Bookworm Bambini

Birdie, in the stacks.

Lately, after swimming class, Julie has been routinely swinging by the library with the bambini. Usually something we have placed on hold is in, and the bambini are permitted to pick out a number of books that is equal to their age.  Although they are not always returned at the same rate, we usually do also have books to return, which will sometimes prompt Clara to bellow charmingly as they are swept off down the conveyor belt, "Bye bye books!"

Birdie likes to do as Joe does, so they both usually make a beeline for the pre-readers. Right now she gravitates toward the Barbie series, her favorite one of which features Barbie battling a fairy queen who thinks she is in love with Barbie's Ken, whom she forces to propose to her. The spell is broken when Barbie makes up with her frenemy, Racquelle, which turns them both into fairies--a fairy secret!  Fans, we're not making up that storyline (we use the term loosely).  The Witch of Blackbird Pond and such awaits, but for now, we have Barbie and Racquelle, the dopey Ken, and their fairy secret!

Last week, Joe got some more books from the Fly Guy series to which Sara introduced him at Christmas in Julie and Sara's annual holiday book swap.  These are quality pre-readers: simple but clever.  Nary a fairy secret--or weapon--in sight.  Joe's version of the above Barbie pre-readers feature plot lines that devolve into a fight of some sort on page three.  Later that same weekend, Joe made himself a pair of fly eyes (i.e. compound) out of crumpled balls of paper and one of Birdie's tiaras.  (They were fly.)

This weekend, Julie decided to check out Little House in the Big Woods, the first in the Little House on the Prairie series, which is basically a primer on how to be a pioneer. So far, we have learned about how to slaughter various animals and store their meat for the winter, how to make butter, and how to make bullets and clean a gun.  It's winter in the little house in the big woods and frankly, Fans, it all seems rather grim in spite of the toasty fire over which Pa is making bullets before entertaining the family with the fiddle.  But Christmas is coming and fingers crossed, four-year-old Laura will be able to retire her corn cob doll for a rag doll like her older sister, Mary. Naturally, the bambini are riveted by all this romantic seeming deprivation: bears, panthers, guns, and fiddling.

All of this happened not far from here, too, of course.  We are in historic Laura Ingals Wilder territory up here along the Minnesota-Wisonsin and Minnesota-Iowa borders. We told the bambini perhaps we would take a tour of some historic Little House sites this summer and Joe gasped in anticipation.  We better tell him there won't be panthers, and that we won't be salting and smoking our lunch.

Fly Guy--looking so very fly.

Rainbow Loom Club

Caped crusaders waiting for the Ladies of the Book.

A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday night, Julie hosted her book club at the White House. Shortly before the ladies arrived, Joe announced that he was having Rainbow Loom Club at the White House that Sunday. The first thing we asked was just who were the members of the Rainbow Loom Club? It turns out there are four members, all kindergarteners, and all Kid's Placers: Audrey, Amelia, MaKenna, and Landon. Audrey and Amelia are also in Joe's class.

Julie suggested that the inaugural meeting of the RLC be postponed until she could contact its members mommies and daddies, seeing as how none of the members could yet drive.  Joe saw the reason of this plan, and that is how the RLC's first meeting came to be this afternoon.

Some looming did occur.  So, too, did a lot of conversation about which boys loved which girls, and who would be getting married.  There may also have been a bit of stereotypical teenage girl-like screaming.  (Interestingly, Clara is currently all about whom she can marry. She has been trying to tack down why she cannot marry Joe--who is, it must be admitted, a catch!--Julie, or Ted. One cannot marry a family member is a confusing explanation as to the prohibition against marrying family members when Ted and Julie are family. Once it was explained to Birdie that Ted and Julie were not related until they got married, she seemed to understand and promptly announced her intention to marry her friend Silvia.)

The highlight of the RLC's meeting was the refreshments: homemade cookies.  The meeting was adjourned not long after each member had two cookies.  It may not surprise you to know, Fans, that in spite of the looming that happened, not a single bracelet (or other accessory) was completed. But then, all romantic combinations among the kindergarteners were explored, which represented a very full agenda for the first meeting.

Of Fortune

There is also this, Fans.

Until a few weeks ago, Joe would have said that he already knew how to swim.  It was true that he could move his limbs in an uncoordinated symphony that, despite the absence of any semblance of real organization, still served to move him through the water.  He floats in it without holding his body stiff, and he enters it without a second thought.  His comfort in the water is itself a comfort, gratifying to see.

But he'd gotten rather too big for his swim trunks.  The bambini go to swimming classes Saturday mornings, and a few weeks ago, Joe was goofing off in his class, distracting his teacher and the other students in his class.  Julie watched from one of the benches that line perimeter of the pool, her irritation building.

So after class, when he was wrapped up in his towel, Julie asked him to sit next to her on the bench and put it to him straight. She said something like, "You think you know how to swim? Well you don't. You are comfortable in the water and that's about it. Stop acting like you know everything, especially when it comes to swimming which is about a lot more than being comfortable in the he water; it's also about being safe in the water."  That's when she added that she'd signed Joe up go to day camp with Graham for two weeks this summer, where there would be swimming every day, but that if didn't start paying attention and practicing what he was being taught in swim classes, then he wouldn't be going.

It's sometimes hard to know how best to deliver a lesson in a "teachable moment," if you even recognize the moment for what it is.  Julie felt terrible--taking Joe down a peg like that, watching his face fall, not adding a coda like "I want you to have fun, but I want you to be safe, too," to soften the punch.  She had a hard time not smiling when Joe asked her when he and Graham were going to go to "swimming day care," a hard time keeping her voice flat when she replied, "July--if you shape up--and not at all if you don't."

If only Joe knew that the idea of obliterating those two weeks from the  quilt of summer care working parents must stitch together is practically unthinkable!  But he doesn't and mercifully, it hasn't come to that. Our Hero shaped up and yesterday, graduated from the Little 4 class to the Middle 2 class.  He's not always perfectly behaved, but that's o-kay. He's present, learning, stroking, breathing.

Two weeks ago yesterday, a St. Louis Park middle schooler, a 12-year-old boy in seventh grade, died after drowning in the school's pool. He was found after the end of a gym class, in the pool's deep end, unconscious, but alive, and died two days later.  The Parent Teacher Student Organization--the PTSO--asked that orange balloons be flown outside homes and business a week ago Friday to mark a day of remembrance for the boy, whose family has said could not swim, prompting all kinds of questions about why he was in the deep end and the class's supervision.

Of course the bambini asked why there were orange balloons all over town. Telling them that the balloons were to remember a 12-year-old middle school boy who died, and for his family and friends who love him and miss him, prompted questions about how people die--though not how this boy died.  Questions about death and dying aren't easy to answer, but when a child is asking them, it seems like the questions that start with how are easier to field than those that start with why, and they are more easily answered when they are about death as an abstraction, rather than a specific death.

The balloons, what happened to prompt their appearance, and the questions they prompted, have all sent Julie's memory back, and back again, in recent days to that poolside moment after Joe's swimming class, when she harshly told Joe he couldn't swim.  She's felt keenly all our good fortune.

We have the time, and money, and inclination to try to ensure that the bambini  know how to swim, but it is not really that fortune whose weight Julie has felt.  Because in spite of all one might do to guard against accidents, she knows they still happen.  She's felt the fortune of knowing the feel of the warm weight of the bambini in her arms, knowing even the cut of the irony of being frustrated at their interruptions as she tries to write these particular words, knowing the swell of love that pulls her away from the words, and back to the life.

Birdie Naps No More (On Weekends)

Ted has ensured that his children know how to eat a slice like a proper New Yorker.  Though Birdie didn't achieve the full fold here, she did not use a knife and fork either.

But the big news is that Birdie has dropped her afternoon naps on the weekend.  Or--more accurately--we have allowed her to drop her weekend naps.  For some time now during nap time, instead of napping, Birdie would natter away happily to an assorted gaggle of stuffed friends and baby dolls in her bed in her room during "nap time."  At the same time, she's been going to sleep later at night, but still seeming to be getting enough sleep.  So we have been thinking for a while now that Birdie would do alright without the weekend naps.

So last Sunday, when Joe had a birthday party that stretched over lunch time, Julie decided to take Birdie out for a big girl ladies lunch and roll right through the start of nap time and just see how things unfolded from there.  The Birds had pizza and ice cream with carmel sauce on top before heading home where there pattered about until the boys got home.  (Nap time just becomes quiet time.  It might also be called everyone-often-does-his-or-her-own-thing-so-as-to-preserve-communal-sanity time.)

Still, yesterday, Clara went to her room after lunch and announced that she was ready for "nappy" time.  She then proceeded to natter away happily to the friends currently in residence on the bed, though she did sleep for a bit.  Baby Doll, Aurora, and Minnie needed some quiet time, too, after all.

Socks

Birdie has taken to sleeping with socks on her hands and her feet. She calls them her sock-ity puppets or sock puppet-ies or sock-ity puppet-ies. (Many a noun is embellished with an E sound at the end these days.) This whim means that there is an abundance of socks in the laundry of late and this abundance, in turn, is good because Joe has taken a shine to folding socks. You read that sentence right, Fans. Julie was folding laundry last weekend, Joe rolled around and asked if he could help, and turns out he really likes to fold the socks. For now anyway.