Monkey went to a birthday party this weekend. Now, on the one hand: Monkey went to a birthday party this weekend. In fact, Monkey has received no less than four birthday party invitations since beginning his time at Hippie School, and if you're a longtime reader I probably don't have to spell this out (but I will, anyway, because saying it out loud makes me marvel all over again), but four birthday party invitations is... oh... roughly FOUR MORE than he received in the previous couple of years combined. Hippie School is terribly tolerant and inclusive, and I love and cherish that so much,...
I kept Monkey home from school yesterday because they were having one of their fantastic hippie field trips where they spend the entire day in the woods connecting to nature*. These field trips are great, but even when Monkey's doing okay, we have determined that I need to go with him as he pretty much requires one-on-one support for them, because if he decides to melt down in the middle of the wilderness that's kind of a pickle for the teachers there who are dealing with other kids, too. And right now, Monkey is maybe coming down with a cold. Maybe! I mean, who knows? How would we know? He...
Otto and I are going on a real live genuine date tonight, in just a little bit. I am drinking a large cup of coffee by way of preparation, because the sad truth is that my idea of a perfect evening, lately, is sitting on the couch watching TV for a while before going to bed at about 9:30. I'm not sick. I shouldn't be tired. But I am exhausted, mentally, and that's bleeding over into everything else. I've taken to shutting off my alarm in the morning and going back to sleep; on the rare occasions when I used to do this, before, I would just get up 15 minutes later when Otto's alarm went off....
Yesterday everyone got home late and we had take-out for dinner and I was scrambling to put out everything we needed, and I opened the silverware drawer and stopped short. For some reason, the last time Otto unloaded the dishwasher, he decided that our silverware organizer was arranged incorrectly. For four and a half years it has been (left to right) knives, forks, big spoons, little spoons; what I looked in on as I was exhorting Monkey to pour milk and Chickadee to get out the napkins was big spoons, forks, little spoons, knives. This halted the entire operation. "What did you DO?" I asked...
One of the things we were asked, upon enrolling Monkey at Hippie School, was if we would be willing to come in do little presentations to the group on our work. I assume this is a standard question, but because Otto and I are super fantastic (and, okay, FINE, because he's a photographer and I'm a writer and the school starts production of their newspaper first thing), we were slated for the first two guest spots. Otto went in last week, and when Monkey and Mario tumbled into the house that afternoon, I asked them how they enjoyed his talk. Both boys immediately fell to making chimp noises...
So after one glorious week of "SCHOOL IS AWESOME!" and "THIS IS THE GREATEST SCHOOL EVER!" I had finally begun to unclench, a little. Turns out that the honeymoon ended this week, though. On Monday, Monkey came home a little less excited than the previous week, and suddenly he was listing various transgressions he felt had been committed against him, and noting that "some of these kids really seem to have some problems," which, you know, Pot, is terribly interesting about Kettle and all, but.... And then yesterday I got a phone call. As soon as I realized it was school, I'm pretty sure every...
Last night as I got ready for bed, Otto took Licorice outside for her last trip of the evening, then headed upstairs to put her in Chickadee's room. Before coming back down, he must've stopped in his office and checked his email. "We have an email from Teresa*," he said. [*Teresa is not the Hippie School owner's name, but as I'm starting to think of her as our family's very own personal Mother Teresa, I thought it would make an apt blog name for her.] "What does it say??" I asked, already fighting against a small, dark voice in the deepest corner of my brain that was only too happy to...
Several of you looked right past the story of how I nearly didn't recognize my parents' dog when they so-sneakily showed up last Sunday to surprise me, and went right for the more important issue, which was: How did Monkey do with meeting some of the kids he'll be attending Hippie School with? (I would like to buy some proper syntax for that sentence, but I'm too lazy to fix it, so just pretend it wasn't the most awkward and rambly one you've ever read.) Last Sunday we had just two of his classmates here (along with a younger sibling and the younger sibling's friend), and despite three being...
"I want to study chemistry," he said. "Do you do that here?" "Sure," she said. "If you come here, you get to choose a lot of what you do. What do you like about chemistry?" "I don't really know, yet, I just think it would be neat." He was playing with Legos in the middle of the floor, happily chatting, a far cry from his refusal to look at the new parapro the day before. "Well, you can maybe choose that for some independent study, or when it's time to do a group project you can pitch that to the other students and see if other people want to do it, too." For the past half hour she had gamely...
