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.

Easter Bunny

On the Thursday before Easter we took Penny to the Student Government Association-sponsored easter egg hunt. It was for the children and grandchildren of faculty members. P was in the 1 and 2 year old group, but since she's almost 3 she was one of the biggest kids in the group along with a lot of barely walking toddlers. Luckily, though, she's not very greedy. She wanted to stop and open each egg before getting another one. I think most of the "babies" ended up with more eggs than she did! (Which is fine with us b/c we already had to confiscate a fair amount of candy- lol!) She loved meeting the Easter Bunny. I didn't know what to expect. I pictured him sitting on a chair like Santa at the mall, and waiting in line for our chance to be photographed with him. Instead it was a SGA member in a costume roaming around through the crowd acting goofy and approaching kids individually. He shook her hand, and then she went in for a hug. She just couldn't believe it! She was so excited. After the easter egg hunt, we asked him if we could take a photo of all three of us with him. He obliged and afterwards she called out to him, "thank you for the eggs!" Too cute.

Stay on your sticker

I took P to dance class this afternoon and peeked in the curtain to watch her dance. They were doing the hokey-pokey and I saw her really getting into it -- and then stopping what she was doing to look down to make sure she was still on her sticker before resuming dancing. Ms. Carla must say, "get on your sticker" one hundred million times during the hour because so many of the older girls just want to run around and not stay focused. Penny appears to be the only one who listens. And listens so dang literally. We keep trying to tell her it's okay if she dances around or near her sticker (and, heck, I wouldn't even mind it if she wanted to go run around with the other girls). But no. Ms. Carla says on your sticker, so on your sticker it must be - even if that means having to readjust her position mid-song. OCD, much?

The funny thing is, I know she gets this from me. I drive Tray absolutely bonkers with my "I'm a stickler for the rules" attitude. Well, rules I agree with anyway. It's so funny to see an element of my personality reflected in her like that.

Respond versus React

I once had a professor who told me he wasn't interested in hearing another excuse from his students and I remember thinking, "Ok. But what about a reason?" I try to remember that when talking with my students. Sometimes they give excuses, but sometimes they give reasons. And here's another distinction that I've been thinking about today: When I became a mom, I was knocked on my butt by how hard it was. It took me months to come to terms with it (not that I completely have). The loss of personal freedom was the hardest thing for me, but I try to recognize that personal freedom isn't always the best goal anyway. Isn't a better goal to work for others in general - and not just one's children? I read a lot these days bemoaning the fact that parents focus too much on parenting and that maybe we should just step back and (the way I read it anyway) just go and live our lives with our kids over there in the background or something. That doesn't seem to me to be the solution, because why have kids if that's what you're going to do? But I read a comment today that moved me to write this. It said that a lot of the problem was that we as parents are viewing ourselves as fully formed adults who are supposed to be "in charge" with the goal of shepharding our children into the status of fully formed adults. When in reality, we aren't finished. None of us are. Becoming a parent shouldn't be the moment we become adults, full and complete. It should be the moment we realize just how much we still have to grow. And one of the things that I and that anonymous commentor have in common, is that I need to learn empathy. I need to learn how to respond instead of react more often. So many of the times that I lose my patience with Penny, I find myself reacting, which does nothing to resolve the situation. She needs empathy, not my anxiety or anger. That's definitely an area that I'm going to work on. And just like school isn't about what students learn, so much as it is teaching them how to learn, I think that rather than trying to turn Penny into a person, I want to teach her how to become her own person.