks” as all we moms remark to each other. Every event has felt like the scribing of a closing parenthesis, an opportunity to think back to the drawing of the opening parenthesis. How different the one is from the other!

(Field Day), for example. I loved my final Field Day. I felt mellow, relaxed, happy. I know so many of the moms, the teachers, the kids. I know what snow cones are. I know what to expect. I know what to volunteer for, and – crucially – what to avoid. I know how to be me in that situation. Five years ago was my first Field Day (I wrote a blog post about it), and it was all so new. New and fun, new and exciting, but new and unsettling too. I knew hardly anyone. I wondered what a snow cone was. I was trying to be someone, but without knowing who.

(Talk about Scotland), for another example. I came into your class to talk about Scotland and your new school. You and I did a PowerPoint presentation together. That’s what Fifth Graders do. You’d helped me put it together, looking for pictures of Edinburgh Castle and Loch Ness on Google Images. I remember coming into Kindergarten to talk about Scotland and your old school.  I’d asked you beforehand what differences you’d noticed between school in Scotland and school in America. You said “When we line up in America to go to a different classroom or out into the playground, we just line up in a line. In Scotland, when we lined up, we had a partner and we had to hold hands.” “Anything else?” “Those hanging-down things in the dining room. We didn’t have those in Scotland.” America. Land of the free, home of the brave, nation of moveable track-mounted partitions in school dining rooms.

Dear 8-yo,

You were a tot when we came to America. You started at a “Mom’s Day Out” one morning a week. You were in a little class of five girls. You loved it. Next was pre-school, a year of Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and then a year of five mornings a week. You were so ready for school when the time came. I’d lost my hair to chemotherapy when you started Kindergarten. I hoped I didn’t embarrass you, coming into the classroom to help with “reading centers” in my cap.

Now you’re finishing Second Grade. There was one day last week when all the other grades were out on field trips, and the teachers let you run through the hallways shouting “Second Grade Rules!” I agree. You do!

You’re still not quite big enough and brave enough to stand outside the school door next to that gaggle of fourth and fifth graders, but you hate to be late, so we have to time our morning arrival to the minute. You’re half way through elementary school – “grade school” as they call it – and your tot days seem very distant indeed.

Dear 14-yo,

You’ve experienced all three stages of American schooling. A year and a half in elementary school, three in middle school, and one in high school. Middle School in the parentheses of Elementary School and High School. More parentheses! The three schools are all part of one school, on one campus, and I’ve been glad for that. The transitions have been easy.

Your round, full fourth-grade face is now shaped and chiseled, with cheek bones and a chin. You regularly check to see if you’re taller than me, and last time we compared, we decided that yes, that day had come. Your legs and arms are those of a sportsman. Your backpack is sometimes so heavy, I hesitate to lift it, but you swing it over a shoulder multiple times a day. You’ve seen all three stages, but I’m sure it’s the High School year that will remain with you most. You’ve loved the freedom, the fun, the adult-ness of it.

You’ve borne the brunt of our parental ignorance. You’ve had to teach us as you’ve learnt. “Getting to Regionals is a big deal, Mom.” “Everyone calls Coach ‘Coach’.” “If the flag touches the ground when you take it down, they have to throw it away (but I don’t think they always do).”

You came as a child, and you leave with the man in you emerging, almost here. You walk tall. The school has served you well.

Everyone clucked their teeth as we left Scotland. I know they did, even if they didn’t do it to my face. Schools… education… what would it be like? How would they compare? How would our children ever fit back into the British system? And I’d be lying if I denied that their unspoken thoughts tapped into my own deep anxieties. Let’s face it, education is something of a British obsession. I just held on to the thought that whatever they lost in flip-flopping between education systems, they would gain in life experience.

You know what? The education has been one of the greatest benefits of our time here. At their schools, our children have been motivated, stretched, enthusiastic, (well, at times enthusiastic-ish), and – most important by a long chalk – happy.  I’ve probably got rose-tinted specs on, feeling a little sentimental as we leave, and we haven't done the "fitting back in" yet, but the specs are only slightly tinted and I'm feeling confident about the "fitting back in".  I’ve had my reservations off and on about some of the academics (weekly newsletters from teachers with grammar and spelling mistakes), and there was a year when one of them wasn’t happy, but wasn’t exactly unhappy either. Otherwise, they’ve been happy - truly happy. Three children, for a combined total of 14 school years, happy. That’s an A+ for the schools here, in my book.

Back to school

I don't know if you remember, but way back last August, I enrolled to do a Masters in Christian Ministry. I've just completed the first year. It's the big casualty of our move back to the UK. I would love to finish it, not only for the content per se, but also for the sense of achievement that would be. I have occasionally fantasised about graduating - gown, hat, certificate, that kind of thing - and it's always felt good.

People here ask if I can transfer the credits and finish in a university in Britain, but I don't think British universities are open to that kind of credit trading (I may be wrong here). They then look at me with a "wot?" expression on their faces, because that is so very standard over here. But credit transfer or no credit transfer, I am hoping to continue in some shape or form. The city we will be living in has a university known for its theology department, and I'm hoping they will have me. The only question is whether to try and sneak in this autumn (which feels rather overwhelming), or to take a year to settle, focus on the family, and apply for next year, giving myself time to think more carefully about what area of theology I want to engage with, and to do lots of preparatory reading. I think I've just answered that question for myself.

Husband is enjoying having a nascent theologian in the family. I use words like 'theodicy' and 'post-modern' quite a bit, and have opinions on the way the Enlightment has affected the church. I no longer say things like "I suppose God might be a Trinity, but who knows? and why would it be important anyway?" (though hmmm... my old self did have a good point, come to think of it...).

I started the course (you may remember) with the attitude of "well, this might be fun, and you never know where something may lead, and I can always drop out if I don't like it". I was wondering if I should get a job instead. I'm so glad I tried the Masters, though. It's been like a door opening into an intriguing new world. I have struggled with some things. It hasn't been an easy ride at all. I have found some of the ideas difficult to grasp, I have discovered strong and uncomfortable opinions I didn't know I held, I've not always found my classmates easy to be alongside. But... I have loved it. I have loved going out on a Monday evening and leaving everything else behind (bad timing, though, Monday evening). I have loved the intellectual challenge. I have loved the confidence that comes with having to give class presentations. I have loved rediscovering rusty academic abilities. All those skills developed of old, which have laid dormant for 25 years - they're all still there. It was like meeting old friends. For example, I couldn't think of a conclusion for one essay I was doing, so I simply typed the sub-title "Conclusion" above the last paragraph I'd written, and ta-da, job was done. I found I'd said all I wanted to say, and had already summed it up adequately. Then I thought to myself "oh yes, I remember that old trick now". See? An old friend.

I could write at length about the topics I've covered, but you might be tempted to insert "Conclusion" before long, so I'll keep it brief. One of the really great things about the course is that it gives students a lot of freedom to pursue our individual interests - you'll see that in each of the four classes I've taken.

Church History
I thought this would be dull and boring, but, as I wrote on the course evaluation, "I have discovered my inner church historian". It makes so much sense of present day situations, if you have even a very scant knowledge of the history of the faith. For my paper on the topic of my choice, I wrote about the Crusades and Modern Day Guilt. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Christian/Muslim relations are going to be increasingly important in the century we've just begun, and I feel that the Christian church in Europe has a deep sense of guilt over the Crusades that somehow stands as an invisible block. So I looked at the whole topic of whether you can apologise for wrongs carried out in past generations. I discovered that there have been attempts by groups of Christians to do just that, and plenty of historians who say that the Crusades were such a mess, over so long a period of time, that it's impossible to say who should apologise to whom. I also discovered a rather fascinating 13th century theologian, called Ramon Llull, who wins the prize for having the most L's in a 5-letter surname, and who would be an excellent PhD subject, because he lived in Majorca, and of course any serious research into his life and writings would necessitate several lengthy trips.

Leadership 
I'm not in any position of church leadership, so I didn't think this would be terribly relevant to me, but a lot of it was about the development of personal spirituality, and so it was. Terribly relevant. I did a rather zappy presentation (though I say it myself), with photos and youtube clips, on Women and Body Image. I based it on two texts which had nothing to do with church or religion, but tried to think about how good theology could, and should, enable women to feel better about their bodies. We do not HAVE bodies; we ARE bodies. Why do we all fall victim to the idea that there is a perfect standard to which we should attain? What can we do about the fact that most women feel their bodies are so un-perfect? I can't remember how I tied that into "leadership", but as I said, the course is pretty flexible in that way.

Basic Theology
Yes, well, in my opinion there is nothing basic about theology, so that's an oxymoron right there before we've even started. My special topic was the Problem of Evil (Guilt and the Crusades, Women and Body Image, the Problem of Evil... I am nothing if not ambitious in my choice of topics). I didn't reach any conclusion on that thorny old problem of why an omnipotent, all-good God would allow evil and suffering in the world, but I had a pretty good canter round the course. I still think that if I was God, I'd have done things a bit differently, but, well, I'm not. And I guess God knows what he's doing. I sat in on one of Husband's undergrad classes, which was fun.

Dimensions of Worship
Ooh, this was fun. We had to go to worship service in two churches outside our own tradition, and then reflect and write on the experience. I went to the Eastern Orthodox Cathedral in town, which was beautiful, and an Episcopal service, beautiful in a different way. If I'd had more time (wasn't getting the house ready to sell, dealing with the prospect of an international move, single-parenting while Husband was away), I would have made the effort to venture further outside my comfort zone. I wanted to go to the church of the African American pastor who came to speak to the class, and respond with a vigorous "Ay-men" after each and every one of his sentences (can't you just see me?). Maybe I'll have time over the summer to do that, before we leave. There was a section on the Arts in Worship, and (for all the aforementioned reasons), I cheated, by digging out an old blog post - one which I'm very fond of, actually - imagining Jesus paying a visit to the toy shop where I work, and trying to recast it as a drama skit. I'm embarrassed even just writing that, and it didn't work very well at all, but it achieved my main objective which was to do with being brave, and speed rather than quality. Oh, and I also did a presentation on Food and Worship, in which I looked at the totally dysfunctional relationship our culture has with food. And gave everyone Ghiradelli dark chocolate to eat.


So there we are. Doing the MA was one of the best decisions that I've made. As I said in an email to the Prof in charge of the course, "It has been fun and exciting, opened new windows for me, challenged me, nurtured me, given me confidence, and enriched my life". It also taught me that sometimes the best decisions are ones that don't seem to make a huge amount of sense, and you're not sure why you're making them. Hurrah for randomness in life. And maybe it isn't randomness. 

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Finest parenting moments

The other day, at dinner, 11-yo stood up, in order better to access his trouser pocket, and grinning, fished a many-times-folded piece of paper out. He handed it to me, and it took a while to unpeel the layers. When I did so, I recognised the homework I'd helped him type out the night before. 


Fifth Grade had been set the task of writing a poem, titled Springtime. He'd done that, and then a couple of evenings later, they'd been given back their texts, and asked to type them out - for display purposes. When he sat down at the computer, it was late, he was tired, and I thought the point of the assignment was creative writing rather than typing practice, so I said I'd type it for him. It took me no time at all (I'm a touch typer).


Ladies and Gentleman, for your delectation and delight, here is the poem that he submitted to his teacher, (which describes his memories of his grandmother's garden).

Springtime

By 11-yo

When I look outside my window, I see lush green grass and tall trees. I see purple flowers with yellow and red. There are pink blossoms in the trees and thorns on the branches. There is a vine of colourful flowers climbing down the brick wall of the house.

Sometimes there are rabbits, birds, squirrels, and deer. I can see the farm next door, and hear the cows mooing. There are young sparrows chirping in the tall trees.

The sky is blue and speckled with puffy shit clouds, and birds flying high in the air. The sun is shining with puffs of wind swaying the tree branches.

One word had been circled by the teacher, with the comment "oops" written above. Have you spotted it? Luckily, she has a good sense of humour, and thought it was very funny. She made it into a joke between herself and 11-yo, not to be shared with the rest of the class, and she and he had a good laugh privately about it (you have to remember that Americans are much more offended by this kind of bad language than Brits, so this is a much bigger deal here). When she and I emailed about it, she said that actually, what had amused her most was that when she first pointed it out to 11-yo, he told her I'd "helped him" type it, rather than saying I'd typed it. Which only goes to show that as an exercise in choosing words carefully, the poetry homework had served its purpose.

And here's a little secret addendum to the story, between you, and me, and 11-yo, which I didn't confess to his teacher. I originally typed it as puffy shite clouds, noticed, had a laugh with 11-yo, and then corrected it. But I wasn't paying attention, and my subconscious obviously spotted an opportunity for a bit of a joke at the expense of my conscious. Damn you, Subconscious, though I like your style.

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The shape of childhood

Talking about jam sandwiches, as we were, this seems a good moment to try out one of my theories on you. I have decided that childhood - from a parent's point of view - is like a sandwich. It goes like this.

The years from 0 to 5 are full of change. You can hardly keep up. As soon as you've got used to one stage, you're through it and into the next. Each one greets you not in some considered way, but in a bewildering moment that you feel unprepared to deal with. Your child grows, changes, evolves all the time, and it's easy to feel you're hurtling down a bobsled run without a clue of what's round the next corner.

Then they go to school, and it all calms down a bit, after the initial learning curve (less of a learning curve than a climbing wall where you are roped together with other parent climbers, all of you puzzling how to use the crampons). Between the ages of 5 and 13 or 14, the whole process slows down. The child still grows, still learns about the world, still explores themselves. They have their highs and lows, their joys and woes, and you are part of that. But it feels like it's more of the same. More birthday parties, just with the participants getting bigger year by year. More homework and projects, just with the subject matter getting harder and the level more challenging. More fun and activities, just with the children's energy levels and abilities increasing, whilst your own ones are decreasing. Time can go by frighteningly fast, but the milestones become familiar, and it's a question of "gosh, another school term over already", rather than "what the heck is happening here?". The bobsled run has levelled out into a road that you can see ahead, winding across a gently-sloping plateau.

You've been lulled into a false sense of security. Watch out. When your oldest starts secondary education, you're hurtling down the bobsled run again, banging into the sides, rolling round the corners at alarming angles. Secondary school is a new, bigger climbing wall, without any crampons at all. The parent ropes are much harder to tie, because you're not meeting daily in the classroom or at the gate. The kids are growing, changing, evolving with the speed that they did when toddlers. They suddenly develop new skills and interests, and want to know where the boundaries are. Those boundaries aren't just a gentle expansion of existing ones, as you've become used to, but the edges of whole new territories. You are careering downhill again, and the speed is faster and you have less control than ever before. It feels like there's more at stake, too.

When I had a toddler, I hated that remark that was sometimes tossed my way "Oh, just wait till they're teenagers". I vowed I'd never say that to anyone. But I do offer you my sandwich model. The three stages of childhood. What do you think?

My favourite character

My favourite character in the Bible is Jonah. Not very seasonal. You thought I was going to say Mary or Joseph, or possibly a shepherd, didn't you? Well, ha ha. Wrong! My favourite character, by a long chalk, is Jonah.

Jonah is best remembered for that stint in the whale, but the rest of his story is the best bit. He gets to Ninevah, where God sent him in the first place, and he preaches to them, and they all go "Hey, yes, Jonah has a point". They repent, and live happily ever after, and Jonah says "See, God? I told you there was no point me coming here. You make me so angry. And now you're probably expecting me to be all glad and joyous that the Ninevites have repented, but I'm not. I'm angry and I'm grumpy. Aaaaargh, I'm so angry I can't even speak. I'm going to sit under this tree in the shade and be really really angry". And the story ends with God trying to get Jonah's attention, and Jonah sitting in a great big wallowing grump, probably the emotional equivalent of the belly of the whale, and not talking to him. It's marvellous.

When I get to Heaven, the first thing I'm going to do is find Jonah. I'm going to sit right down next to him, under that tree, and I'm going to join in his great big long eternal grump. And I'm going to enjoy every eternal minute of it. I think he and I will get on really well.

We'll start with schools. I don't know if he had much experience of schools, or even had children, but I expect he did. I mean, that whole whale episode was so designed to be a Favourite Kids' Bible Story down the ages, it smacks of someone who knows about children. So we'll get started on schools, and how teachers can ruin your week by expecting you to help your child produce a project, on a huge piece of poster board, about Christmas traditions in some selected nation of the world, by Friday. Don't they KNOW how much some children hate doing projects on poster boards? Don't they REALISE that Friday is very soon after Monday? (and ok, ok, I could have read the homework page on the website, or maybe my child could have communicated to me, but GET REAL, this is life). Does anyone CARE about Christmas traditions in France? I will ask Jonah if they had the tradition of teachers' seasonal gifts back in his time. You know the one. Where you feel obliged to contribute to a pot of money for someone who is doing their job, just like all the rest of us are doing our jobs. But most of us don't have jobs that involve innocent adults having to help with projects on poster board. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

You see, Heaven will be Heaven, because it will be full of people who have noticed the poster board thing. I am sure of it. I'm guessing quite a few thousand of them will have drifted towards Jonah and his tree, and it will be FABULOUS, because we can complain about poster board projects endlessly (literally endlessly). And if we get bored with that, we can move on to children and their incapacity not to strew chaos everywhere (Heaven is going to be self-tidying, did you know that?), the Post Office, churches and all their members, the media, adolescents who answer every question with "I dunno" but manage to leave out all the consonants so that it sounds like a nasalised "I uuuhhh", tax forms, sleepovers, McDonalds, customers who want to tell you about their trip to England which happened so long ago they can't remember the names of any of the places they went to, the quirks of Blogger, apostrophes in the wrong place's, library fines, and families who have the nerve to get together at Christmas - together, I tell you! - without those of their number who live on a different side of an ocean.

So Jonah, hang on in there, up there, or wherever the Nth dimension is. I am coming. I'm going to join your club. I bet it's the coolest one in town (does Heaven have towns?), with all the anarchists, the Occupy Cities people, the trailing spouses, the disgruntled mums, and all those people who just can't face the shiny smiley ones over the other side of the cloud. We will eat far too much chocolate and drink far too much wine, and be really really grumpy all the time, without it mattering one single jot. We will whitter and whinge to our hearts' content, and dance to the very loud music of rejuvenated punk rockers dressed in bin liners with safety pins through their noses and lips, who will be tediously smug about how they started the whole body-piercing craze.

And ha! I've just had a brilliant idea! We will do poster board projects... about teachers. We'll do them badly, without reading the instructions, and hand them in late (we'll need a philosopher or two to help us out with the concept of "late" in an eternal setting). Ooooh. I'm looking forward to it already.



Picture credit: phillipmartin.info

Adding infancy to injury

It's bad enough trying to get to grips with school years being called "grades" and how the numbers equate, when you arrive in the US. Then there's the whole issue of college years. For a long while, that was just a mystery to me, until I took the bull by the horns, googled the answer, and then spent a few minutes chanting "freshman, sophomore, junior, senior" to myself, until it became ingrained in my mind. Not ingrained in the same way that it's ingrained if you've lived through it yourself and it becomes second nature, but ingrained enough for day-to-day purposes.

What I hadn't realised was the extent to which High School grades use this terminology too. So it's no good that I know that High School is grades 9 to 12. Nobody talks about 9th grade. I now have to shelve that knowledge, and start talking about 14-yo as a freshman. "He's in his freshman year at High School" I say.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "wow, those expat mums are so impressive... We really have no idea the burdens they carry... Someone, give them an award".

At least you'll be comforted to know that I'm not alone in my struggles. I have a helpmeet in the form of 7-yo. She has recently been reading Dick King-Smith's "Sophie" books. When Sophie starts school, there is talk of her brothers being in the juniors. This confused 7-yo, so I explained. It's nothing to do with being college juniors or high school juniors. In England, Kindergarten, first and second grades are called "Infants" and third, fourth and fifth grades are called "Juniors". So far, so straightforward. (I was a bit hazy on the exact demarcation, but given that these things vary from LEA to LEA, and given that I'm not sure that terminology is still used in any case, I didn't worry too much.)

A few minutes later, 7-yo came back with further questions about "Insults and Juniors".

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More second grade homework

I wrote recently about 7-yo’s homework, and how I hate the way she is being taught ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways to interpret passages of English. It’s getting worse. Could you bear it if I whinged on about it again? Given that you, my readers, are among some of the finest writers I've ever come across (and I sincerely mean that), let's see how you'd fare in second grade English homework.

Sam swims quickly.
Sam swims well.

Question : What is the best way to combine these two sentences?
Answer (choice of 4):

1. Sam swims quickly and Sam swims well.
2. Sam swims quickly, well.
3. Sam swims quickly, well too.
4. Sam swims quickly and well.

The right answer is number 4. But 7-yo had chosen number 1. I have to say I agree with her. That sentence has a lovely rhythm. It’s almost like a nursery rhyme or chant. It echoes the movement of someone swimming front crawl. It has a symmetry. It swings along. I actually quite like numbers 2 and 3 as well.

Of course it depends on your definition of “what is the best way…”. I note that it doesn’t say “what is the correct way…” (thank goodness). I would prefer to see it rephrased “what do you think you’re meant to think is the best way…”. At least that would be good early training in exam technique.

I’m sure you’re going to say that it’s important for second graders to learn grammar, and that these are just grammar exercises, and won’t quash her literary creativity. And you’re probably right. But the words “dumbing down” spring inexorably to mind. (Perhaps I wouldn’t mind so much if the letters that have come home from the three primary schools my children have attended weren’t sprinkled with typos and grammatical mistakes.)

Then I stopped to think. Do I care so much about how her brain is being trained in maths? Or any other subject? Do I have a strong opinion on what she should or shouldn’t be doing in PE? Do I react so strongly, either positively or negatively, when she talks about what she’s done in Art or Music? The answer to all these is no, not really. Opinions here and there, varying from mild to strong, but nothing gets under my skin to the same degree as her English homework. This says more about me, than about the education system (though I think my opinions stand, none the less).

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about being a parent, it’s that you learn such a lot about yourself in the process. I knew all along that I love words, and that how we put them together is important to me. I didn’t need the reminder of 7-yo’s homework really. But it’s interesting to see what things push our own personal buttons.

What I wrote... What I wanted to write...

What I wrote

Dear Teacher of 7-yo

I wanted to write to tell you how sorry I am to hear you are leaving. I understand you have personal reasons for relocating with your family to another state. I do wish you well. 7-yo will miss you. She has made a really great start to Second Grade. Thank you so much for the way you have encouraged her. She is happy in the classroom and eager to learn. Thank you for that.

What I wanted to write

Dear Teacher of 7-yo

Nooooo.... You can't go. You can't. 7-yo loves you. She cried yesterday when you told the class you were going. You're a brilliant teacher. Softly-spoken, serene, fair, kind, an encourager, a piquer of children's curiosity. You teach them to love learning and have fun. Don't go... There should be a rule that says good Second Grade teachers can't leave mid-year. A law. I'm going to write to President Obama. Waaaah...

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Things that aren't right with education

Oh, don't get me started. Truly. This is the stuff of many a conversation in our household. Kind of goes with the territory if you're married to a Philosophy Professor. I tell you, "evaluation" is a more-than-four-letter word in this house. (Come to think of it, it probably is in your house too.)

So I'm not going to get all ranty about the education system. The school year has been underway a couple of weeks here, so we are almost in full swing, ahead of you, my fellow compatriots-by-birth-not-current-location.

However, I do just want to share with you something that happened with 7-yo, which was one of those moments where she discovered that sometimes you do your best, and it's not right, or not good enough. I hate that. What mother doesn't hate that for her small child?

She was showing me a couple of passages that she'd had to read and answer questions on. I think we used to call them 'comprehension exercises' - I don't know if they still do. The first one was about a girl named Frida, going off to camp to learn to play tennis. On the bus, Frida looks for her best friend, named Gina (not Saturda or Sunda, which would have been more logical), who wasn't there. So she sat next to another girl, Elaine. When she got to camp, she found out that Gina wasn't coming as she was ill. "Frida was sad" the passage tells us. "She wanted to play tennis with Gina". But she played with Elaine instead. The passage goes on "The girls learned how to hit the ball." Oh yes. That would be useful for playing tennis. It concludes by saying that Frida missed Gina, but still enjoyed herself. The next day, she told Gina about camp and about Elaine, and couldn't wait to share her new friend with her best friend.

Most of the questions on the passage were multiple choice, but one of them asked

Why is Gina's illness important to the story? Include details from the story in your answer.

7-yo wrote:

Frida and Gina are Best friends. Frida missed Gina very much.

an answer which was deemed inadequate. Wah. Honestly, I think 7-yo had just missed the ending of the story, which was on the back of the page, and maybe there's a lesson there about remembering to turn the page over. But I also think that even if she'd read to the end, her answer stands. I'm guessing the correct answer would be something like "Because Gina was ill, Frida made a new friend, Elaine. Frida would not have played with Elaine if Gina had not been ill." But I like 7-yo's response. She's bringing of herself to the story. To her, the most important thing was that Frida missed Gina very much. (And, between you and me, I think she did well to skip that bit about introducing a new friend to a best friend, because we all know what a recipe for upset that can be.)

I comprehend that the exercise was all about comprehension of the passage, and not designed to encourage personal response to literature, but I think that's sad. The idea that there's a right and wrong answer when you're talking about plot and character seems very limiting. I know I'm over-thinking this, but you would too, if you'd seen 7-yo's big blue sad eyes, as she asked "why did I only get 11 out of 13?", and I had to tell her that she's not always going to get full marks for everything and that that's ok. And adding that sometimes the questions are a bit silly, or open to misinterpretation, and then you just have to know that it's the question that's wrong and not you. Was that the right answer? I don't know.

Then there was the second passage, all about Mr Garcia, who brought a guinea pig into his classroom, and how excited the children all were. One of the children, Paula, held the guinea pig, and whispered to it "Welcome to our class". Aw. Anyway, 7-yo had to say what "whisper" meant from the following four options: shout, soft voice, loud voice, friendly tone. She picked "friendly tone", which wasn't the correct answer. But she explained to me that in the story, Paula knew the guinea pig would be frightened by all the people, so she whispered to it because she wanted to help it not to be frightened, and so that was being friendly to it, wasn't it? So "whisper" DID mean "friendly tone" in this story, didn't it?

All this over-thinking. Can't imagine where she gets it from.

One more thing. Can schools puh-lease stop giving our children stories to read about cute dogs and sweet little guinea pigs? At least until after Christmas. If they insist on stories about dogs, the narrative should be full of details about vet bills, boarding kennel bills, unpleasant poop-scooping, and walking out in the wind and rain when you'd rather be inside watching television.

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What can really only be described as rambling

OK, so here I am on the other side. Of the Atlantic. This isn’t a mystic voice from beyond the grave or anything. But you probably knew that. Oooh, I was about to write “But you probably knew that already”, which just goes to show. Year by year, day by day, sentence by sentence, I am being tweaked and shaped, and I become less and less the two people I flit between, UK and US, and more and more the one hybrid lump of somewhat amorphous personhood that… oooh, “somewhat”. Did you spot that?



For thus it is. The longer we live here in the Midwest, the more I become me, in this life that is my life. I’m no longer constantly surprised that it is my life. I don’t spend so much mental energy on comparisons and analysis. I’ve got used to the loss of many of the things I’ve had to let go of (not all…), and I’ve got used to carrying round the new things I’ve acquired. It’s just me, here or there. I’m feeling what the French would call “dans ma peau”, meaning literally “in my skin”. Very good expression, don’t you think? It’s rather taken me by surprise, because these transitions from one location to the other, from one culture to the other, are usually rather difficult. I know, too, that homesickness is a spooky lurking beast, and can pop out unexpectedly when you round a corner, so don’t be surprised if my next post is all about how much I miss England and how miserable I am.



For the moment, however, and we all know that the moment is the best place to live, life is good and seems full of potential. Today the kids are all back at school. I am debating whether to go back to the toy shop, which is fun, but has - as I predicted - rather lost its novelty, and is appallingly badly paid. I am capable of so much more, and as Husband’s teaching schedule this year means that he would be free to do school pick-ups, I have the freedom to explore. So I am job-hunting. I applied for a job online, but logged out half way through the process. I hadn’t got round to logging back in and finishing the form, when, blow me down, quick as a wink, the next morning I woke to find they’d sent me an email saying thanks but no thanks. This serves to confirm my worst anxieties about Corporate America. Way too flash fast for plodding-along me. But I know you’re all going to tell me not to be discouraged, and yes, you’re right. I will persevere.



The other idea that’s bumbling around in my head is to do an MA. My thought process goes like this. I can do an MA for free at Husband’s university. Ooh, good deal. What do they offer that I could do and that would be interesting and useful? (You have to remember it’s a small private university with a very small graduate programme, so the answer is not going to take long.) An MBA? Well, that would certainly look good on my cv, but it looks like you can’t really do it unless you’re in a job that will let you do on-the-job projects and assessments. And an MBA? Me? Really? Moving on… Counselling and Family Therapy. No. Not for me. At least not from that side of the table. Christian Ministry? An MA in Christian Ministry? Hm… Well, I don’t want to be a Christian minister… But it does look interesting. Some of it, anyway. And what’s this bit here? “You don’t have to be preparing for ordination or Christian leadership to take this course. Many of our students sign up for their own personal development.” Ooh, sounds like me. I’ve already spoken to Husband’s colleague who runs the programme, and he said he’d be happy to have me. Wa-hey! The only snaffoo (just learnt that word, isn’t it great?) with the idea is that I have discovered that although it’s billed as a freebie for families of employees of the university, it’s a taxable benefit and therefore does have a financial implication. Given the huge fees that people pay for these kinds of courses, even just paying the tax on it is significant. Plus there's the ginormous loss of earnings that I could potentially enjoy in my new, reinvented, Iota as Corporate Princess, “who needs to fill out a whole application form, can’t you see how impressive I am from the first half?” self.

So… job or MA, job or MA, or shall I just go back to the toyshop and potter along? Options, options.



Meanwhile, back at the first day of school for my kids, I have to just tell you that I am super-impressive in the whole area of school supplies these days. Gone are the laborious hours wandering round Target, Wal-mart, Hobby Lobby, Office Max and wherever else the last person mentioned, lists clutched in sweaty hands, wondering why on earth it has to be a pink eraser, not an eraser of the colour of my choice. I am now Supplies Queen. I know that all erasers are pink (except those white polymer ones), so that pink erasers are easy to find! I know what a 1½” 3-ring binder with an accordion folder inside is. Yes, I do! I know what a folder with brads is. Ha! I know that… sshhhh… it doesn’t always matter if what you get isn’t exactly what is specified on the list. Is it really going to matter if your child has a 2” notecard ring instead of a 1” one? No! I am so obviously Supplies Queen that I’m surprised Target hasn’t made me a crown using their construction paper (one pkg, any colour), dry erase markers (pack of 4, thick, different colours), 3” x 5” plain white index cards, 7” pointed Fiskars scissors, and Elmers glue.



But pride comes before a fall, so I must temper my self-adulation, and tell you that having a child start High School puts you right back at the bottom of the pile. You know how it felt when your child started Kindergarten or Reception, and everyone else seemed to know what was going on except you? Well, High School brings that feeling back with what might be called a vengeance.



And now, since this is 1,000 words and already too long, I’m going.

State fair

In this post, I’m taking part in a blog party 'Around the World in a Day' at Happy Homemaker UK.



When we first arrived here, my oldest went into fourth grade, just at the point when the class was learning all the states in the US. This involved being able to place them on a map, and knowing their postal abbreviations and capitals. This was a rather daunting task for him, to say the least, so I said I’d do it with him. It was something of a challenge for me too, since my geography of the US was so bad that I didn’t get much beyond knowing that California was on the west coast, New York on the east, and we were somewhere in the middle. So we plodded through together, and now, if I’m ever on your pub quiz team, I will be able to help out with the location of all the states and their postal abbreviations (so many beginning with M, it’s just crazy - you darn Americans, you should have set a cap on the number of states allowed to begin with the same letter). I’ve forgotten all the capitals, though. Sorry.

So now my second child is in fourth grade, and has been through the same exercise. I didn’t volunteer to do it with him, but instead came up with a suitable bribe, and the deed was duly done over the course of a few weeks. But they’ve introduced a new project since oldest learned his states. Each child picks the name of a state out of a hat, and then has to research that state, and put together a report and a scrap book. I remember oldest doing a scaled down version of this (he got Wisconsin), but it’s since really blossomed into a magnum opus. The children wrote to the relevant state tourist office in class, so the first task was to intercept the brochure which arrived and not chuck it in the bin with the other junk mail. The report had to include a rough draft as well as a final copy, an outline (I never did quite understand what this was, but it involved writing in bubbles), and a bibliography citing at least three different sources. The scrap book was to supplement the report, with illustrations and… oh heck, you all know what a scrap book is.

Hurrah for the good luck with which 10-yo picked Colorado out of the hat. It’s an interesting and picturesque state, and we’ve been there, which surely helped. So, following the suggested format, Husband and I helped 10-yo put together a report about Colorado’s geography, history, flag, emblems, state government, famous people, main industries, places to visit, sports teams, and ‘fun facts’. You might know that Colorado has the highest mean altitude of all the states, but I bet you didn’t know that Colfax Avenue in Denver is the longest continuous street in America, or that Colorado is one of only two states in which all the water in the state flows out of it and none flows in. (Brownie point to anyone who can name the other one.) We helped him cut out pictures from the tourist office brochure, draw maps, and stick in photos of our own Colorado experiences.

Then last week, the children hosted The Second Annual Fourth Grade State Fair. (Yes, the Second Annual one… I don’t make this stuff up, you know). The school gym was duly decorated in red, white and blue, and each child had half a long table on which to display his or her scrap book and report, and any items that represented the state in some way. They were allowed to offer food items (this being America, where the policy ‘no snack left behind’ is in full operation). And they were to dress in an appropriate costume. Thus it was that 10-yo borrowed some ski goggles, and donned his snow boots, his winter coat and a woolly hat, and brandishing a couple of ice axes that I hardly even knew we possessed (maybe I really did marry an axe murderer by mistake), declared himself an ice-climber. His half of the table displayed a pair of hiking boots, a few boxes of ‘Celestial Seasonings’ tea (one of the biggest herbal tea companies in the world, which started with one Coloradoan gathering and drying wild herbs), and a little glass vial of iron pyrite, the substance known as ‘fool’s gold’ which we had panned from a stream when visiting an old gold mine on one of our trips (and which 10-yo insists is actually real gold). The food he offered was potato chips (crisps, to you Brits), because they grow a lot of potatoes in Colorado. By a stroke of happy luck, I just happened to be in a health food shop a few days beforehand, and spotted a brand called ‘Boulder potato chips’, which hailed from Boulder, Colorado. How clever was that?! (and they were even on special offer).

I thoroughly enjoyed the Second Annual Fourth Grade State Fair. It opened with the children singing a couple of songs, my favorite being ‘The Nifty Fifty’, which included a rapid run-through of all fifty states in alphabetical order. Quite a feat of memory and verbal articulation. Then the fourth graders took their places at their tables, and we all circulated round the displays, ‘we’ being the fourth grade parents, and kids and teachers from other grades.

The children were happy and confident, and as you approached their stand, they would readily engage you in conversation and share their knowledge about their state. This is one great benefit that my kids will have received from an education here. They are taught to present confidently and clearly. They have no problem addressing you as you walk up, saying “Would you like me to tell you about Vermont?” or “My state is Hawai’i. Would you like to sample some pineapple?” It will be a useful life skill, and not one we teach in the UK (not as far as I know). I loved the costumes: a cowboy from Oklahoma, a southern belle from Georgia, a scientist from Maryland, the Statue of Liberty from New York State. The snacks were fun and varied: fruit of many kinds, fish sticks, bread, cheese, green jello (looking at you, Utah), Ritz crackers (I thought they originated at the Ritz Hotel in London, but apparently they’re from Maryland), rice krispy cakes (did you know that Arkansas produces half the rice grown in the US?) and various drinks, including milk, which is the state beverage of several states. Who knew?

I loved the enthusiasm of the fourth graders to share the wonderfully random ‘fun facts’. The official state cookie of Maryland is the chocolate chip (yes… some states have official state cookies). In Oklahoma it is illegal to take a bite out of someone else’s hamburger, and you may not take elephants into the downtown area of Tulsa. Also in Oklahoma, women may not gamble in the nude, in lingerie, or while wearing a towel. Good to know.

All in all, it was a great event, an imaginative culmination to the state projects. If I was American, it would have made me proud to be American. As a resident alien (yay), it made me reflect on really how incredible the USA is. What a land of plenty, and variety, and beauty. So much to offer “from sea to shining sea” as the words of America the Beautiful go. You may not know, incidentally, that the words of that song were written by Katharine Lee Bates, after being inspired by the view from the top of Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak in Colorado, that is.

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Google, Blogger, my dishwasher, and my ill child

Am I the only one who is getting fed up with Google? (Oh yes, you can always rely on me when it comes to being up there at the vanguard of blogging technology.)

First and foremost, I never know whether the word should have an initial capital or not. And is it different according to whether it's a noun or a verb? Do you write "I looked on Google" or "I looked on google"? Do you write "I Googled an old friend" or "I googled an old friend"?

Then there are the glitches. My Google Reader (ooh, initial caps there, it seems) now opens two copies of the blog I want to read when I click on it. I have no idea why. I didn't change any settings. It just started doing it. I'm annoyed.

A few days ago, again for no apparent reason, the format of my gmail page changed. I can't sign out from it. The words 'sign out' used to be in the top right hand corner, but where they were, there is now my name. If I click on my name, I get a drop-down list, which does have 'sign out' on it, but it won't let me click on it. If I try to, before I can get the cursor there, quick as a flash, it whisks the words away and reloads the page. I'm annoyed.

Blogger is full of glitches too, and they're getting worse. Does anyone else think so, or is this just me? I sometimes get an email notifying me of a comment on my blog, but that comment doesn't appear on my blog itself. I'm guessing that for every time I notice this, there are several when I don't pick it up. Life is short, Bloggy Peeps, and when I'm reading comments from my email account, I don't bother to go to my blog to check that they're there. It's just that I've noticed a few times. I'm annoyed.

Plus, our aged dishwasher needs new baskets. The plastic is all peeling off, leaving sharp rusty stumps, which I've cut myself on. The cutlery basket has holes in the bottom, so that if you don't stand the cutlery up in just the right way, it falls through. Because the model is such an old one, it would cost us $280 to replace the baskets. That's $150 for the bottom one and $130 for the top one. We can buy a new dishwasher for that. I'm annoyed.

AND... when children are off school because they are sick, you have to pick up work for them. There's always loads of it. Loads. It's like the teacher feels the need to punish you for letting your child get ill. (Note I say "you", not the child - because where do you think the burden of this task falls?) It's bad enough for one day, but if your child has been off for three, they pretty much have to write a couple of theses as they struggle back to health. I'm annoyed.

The eyes have it

Enough already with the tea! (See how American I'm becoming. Not only do I know the lingo, but I can bring myself to express a sentiment that surely, surely no honest-to-goodness Brit would ever genuinely feel.) Yes, time to move the blog on to other matters. Life through the eyes of a first grade girl.

Husband and I are very short-sighted. Physically, not metaphorically. Well, probably metaphorically as well, since we moved to America with neither the intention of staying long-term, nor any return strategy. Americans call it 'near-sighted' if you're talking about eyes, and 'short-sighted' if you're talking about a plan. I think we Brits use 'short-sighted' for both. I don't think we really use the term 'near-sighted'. Oh my goodness, the tolerance that you lovely Bloggy Peeps have for the useless trivia on this blog never fails to astound me.

Anyway, any old way, where was I? Yes. Husband and I are both short-sighted, so no surprise then, that our oldest is already in glasses (he of the perfect teeth, but you can't hope to have everything). 10-yo, has good eyesight, but 6-yo has been complaining about having blurry vision, so I thought we should get her eyes tested. I did take the blurry vision with a pinch of salt though, since there's no evidence that she can't see perfectly well (and her teacher confirmed this). It also just so happens that her best friend's Dad is an optician (or whatever the longer, more complicated term that we're meant to use these days is) and her best friend has just got glasses.

In fact it turns out that glasses are all the rage for girls in first grade. They are desirable, sought after, coveted, fashionable. We have come a long way since my day, when glasses were to be dreaded, and delayed until no amount of screwing up of your eyes could get you to make out the teacher's scrawl on the blackboard. But then glasses are so much better. No more those heavy lenses in unattractive NHS plastic frames, where your only choice was pink, blue, white or tortoiseshell. These days, glasses are lightweight, comfortable, attractive - easy on the eyes in all senses.

So we went along to the optician, and 6-yo had the full range of tests, one small part of which, these days, is reading some letters off a display. When it got to that part, 6-yo managed the big letter at the top confidently, and then stopped. The optician clicked to make the chart bigger... and then bigger... and then bigger... but even when the letters were all huge, 6-yo sat in silence. "Uh oh", I thought, "she's foxing. She really does want to wear glasses. How are we going to get past this?" The optician tried another set of letters, and again, 6-yo managed the first letter, but stalled at the second row, and sat in silence, no matter how much larger the optician made them. She tried one more chart. Still the same pattern - the reading of the first letter and then no more. At this point, 6-yo gave a small shrug and said "I don't think I know these words".

Because in first grade, they're still doing words like about, and under, and should, and they haven't got onto more difficult ones like zfdax, and lvceno. Shame on them.

Well, it turned out that 6-yo has a very slight prescription, but only very slight. The nice optician said they could certainly make up glasses for us, but he said that quite honestly, our best bet was to go to Claire's in the mall, where you can buy non-prescription glasses for $10.00. So that's what we did (and in fact they were $8.50). The upside of this strategy is that we have saved probably a couple of hundred dollars. The downside is that 6-yo now knows of the existence of Claire's, a knowledge which so far I had deliberately kept away from her innocent mind. However, that aside, it was a happy solution. The frames are dark blue, with tiny flowers on them. 6-yo is thrilled with them, and I nearly die of cute attack every time she puts them on. She wears them to school, having sworn me to secrecy on the fact that they're non-prescription (which is the term we prefer to the unkind and metaphysically incorrect 'not real'). She's made a sneaky discovery since she's had them. Turns out that at least one other bespectacled first grade girl is wearing non-prescriptions too. Sshhh...

Words, words, words

Words, words, words. There are so many of them that just don't translate quite exactly from British English to American English. Here are four that have troubled me this week.

1) I still haven't discovered what 'aseptic drinks' are. There's an aisle in Dillons supermarket that has 'aseptic drinks' as its title (I've mentioned this before, but I never found out the answer). I just hope they're the ones I'm buying, because I sure as heck don't want to discover that I've been putting septic apple juice in my kids' packed lunches.

2) Packed lunches. Now, I know you call them 'sack lunches' over here, but I think maybe sometimes you call them 'packed lunches' too. It's just that every time I think I hear someone say 'packed lunch', I can't quite tell whether it was, in fact, 'sack lunch', and it doesn't feel quite right to say "hang on a minute... did you say 'packed lunch' there, a la British English, or was it just the usual American 'sack lunch' after all?" because, frankly, does it matter anyway?

3) My daughter's homework. The instructions asked us to listen to her read the 'decodable reader'. Hello? Hello, teachers? I think you've forgotten that we're parents here, not people deeply entrenched in the minutiae of education theory. What you're asking us to do, is to listen to her read the sentences about Pam and her hat, which she pats, and Sam and his cap, and the fat cat. I can see why you don't want to call it a book. Thin on plot, thin on characterisation. But 'decodable reader'? Puh-lease. Send her home with a reader that is NOT decodable one time, and then I'll be interested in whether your readers are codable or decodable.

4) Meccano. I thought you didn't have Meccano over here. But you do. You just call it something different. You call it 'Erector'. I discovered this in the toy shop, when the owner was showing me round on my first day. She pointed it out to me, and said

"Erector is popular. You'll find that dads often buy Erector, because..."

and I think she continued

"... they remember playing with it when they were kids",

but by that point in the sentence I had my mental hands over my mental ears and I was mentally singing la la la very loudly to myself.

Erector. Please take me home to a land where they call it Meccano.

Last year, this year

Last year, I drove 5-yo to school on her first day. I have photos of her getting ready to leave, the sky so dark that it could almost be night. The heavens opened, and it rained as if Noah had built his ark in the neighborhood. We were soaked.

This year, I walked 6-yo to school. She had been up for more than two hours, and ready for nearly one. Walking seemed a good way of using up twenty of the remaining minutes. It was a lovely morning, sunny but not yet hot. She told me she had a tummy ache, and I asked if it was really a pain, or if it felt like butterflies. She said, yes, butterflies, so I talked about nerves, and how they would go as soon as she got started at school. "Do you remember in the summer, I went to a conference, and I was reading something out in front of a big lot of people? Well, I had butterflies then, but they went away as soon as I started. It'll be like that when you get to school." She wondered why people say they have butterflies in their tummies, and not birds, and we agreed that birds would probably feel rather heavier.

Last year, I didn't know a soul at this school (she's at a different one to her brothers). If I'm honest, I didn't really want to know any. Getting to know new parents, new teachers, new children seemed just another exhausting thing to add to the exhausting list.

This year, what a pleasure to see familiar faces, to exchange a few sentences about the summer and add "we'll have to catch up". On the way home I passed a friend, out with her twin babies in their stroller, before the day got too hot. We talked, but only briefly, because the babies wanted to be on the move.

Last year, I was so pleased that the first day of school fell towards the end of the 3-week chemotherapy cycle. It seemed so important to take my daughter to school, though of course she could have gone with her daddy. He'd already been to the enrolment and open day. I had to drive. Twenty minutes there on foot, and twenty minutes back, would have been far too much.

This year, I was happy to walk, as I've put on quite a few pounds while on holiday, and I'm needing to lose weight. Needing to lose weight! Ah, that's a sign of life returning to normal, if there ever was one.

Last year, I wore a cap.

This year, one of the other mothers greeted me with "you've changed your hair". I was a bit flummoxed as to what to say, and ended up with "well, it's grown!". I was secretly rather pleased she didn't instantly remember the cap and the reason for it.

Last year, I had two chemo sessions to go. I didn't know the third would be the worst. Probably just as well. I was dreading starting on Tamoxifen, and getting used to the idea of being on a drug for years seemed a huge mental hurdle. Huge.

This year, I forgot to take the Tamoxifen tablet this morning, but that's just because we're out of routine and not properly unpacked, and my pill box isn't in its usual place. Being on a drug seems a tiny thing. I was lucky with the side effects. Lots of people are on long-term medication. It's a very safe drug. Been around for years. No big deal. Not any more.

Last year, my biggest fear (which I couldn't bring myself to write down in black and white - though I did try) was that I would lose myself. That was it. Whenever anyone talked about losing my hair, I'd hear a voice inside saying "and you might lose yourself". I'd lost little bits of my body, and the steroids during the first chemo session made me feel like I was losing my mind. I didn't seem to be doing much. If you take away body, mind, and role, it doesn't feel like much is left. I wondered if somehow the bit that is the essence of me would evaporate, and I'd never get it back.

This year, I look back and see that I did not lose myself. I am here. I am me. (Actually, I was all along.) I can even write about that.

And now it's time to go and pick 6-yo up. I wonder how her day has been.

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Names and numbers

5-yo told me the other day,

"Mom, there are two boys in my class with the same name. Carlos. One of them is new. So he has to have a number."

This seemed a little harsh. Surely the teacher didn't say "Sorry, there's already a Carlos in this class, so you'll just have to be called Number 27 instead"? So I asked 5-yo for a bit more detail.

"Well, it's not just a number. It's his name AND a number."

I wasn't sure this was much better. Did the teacher say "We'll call you Carlos 2, ok?" So I probed a bit more.

"He's One Carlos. We already had Carlos, and the new boy is One Carlos."

Aaaaaah. All is revealed.

"That's not One Carlos, Honey. That's Juan Carlos."

So confusing, being in Kindergarten.

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Small world

The girl who I was at primary school with was… Brit Gal in the USA. I can’t remember quite how we discovered the connection – something to do with a website that I’d typed ‘Chesham’ into. As I mentioned, Brit Gal was a couple of years below me, and I can’t honestly say I remember her. There was also a girl with the same name as her in my year, who I do remember well. That made the process of uncovering Brit Gal’s identity a little complicated. According to Friends Reunited, that girl is living in the Chesham area, divorced, with five children, whereas Brit Gal in the USA claimed to be living in Oklahoma, married to a man known as the Hubster. For a while I was confused - but I worked it out in the end.

I enjoy Brit Gal’s blog, with its friendly and open style. She talks about things that, like for me, would have been completely alien to her a few years ago: tornado warnings, trucks, the front porch. These are now the stuff of her life, as they are of mine. I read her posts about these things and think “yes, it’s just like that”. We live a few hundred miles apart, but so much of what she writes is familiar. Except for the rattlesnakes, for which I am very grateful. We don’t have rattlesnakes round here. Who needs rattlesnakes?

Brit Gal and the Hubster have an intriguing hobby. They go geocaching. I’d never come across geocaching before reading Brit Gal’s blog. I think I’d enjoy geogaching. It sounds to me like treasure hunts for grown-ups. Treasure hunts were a part of my childhood, and I often do them for my kids too. I love watching as the excitement overtakes their critical faculties. The clue says “this is where you put your dirty laundry”, and with a shriek, 5-yo exclaims “I know, I know. It’s the television!” and sprints off in the direction of the sitting room. Geocaching is a little more sedate, but I imagine there’s still a child-like thrill in finding the box you’ve been hunting for.

One thing the Midwest does very well is the sky. Brit Gal posts a photograph of the sky on a Friday: ‘Skywatch Friday’. If I’m ever feeling low about living in this part of the world, it reminds me of one of the things I will truly miss when we leave. If you think you’ve seen a big sky, let me tell you this: if you’ve not been to the Midwest, then you haven’t.

The only bad thing about your blog, Brit Gal, is that it is one of two that makes my web browser crash (Not From Around Here – you have the dubious honour of being the other one). The only way round it seems to be to read the post in Bloglines, rather than opening it up. So if I don’t comment very often, that’s the reason why. Anyone have any ideas how I can get to the bottom of this problem? It's only started happening recently and it's only these two blogs. Just as well I'm not into conspiracy theories...

So here’s to you, Brit Gal. Funny to think of us in our blue stripey dresses, running around the playground playing tag, doing ‘Music and Movement’ in our pants and vests, working our way through our times tables with the scary Mrs Edwards, she with the bouffant bleached white hair. And yes, I share your memories of the chain-smoking Mrs Davis, and Mr Kitchenman. How could one forget a teacher with a name like that? And oh indeed, the egg and spoon race too - that annual highlight. I won it one year, which is the one and only sporting achievement of my life. But I also still remember the horrible humiliation of coming last in the bunny hop race. Ah, the highs and lows.

I wonder what our head teacher Mr Ford would make of us now. He taught my class to sing ‘All Through the Night’ in Welsh. That was pretty darn PC, before PC-ness was even invented. I wonder if you learned that too?

Little Iota

Here is Iota. This is me, aged 5 or 6. In my blue stripey school uniform summer dress. I remember this photo being taken. I remember squinting into the sun, and I remember not liking that bunch of flowers. Does it show? It must have been in the days before the great industry that is school portrait photography had got started. I remember the teacher Miss Nunnerly taking the photograph, and bringing an envelope to school with money for her for the prints. Enterprising Miss Nunnerly!

We lived about a mile from that school, and in summer we would walk home, taking a short cut across the orchards you can see in the background. Those orchards were all cut down, a few years after this was taken, victims of the ‘Common Market’, and the way it favoured imported French apples over homegrown English ones. That was how I understood it at the time, but my guess is that it was less to do with the market price of the apples, and more to do with the subsidies available to farmers for change of land use. I remember the sound of the chain saws, and how sad we all were. I still miss those orchards, when I’m at my mother’s house, the same house I lived in as the little girl in this photo, and take the dog for a walk over the open fields which replace them.

What else can I tell you about Iota, aged 6? I was good at reading, and I loved spelling tests because I always found them so easy. I was a slow runner, the slowest in the class, and hated any sport or game which showed this up. I was the youngest in the year. My best friends were Catherine and Sophie, and at playtime, we would teach each other ballet and gymnastics from the classes we went to. I always felt my ballet class was rather superior to Sophie’s (Catherine was the gymnast), as we wore BLUE leotards. Sophie’s ballet class wore pink, and even in those days, I rebelled against ubiquitous girly pink. I thought pink leotards were just too insipid and twee for words. What's more, my blue one had a SKIRT. Another point which made it clearly superior.

When I was 8, fate and the school dealt me a cruel blow. They divided the year in half alphabetically, and Catherine and Sophie were in the other class to me. I thought I’d be unhappy for the whole year. I think perhaps I was. I hated my surname with loathing, and then felt guilty for doing so. I missed my friends in class terribly, but I knew it was tactless to berate my parents for the name they had bestowed on me. Loyalty to friends battling it out with family honour. It's the stuff of tragedy.

There was another girl at that school, in Chesham, Bucks. She was two years younger than me, and in all honesty, I can’t remember her at school. I know a lot more about her life now than I did then, though we haven’t met since those early childhood days. I’ll tell you who she is in my next post…

Postscript: 9-yo tells me that this picture looks like 5-yo.

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