Little m Long a

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks…..School’s out for summer!!

Well, not just yet but the countdown has definitely begun.  Zoë has but six days remaining and my boy, Z just finished his final day of pre-K.  His class celebrated the occasion with a picnic in the park.  It could not have been a more perfect day, sun shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky and temperatures in the mid eighties.  There were hordes of juice boxes, brownies, cookies, cupcakes and lots and lots of sliding.  Nothing says school’s out to a bunch of four and five year olds like mounds of sugar laden treats and a fifteeen foot twirly slide.  As I stood on the sides of the playground watching Z bounce from activity to activity I couldn’t help but to reflect on the closing school year and perhaps ponder what the future holds.

In early February, we enrolled Z in a different school.  He had begun the year in our local pre-K program and much to our dismay was languishing there.  He never complained, he really never does and were it not for my wife having visited his school we would never have known.  We were shocked to find that our happy, energetic, vibrant and full of life little boy was spending his mornings at pre-K alone, on the outskirts of all the activities actually refusing to participate and worse yet not even being encouraged to do so by other classmates or the teachers.  They thought he was just “shy“. 

There were things along the way that I suppose in retrospect would have given us insight into his unhappiness there.  The papers he brought home were usually colored with only one color with no apparent consideration to form or content or they were just left blank altogether.  Granted, we are talking about a four year old boy that can barely hold a crayon.  But he colors.  All of the time.  And his artwork usually has form, a concept and different colors.  I’ve got very interesting wall murals in just about every room of my house to prove it.  Those Magic Erasers from Mr. Clean really do work.  Oh, and as a side…the no mess finger paint from Crayola is a crock!  It’s supposed to only color on this special paper and nothing else.  All true.  But no mess?  It took my kids only three minutes of unsupervised creativity to realize that the stuff, when scooped out in sufficient quantity makes a really interesting hair gel.

Anyway, Z thrived in his new school environment.  The change in his work was immediately evident, completed papers in multiple colors and a noticeable effort to stay within the boundries delineated by the thick black outlines of the characters he was drawing.  He even talked about some of his new friends calling them by name, something he never did at his other school.  The change was good.  My only regret was that we waited so long to notice.

One of our primary goals for Z this school year was quite simply, to expose him to the school environment and learn to enjoy being around other kids.  Socialization.  My wife and I were pretty confident that there was absolutely nothing that pre-K was going to add to his knowlege base.  He knows his alphabet, can count way high sometimes by fives, does simple addition and subtraction, has started to read and just last week I think he may have discovered a new element and a way to use it to increase gas mileage all the while decreasing harmful carbon emissions.  OK.  So maybe he can’t count by fives.  But the kid is smart.  Freaky smart.  

Point number two.  Meet and get to know your child’s teacher.  If at any point during the school year you feel your child is not being challenged by their teacher, challenge the teacher.  Case in point.  Zoë, at the ripe old age of “just turned six”, is a remarkable reader.  She started about a year ago with these BOB Books and just took off.  Some of the things she has recently read unassisted:  “Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me”, by Eric Carle, “In the Castle”, by Anna Milbourne, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!”, by Mo Willems, “The Perfect Nest”, by Catherine Friend, “Fox in Sox”, by Dr. Seuss, and “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy.  OK.  So she didn’t really read “Fox in Sox” unassisted.  Hell, I can’t even read that one by myself! 

Her reading assignments from school however, were less than challenging.  I’d like to be politically correct here but in all honesty the books she brought home to read to us were a joke.  Basically some watered down version of a Clifford story that took Zoë all of three minutes to read.  After several polite requests for some more challenging material went unheeded, my wife met with Zoë’s teacher, brought her a copy of one of the third grade readers Zoë had completed the previous night and basically told her to step it up.  Zoë was floundering and quite frankly the reading material she was bringing home was not going to cut it anymore.  That night, Zoë brought home a copy of “Frog and Toad are Friends”, by Arnold Lobel.  Message received and we all read happily ever after.

And finally, point number three.  (I heard once that all good sermons had three points.)  Do not be afraid of change.  This one is, at least for me probably the hardest.  I abhor change.  The very thought of having to alter my routines, my norms, the ruts of my life that so securely surround me puts my stomach in knots.  I get physically ill at the very thought of having to do something different.  I read somewhere that the three biggest life changes someone can make are: getting married, moving/buying a new house and starting a new job.  Seven years ago I did all three in two days, and the new home and job part was 1200 miles away.  I was a wreck!  And just look at me today.  I’ve got five great children, a beautiful wife, four cats, two dogs and a partridge in a pear tree….I’m still a wreck!

We made one difficult change this school year with Z in his pre-K class.  The next big one will be this August when we move Zoë to a new school to start First Grade.  She seems to be handling things much better than I am.  I still can’t talk about leaving her school without feeling some sense of remorse, that I have let the school down in some way.  It’s a small school, intimate and they have loved Zoë for two years now.  She’s like the mayor there.  Everyone knows her and always stops to tell her hi, and I’m not just talking about the teachers.  Kids in fifth and sixth grade can’t pass by without yelling out, “Hey, Zoë.”  When I ask her who that was she nonchallantly replies, “One of the big kids.  They all know me.”

Starting over in a new school is going to be tough but one of the things I have learned during my tenure as parent is that kids are extremely resilient.  Zoë is going to be just fine in her new school and I’m also sure that in no time she’ll be it’s new self appointed mayor.

I’m a quitter.  That’s right.  I’m the punk kid at the park who gets pissed off when he can’t kick the ball and yells, “I quit!”, grabs his ball and and stomps home.  Hell, once as a kid I can remember the exact scenario, getting home and realizing, “Man, this isn’t my ball!”

I’ve started and stopped so many home improvement projects that I’ve lost count.  My general theory is to get the project to a functioning level then move on.  I’ve got some sort of tool in just about every room in my house left over from some project or repair task I started or puttered with then just got frustrated, bored or lost interest altogether and never put away the tools.  It drives my wife nuts.

It’s not just home improvement, either.  Pick a task, any task.  I have probably, at some point, in my life started and stopped it.  Swim team?  Freshman year.  Quit.  Football?  Sophmore year.  Quit.  (In my defense, those guys were mean.  I weighed all of 113 pounds.  In pads.  And I was not that fast.  It was for my own good, really.  Someone was going to get hurt.)   Track?  Well, I stuck that out through my senior year but changed from distance to hurdles because I was afraid of the varsity distance coach.

Books?  I can’t remember the last book I finished.  Oh yeah.  The Kite Runner.  Fabulous read.  I couldn’t put it down.  But that was over two years ago and I distinctly remember stopping or neglecting altogether at least three other projects to finish it.  Those projects are still incomplete.

I have this recurring dream about quitting a class at college but I never actually officially dropped the course.  So the final exam is coming up for this class and I can’t even remember where the room is.  I can’t even remember what building the class is in or, for that matter, whether it was an English class or a Microbiology class.  It really freaks me out because I need the grade to graduate and graduation is in one week.  I know!  It’s madness!

I had a counselor tell me once that I suffered from the adult version of ADHD.  He followed that up with other words and stuff but I kind of lost interest in what he was saying as I was busy trying to decide if he actually picked the teal green/blue paint color for his walls or just inherited them when he moved into this office.

So, as you can see, there seems to be a pattern here.  I have what would seem to be a lifelong inability to complete a task.  It’s always kind of bothered me.  Kind of.  Until today.  For today marks one full year; 525,600 minutes; since I smoked my last Marlboro Light.  That’s big.  Really, really big.  Not so much so that the guys over at Phillip Morris are sending me cards saying, “Where ya been?” or, “We miss you.”  But none the less I’m pretty proud of the milestone.  Yep, I’m a quitter.  I think to celebrate the occasion I’ll pour myself a nice tall Grey Goose martini.  Oh s#*@!, I quit that last October.  Maybe I’ll just inhale deeply and exhale without coughing.

I consider myself a reasonably knowlegeable individual, a street smart kind of guy.  Not necessarily the most well read or all that well versed in life’s great classroom but I can hold my own.  I pretty much feel that I have been exposed to enough situations and odd circustances in my life that when something new presents itself the well is deep enough to at least draw some sort of comparisons and work my way through any task.  Oh, there’s plenty I don’t know, I’ll readily admit my shortcomings.  I’m not proud.  However, after six years of this Stay at Home Dad gig, I feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on most of the things that I may be presented with during the normal couse of a day.  Let’s face it, with five kids you pretty much are tested with fire.  Daily.  Most days I feel like the shiny new ceramic vase that has just been pulled from the kiln.  That’s right!  I can take the heat.  But never in 42 years of existence on this tiny little orb would I or could I have imagined my agenda as it played itself out this morning.

Today was a big day for Zoë.  Her very first ballet performance.  It seems from the time she was able to speak Zoë has wanted to be a ballerina.  Let’s face it.  Ballerina’s are pretty, they get to dance, they get to wear make-up, they get to do fun things with their hair and they get to wear pink tutus.  What is not to envy about that?!  For Zoë, being a ballerina ranks right up there with all of her other noteworthy life goals:  playing with dirt, singing, laughing, being a doctor so she can go to work with mommy and staring at herself in the mirror.  Today she fullfilled a lifelong goal.  Albeit as a chicken and for only for 2 minutes and 43 seconds. 

Her ballet class is performing an adaptation of Carnival of the Animals  by John Lithgow and was offered the opportunity to perform at the big Parent Expo at the Zoo.  In addition to being a fine actor, Lithgow sings, dances and writes children’s books.  Now he’s doing ballet.  A look at the guy’s bio is dizzying especially if you are like me and remember him solely for his role as Dick Solomon on 3rd Rock.  But this is about Zoë and me not John Lithgow so let’s move on, shall we?

To get Zoë to the Zoo, in costume, was a logistical nightmare.  First, it was Sunday and regardless of whatever may be going on later in the day, “sleep late Sunday” always begins with Mickey Mouse pancakes.  My kids expect it.  And quite frankly, I kind of enjoy it, too.  So after the quick version, it’s not really quick I make my pancakes from scratch and they are fabulous but today I made them faster, I cleaned the kitchen and started to work on Zoë.  We had to shower and get her hair done, standard Ballet Bun.  It’s something I’m actually getting pretty good at doing.  January of this year was the first time I had ever attempted such a feat.  My wife explained how to do it and I remember stopping her halfway through and saying, “Don’t explain this to me like it’s something I should know.  I have no idea what you are telling me.”  Two weeks ago I “MacGyvered” a bun out of a shoelace and a paperclip.  We were running late for practice and I totally forgot to do Zoë’s hair before we left.  I am proud to say that it held for the entire lesson.
 
Next came the hair spray.  Again, not my realm of expertise.  My hair is curly, Buckwheat curly.  I never figured out how to use a blowdryer.  The one time I tried my hair literally stood on end for an entire day.  I looked like I had discovered the difference between a 110 volt and 220 volt power outlet–the hard way.  My task this morning was to figure out how to apply this hairspray to my little girl’s head in such a way as to make it look natural but able to withstand the gale force winds blowing off of the resevoir next to which the Zoo had conveniently placed the stage for our afformentioned performance.  I’m going to give myself a B- here.  It’s a learning process.  I understand there are products on the market called gel?  I’ll know better next time.

So far, pretty benign happenings for a morning that involves a ballet performance, right?  Moving on.  My next task was to iron the tutu. Let me say that again.  I had to iron the tutu.  I’m still not quite sure I believe it.  I first had to explain to my kids what an iron was.  Zoë is six and didn’t really know.  Sad point but it’s true.  I don’t really mind the wrinkles.  Apparently, Mrs. W., Zoë‘s ballet teacher, does.  At this point I just had to sit back and ask myself, “What in the world have you gotten yourself into?” 

I stood there on my “sleep late Sunday” ironing a chicken tutu with two little raccoons looking up at me faces covered in pancake batter.  That’s the name I affectionately have given the twins due to their unexplainable fondness for digging in the trash cans.  This morning they scored big on leftover pancake batter.  My boy and his little sister Z were arguing downstairs and Zoë was singing to herself in the mirror, giddy with the excitement of her first ballet performance.  I hadn’t nearly enough caffeine. 

The performance was a smashing success.  The sheer euphoria of a little girl in a chicken tutu manifesting her lifelong dream of becoming a ballerina is nearly indescribeable.  Couple that with the pride I felt for having helped in some small way to get her there and you’ve got two people almost too happy to be around.