Ballet Terms

I am learning so much about ballet thanks to Penny. We checked out two Angelina Ballerina books from the library when we went last week, including the original book of the series in which Angelina can't stop dancing all the time and everywhere so her parents finally put her in ballet lessons. This is more or less the situation in our house. Penny wants to dance all the time and everywhere, and asks us twenty or thirty thousand times a day to come and dance with her. At first, she would want me to dance and show her what to do, but now she makes up her own "dances" and shows me what to do - ha! This usually involves, "put your foot here, Mommy. Now jump like this, and..." The dances nearly always end with, "and now, fall down!" In Angelina Ballerina, Angelina knocks over her a pitcher of milk and some pies by doing a "beautiful arabesque" in the kitchen. Penny loves to tell me how she is now doing an "alabesque." And at the playground on Friday afternoon she was climbing around the big rope netting stuff putting one foot in the neighboring rope square and saying, "Step," and then putting the other foot in the square and saying, "Pah-zay." I think she means "passe" which is actually where you put your foot on your opposite leg just below the knee. That was part of the dance they were doing for their recital (which we didn't participate in). Anyway, it's funny to hear her running around saying all the ballet terms. It's going to be a long summer until dance classes start up again in the fall...

The Equivalent of a Crinkled Ball of Aluminum Foil

The house we live in in Troy has only one bathroom - and no bathtub. It only has a shower, which means we had to get inventive with a toddler requiring a daily washing and who is scared of taking an actual shower (not to mention the parental logistics of giving her a shower). So, we went to Tractor Supply and bought an aluminum washtub. Every night we put it in the shower and fill it up with the shower head. Her bath toys are old Rapala fishing lures with the hooks removed.

I tell you that story to tell you this one: yesterday Tray purchased two inflatable turkey decoys (that do, I must admit, look quite realistic). He blew one up and staged it in the garden outside for Penny to "find." She named it Mavis and has been carrying it around all day talking to it and telling it stories. Mavis even ate supper with us tonight.

Sweet Offer

A short anecdote, but just a hair too long for a facebook status update:

This afternoon we were picking green beans in our garden. I was holding the plant and directing Penny to which beans to pull. She was handing them to Tray who was putting them in his shirt pockets, but he was running out of room. He said something semi-sarcastic like, "it sure would be nice if we had some sort of bean collecting device. Maybe like a ... basket." Penny, not catching the sarcasm, very sweetly and earnestly said, "I have my Easter Bunny basket in the house!" So sweet.

An even shorter anecdote: I walked outside and met Penny coming around the corner to come inside. I sort of startled her, and she said, "I realized you were outside." Maybe a shade of meaning off, but pretty close. I didn't realize she knew the word realize.

The past week

In about thirty minutes, I am about to give my last final exam for the Spring semester. This is my 10 o'clock T-Th World Geography class. Our last day of class before today's final was Tuesday. As in: the day before the tornadoes. I was sitting here realizing that it hasn't even been a whole week since I last saw these kids, but so much has changed. The devastation across Alabama (and other states too) has just affected us all so much. It's heartrending. And then the news about Osama bin Laden last night. Tray and I had gone to bed early without checking the news, so we didn't find out about it until this morning. I was just reading an article in the Washington Post about the celebrations last night at the White House and at the 9/11 memorial. The author was understandably appalled that people were celebrating a man's death in that manner, but he went out to investigate and talked to the crowd who were mostly young (children at the time of 9/11) and they weren't celebrating his death so much as the closure to what is for them a lifetime of stress and worry and war. I'm not sure they were right to feel any closure from this, but I can at least understand wanting to celebrate that.

And it does remind me to put myself in my student's shoes again. World Geography is a freshman level class. The average freshman is 18 year old. They were 8 when 9/11 happened. The majority of their lives up until now have been framed by that day and the things that came after it. I was born in 1978 during the Cold War, and most of my readers here were born much before that. Still, I remember worrying about nuclear war, and where the bomb shelters were. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved. Most of my students now weren't even born then. Their whole worldview is completely different.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about everything right now, but I can at least sort of see how they might be feeling. It's just -- it hasn't even been a week since I saw them last.