Halloween

We had an awesome Halloween!  Jordan was a very committed Batman, and zoomed ahead at every opportunity, perhaps in order to properly show off his cape.

Aaron, who if you remember last year was terrified of all masks and costumes, declared this year that he is a Big Kid Now and the costumes are only people inside and he would not be scared.  And indeed he had a blast.  The only scary things were the occasional fog machines, which had the same effect on him as geysers.

Sam was a penguin.  One person said "Hey, Batman and the Penguin," and I had to admit that would have been a great idea but in this case it was coincidence.  Sam was not a scary-villain kind of penguin; he flapped his little wings and said "Glub Glub" in a very unintimidating way.

We tried to make Phil into an armadillo.  (Armaphillo.)

The shield was more properly borne by Harry, a gladiator.

Here's the crew in various states of action.

And here's the post-trick-or-treating action.  We let them gorge, and then now that they're in bed I will hide the rest.  Last year they never asked about the remainder, and we put it in a box, and what do you know, it was what we gave away this year.  Dale tested for freshness and there was no discernible difference.

Nightmare at Beaver Lake

Danny got me to go with him to Nightmare at Beaver Lake, the most extravagantly extensive haunted house type of thing I've ever experienced or frankly heard of.  Some of it was in fact too scary for me.  How about that?  A lot of it is just outside in the woods around the lake, with scary things coming out of the shadows; cemetery ghosts, horses, undead children.  In addition they have built multiple and various frightening little shacks that contain serious scariness, like, one is a torture chamber thing with six awful little cells containing real people apparently in various states of dismemberment, and a psycho guy wandering through with an ax moaning, "They do not know the gift I give!  Without pain there is no love!" -- That was very scary.  Another had this really disturbing kitchen scene where a psycho housewife had chopped everyone up to cook them and was horrified by what she had done.


The whole thing is a major event, with hundreds of actors.  Everything is done by volunteers, mostly local teenagers - it started as a project to creatively engage young people in a charitable project. It's run by the Rotary Club, which funnels the proceeds to (other) community service projects.  The fact that it's just down the hill from Kari and Danny's house is a major stroke of luck for Danny; he loves campy horror of all kinds.  The night before last night, he went by himself.

Table mensches

At 5:30, I was shoring up the kids with a substantial snack of peanut butter, apples, raisins, and milk, because although we were hurrying off to a dinner event, the dinner itself was not going to be until after 7pm.  Danny called to ask if one of us adults wanted to go with him to the very scary "Nightmare at Beaver Lake" event (maybe tomorrow), and while I was in the other room chatting with him, Aaron scooped up his gob of peanut butter and smeared it all over his hands like a lotion.  I got back to the dining room to find him throwing handfuls of milk at Jordan with his peanut-butter-covered paws.  Both were laughing their heads off.  

I was furious and rushed and I could have killed them both, but I have been practicing my skills of describing the problem lately, so I said:

"There is peanut butter ALL OVER AARON'S HANDS!  And there is milk on the TABLE, the FLOOR, and maybe even the WALL!  ALL of that needs to be CLEANED UP!  And if any peanut butter gets on the furniture I am going to SCREAM!"

(My favorite parent gurus do not recommend that you pretend to be calm when you're not; on the contrary, better to express your anger than bottle it up, as long as you can do it without insult.  And I was pretty angry.)

I walked out of the room.  And what do you know:  Jordan and Aaron both instantly hopped up and started cleaning like crazy.  Jordan cleaned up every bit of mess in the dining room (the thrown milk, the smeared peanut butter); Aaron washed his hands, which was a big job, but one that he mostly succeeded at.  Okay, in getting himself up to the sink he got peanut butter on the floor, the stool, the faucet, and the soap bottle, but his effort was serious and genuine.  I was impressed.

The dinner event was a Shabbat dinner for new Temple members.  As the membership chair (don't even ask me how I got into this) I was a "table captain," aka "table mensch," responsible for helping new families enjoy themselves and get their questions answered if they had any.  Dale and I had a great time chatting with the other family at our table, but the biggest mensch was Jordan:  On being introduced to the only other kid at the table, an 8-year-old girl, he instantly changed seats to be next to her and engaged her in animated conversation about topics of mutual interest.  (Magic Treehouse and Silly Bandz, from what I gathered.)  His ease in making new friends is a real gift.

"Tests mean you lose."

Jordan does his homework in the morning and he's usually enthusiastic about it.  This morning, though:

Rachel: Hey, this would be a good time to practice your spelling words one last time before your test today.

Jordan:  I already had the spelling test a few days ago.

Rachel:  Right, that was last week.  You have another one this week, on these other words.  

Jordan (anxiety rising):  I don't want another test.  I already had one.

Rachel: I think you're going to have one every week, on different words every time.

Jordan: I don't want to have a test every week!  That's too much!

Rachel: You don't want to take a test?

Jordan: No!  (crying now, having to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes:) On a test you have to get everything right.  I want to just learn to read and stuff and not have to get everything right.

Rachel: You wish you didn't have to take so many tests and could just learn stuff.

Jordan:  Yes.  (still crying)  Tests mean you lose.  

Rachel: What do you mean?

Jordan: The principal reads the names of the people who got them all right, because they win.  

I think that last thing might be Jordan recalling last year's spelling bee.  I assured him that this was different, but I don't blame him if he doesn't believe me.  There are a staggering number of assessments that kids have to do starting in first grade, they are scored numerically, and six-year-olds are obsessed with winning and losing.  I, too, wish he could just "learn stuff" and not be tested on a daily basis, even as I understand the importance of accountability.  Jordan said he would not take the test today, would not do his math homework either, would not go to school, and if I took him to school anyway he would "get out."  Yowza!  Time to calm down.  I gave him some space.  

After a while he consented to get dressed if I would bring him his clothes, which I did, and he did.  He went back and picked out a different shirt.  I told him it is a lot of tests, this year, and that tests can make you worry.  And then he decided he did want to do his math homework, after all.  He was barely calm enough to do it.  I was struck by how true it is for all of us, that if we are overwhelmed, we can't think, and that it can help a lot when someone shows that they understand.  

On the way to school I suggested that in the kind of test Jordan takes, "winning" means beating your own score (there is typically a pretest).  But Jordan said, "For the Huskies it doesn't matter if you do better than last time, you have to beat the other team," and I certainly see where he's coming from.  I didn't try to make it a non-issue; competitiveness is something that adults struggle with all their lives.  Jordan said, "Mommy if I get 12 right and there are 15 questions, another way to say it is that I got 12 out of 15.  I like that way of saying it better."  I said I could see how that would help.

Pages saves the day

I did a double dropoff on Thursday, which is not the norm, and I guess there were just too many things to remember because I left Aaron's tricycle at Jordan's school.  Over the long weekend.  Outside.  And didn't realize it until today.  This morning I looked all over the school grounds and found nada.  So very sad!  We use that trike every day to get Aaron to school!

After kicking myself, I put together an eye-catching flyer and posted it at the spot I had left the trike.  Pages has such nifty templates that I made this flyer in the time it took to type the text and drag the photo:

A couple hours later, I got a call from a staff member who had found the trike tucked behind one of the portable classrooms.  Yahoo!

Props also to our sweet neighborhood, where a kid's tricycle can sit outside for a weekend and not get stolen.  Whew.

Plant food for thought

I spent two hours with Jordan's class this afternoon.  The first half-hour was taping a pocket into each of the 18 science notebooks, which, to me, is a pleasant thing to do while just observing what goes on in there.  Then it's school picture day, so there was half an hour of lining up and waiting around during which I helped monitor things, combed kids' hair, and learned everyone's name.  Then recess.  In the last 45 minutes I helped with the day's science activity, which was seed planting.  One table of four at a time came over to the planting station and:  

1. filled plastic cups with damp potting soil

2. poked two holes in the soil with a designated poking pencil, on opposite sides of the cup, at the side so that you would see the seed as it grew

3. put a seed in each hole

4. covered up each seed with dirt

5. circled the seed's location on the outside of the cup with a grease pencil

6. taped a seed to the outside of the cup, as a label

7. stuck a sticker on the cup corresponding to that table's color

8. watered the seeds with 15 sprays from a sprayer bottle.

I don't actually like doing this sort of thing with kids -- it's so hectic, with all the simultaneousness and motor coordination and sharing and the potential for spills and so on.  But it went fine -- first graders are pretty polite and coordinated -- and it was a fun way to get to know them all a little bit.  I am musing on what science is, or what science is perceived as being by teachers and kids.... is it mainly the "bench work" (the hands-on procedures)?  Because to me, the best part was the five-minute discussion they had beforehand, on the carpet, in which they said what they think seeds need to grow.  They said all the basic things (dirt, water, air, light), and then they started on the more interesting stuff.  One kid said "fertilizer," for example, and other kids wanted to talk about chicken poop and cow poop, which is in fertilizer.  Ms. Wodrich responded to all that in a friendly way (gently steering the talk away from poop), but it didn't get written on the board, so ... do seeds need fertilizer, or not?  What is fertilizer?  She did say something about the soil we would use being "potting soil, which has some fertilizer in it." I don't know what potting soil contains and I'm not so interested in that, but I'm super interested in how kids think plants work.  For example, I wonder if the kids are thinking about plant food.  Living things have to get their energy from somewhere; animals get it by eating; do plants "eat"?  (Aside from carnivorous plants, I mean.)  And if so what do they eat?  Now this is a marvelous, important question; this is a question of what makes a plant a plant.  After all, I could eat dirt (or fertilizer) and get something out of it.  But I can't eat sunshine.

Another thing I wonder about is whether kids might think you need fertilizer to "wake up" a seed into growing.  I didn't hear them talking about that, I just wondered about it later.  And what about poop - why does poop make good fertilizer?  That would be a fascinating topic, if you ask me, though possibly uncontrollable among first graders.

Later, I asked Jordan why he thought the teacher had written "light" and "air" and "soil" and "water" on the board but not "fertilizer," and Jordan said:  "Because it was already up there, Mommy.  The dirt is the fertilizer.  Or the fertilizer makes the dirt a little bit better, it gives it more nutrients, but pretty much the fertilizer is the dirt because in the forest the leaves fall down and decompose and they give their nutrients to the soil and that is the fertilizer and the dirt both."  This is a terrific answer as far as I'm concerned.  We also talked about what is "food" for a plant, and he said that both soil and sun are food, and maybe air too.  I am curious what other kids think.

Update from Aaron's class