I'm thankful for . . .

The fact that I get to go to work. I love my child, but after a long weekend I am so glad to see her walk into school, meaning I can pick up a latte, go to my office, and actually concentrate on something I love to do.  And I get this freedom while knowing she's in a place where she's engaged and happy. Yes! Thank God for good teachers.

Because we had a very quiet Thanksgiving, we got some other tasks completed. We spent all of Friday at the extraction facility, extracting honey. Because it was pretty cold, the honey was running really slowly, so the whole task took longer than usual. We ended up with about 100 pounds of honey. On Saturday, Rob and Emma built a bee-hive shelter, to try to keep the frigid northwest winds from killing the bees over the winter. Emma is hamming it up with the hammer in this picture.

I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Like It Never Happened

I've just read a book that I found very provoking. It's fiction, a novel by Maddie Dawson called The Stuff That Never Happened. On the surface it's a story about a woman with empty nest syndrome, who meets up with a former lover.

But the book has significantly more depth than this brief summary. The woman in question, Sylvie, is unhappy and feeling lonely in her home.  She lives in a small New Hampshire town, where her husband, Grant, is a professor at a community college. The kids have recently left, and her husband is busy writing a book and ignoring her. Her unsettled state of mind disturbs his work, and he's quite happy when their daughter's difficult pregnancy makes it necessary for Sylvie to spend several months in New York City.

While the book is always written in Sylvie's voice of the present, the chapters alternate between her experience of the present and her memories of the past. As you move through the chapters, you see her love affair, and its impact on her young marriage, unfold.

Sylvie is unhappy with her present life. In the beginning of the book, you see how being married to Grant has had its difficulties --not just now, but throughout the twenty years of raising children and keeping house. Even though he truly loves Sylvie, he has a need to be in control that can supersede that love. He is not a very passionate person, he likes life to be lived traditionally, and it was his decision to move to the tiny New Hampshire town where he grew up. Sylvie was raised in California, and was much more of a free spirit in her youth; she has found these constraints difficult. During the busy years of raising children, they were just in the background, but now that she is spending time reflecting and reevaluating, she seems to strain against the ties of her marriage vows. Her lover, Jeremiah, is constantly in the back of her mind, and has been throughout her whole marriage.

Sylvie's affair, which happened just after she and Grant were married in the late 1970's and while they were living in New York City, had the worst possible ending for Sylvie. Her affair breaks Grant's heart, and although neither files for divorce, they do not see or speak to each other for several years. When they decide to give their marriage another chance, it is because Sylvie has convinced Grant to do so, and the price for her involves agreeing to his conditions. While Sylvie wants to stay married, this conscious act of getting Grant back has none of the passion that marked her affair. It's as if she sees a married life with Grant as a way of giving definition and direction to her own life, almost a way to stop her from focusing on her failed romance with Jeremiah. As the reader, understanding this gives you a different perspective on the rather dry, traditional, marriage Sylvie has described earlier.

One of the aspects of this book that engaged me in the beginning is the way in which Sylvie seems to rely on other people to make her life good. She seems to feel that Grant makes her life less happy, and that Jeremiah would have made it wonderful. And once the reader understands that Sylvie played a large part in the creation of a marriage she hasn't found entirely satisfying, it seems natural to ask "Does she have the right to be unhappy in this marriage?"

The older I get (and in the present day, Sylvie is in her late 40's, as I am) the more I feel that we are completely responsible for making our own life good. That's not to say that we don't all move through some times in our lives that are more difficult than others, when life is just hard. But over the course of years, we can either change our lives for the better, or sit around and complain about how others are making us unhappy. I think this is something that women especially tend to forget because we spend a good part of our lives taking care of other people. Sometimes when that care-taking role is no longer necessary, we've forgotten how to create a satisfying life that revolves around our own wants and needs.

I'll admit that I didn't find the end of the book truly satisfying. Sylvie does realize that she needs something different, but that realization still seems more tied to other people more than to herself. However, I enjoyed the book overall. It was well written, with some dialog that had me laughing, and the characters were well filled out. There were parts of the chapters where Sylvie is recalling the early years in New York that seemed to be more information than necessary, but for the most part the book flowed well and kept me engaged.

Jane Austin for the Elementary Set

Emma and I had a fascinating conversation this morning on the drive to school. The conversation started because I'd mentioned that she might want gloves for recess, since it was going to stay cold all day. She grumbled that she didn't do anything other than walk around with her friend L, so it didn't matter. I was a bit confused, because at recesses earlier in the year she'd been having quite a bit of fun showing the boys how to do things on the jungle-gym-like-stuff. 

It turns out that "upper elementary girls don't play at recess".  Huh? 

Emma's Upper Elementary class has two grades: 5th and 6th. Apparently, after spending some weeks playing at recess, she and her first-year comrades found that the second-years were giving them condescending looks. Eventually, the first-years got the message: "Stop playing. We don't play."

After she'd told me this, she said "And I'm not like you --I am affected by what other people think of me. I'm more like Daddy. They make us feel stupid, so now we just walk around the playground like they do."

Wow.

Addtional things I learned about the social situation in her classroom:

Among the girls, there are two popular groups, both consisting of second years. There's one group that has a definite Queen-Bee leader, who controls her group by including and excluding the same kids at different times. There is one other permanent member, and both of these girls are frequently mean to other girls. Other girls cycle through, depending on the whims of the Queen.

The second popular group consists of nicer girls, but they remain exclusive to their group. They won't be unkind, but they won't be including you in an activity voluntarily, because apparently you're not good enough (at least that's how it feels to the first-years). Her previous best-friend (when they were both in Middle Elementary) is part of this group, and this year has pretty much ignored Emma. (There is one girl in this group who does actually reach out and interact with the first year girls, and this was one of the girls who came to her birthday party.)

Then there are the first year girls, who have grown closer and are all friendly with each other.

So, I asked her, doesn't that mean you guys are popular too, just with each other? The difference, she said, is that the first year girls hang out by default, while the "popular" girls all chose to be a group.

Plus, it turns out this actually extends to the boys as well --if you're going to "play" it has to be a team sport. Football is okay, but playing on the various playground equipment is not.

And to think this year, because all the first year girls really are nice kids (no Queen Bees in this group), is SO much better socially than last year, in Middle Elementary. Gah.

So, I told her to try not to let those popular girls stop her from doing things she wanted to do, and that life gets much better once you get to college. Small comfort to an 11 year old I suppose, but it's all I got.

Emma's Birthday Party

A birthday party around November 15th carries some risks for Rob and I. Sometimes November weather in northern Illinois can be very unpleasant and in our house this day traditionally marks the beginning of winter. The year Emma was born, I went into the hospital in capris and sandals, and came out in a winter coat; it started snowing on November 15th and didn't stop until the middle of March.

We got lucky this year, thank goodness, since Emma had invited 5 boys and 6 girls to her party. That many kids naturally leads to some wild behavior, and it's always better if that behavior can occur outside!

Emma started the day by decorating, something she takes very seriously.  After an hour or so, the kitchen island was arranged just so, with mini-pumpkins, pine cones, autumn silk leaves, and leaves she had been carefully drying in books for the last month.

 

The island included a "decorating station", where each guest had the opportunity to decorate their own piece of cake, from a selection sprinkles and icing tubes. 

 She had instructed the bakery to leave her cake mostly blank and white, so it looks a little funny here, uncut.

The kitchen table was set with pre-cake snacks, since we began the party at noon. It looks so neat and clean here, before anyone arrived, with the confetti spread nicely among some drawn leaves Emma created.

Once the kids arrived, there was much snacking and playing outside with balloons and the hammock. It really turned out to be a perfect day, a bit over 50 degrees and sunny.

 Here Emma and her friend L. are taking a break from the action on the garden bench.

The hammock was definitely the hit "toy" of the party, generating lots of laughter both from the kids and from me, watching. I'm not sure I've laughed with such pure pleasure in a long time --the fun they were having was just a joy to watch.

The table didn't look nearly so clean once the kids had been at the snacks and cake.

This is a very brief video of the kids playing on the hammock:

Dead Fish

We drove to Ann Arbor, MI, on Friday to visit my parents. They're in their 80's, and it's hard for them to travel. We  normally visit them in the summer, but because we went out west this summer, we didn't see them.

Rob teaches until 10 p.m. Thursday nights, so I knew we wouldn't be leaving early Friday morning, but I have to admit I thought we'd manage to get away before noon. But no. So, by 11 a.m., when I had been ready to leave for over an hour and Rob had just finished his shower, I was a bit irritated. When Emma suddenly thought about her gold fish, Swimmy, and whether he'd make it through our Friday-noon-through-Sunday-evening absence, I wasn't terribly sympathetic.

"He'll be fine. Gold fish can survive for days without food."

So, late this afternoon, when we were back and I was throwing all the dirty clothes into the washer, I asked her if she'd like me to feed Swimmy, since I was upstairs. And of course, he was dead. Of course. He has to die when we're away, and I've told Emma that he'll be fine without us for a few days.

I just love life. It works out so well sometimes.

Corporations and Education

Two things came home today in Emma's weekly yellow envelope (the communication scheme between the school and parents).

The first is a permission slip for Emma to be involved in the Think Energy curriculum, sponsored by who? (should that be "whom"?) --you guessed it, the two large energy companies in the area. And why do we have to sign a permission slip? Because each child will receive a Think Energy! Take Action Kit. The kits will be sent home. "Using the enclosed Student Guide, help your child install the energy efficient products. You will be pleased to discover how much energy and money your family will save!" Can we say "marketing for brand loyalty?"

The curriculum is part of The Energy Foundation. I googled them, and they have a very nice website, which oh-so-surprisingly lacks any information on who funds them. They have a page that lists their "partners", every major energy company, but the implication is that these are just companies that sponsor an event here and there. It's a non-profit, and I'd really like more information on whether the "curriculum" is actually "objective" as they state.  Now maybe they are totally on the up-and-up. Call me suspicious, but I'm suspicious. 

The second thing to come home is the notice about the annual school book fair. In all the past years, the book fair has been done by a local children's bookstore, called Wonderland Books. This year, it's being done by Scholastic. Poop. I hate Scholastic. I do buy books during the quarterly book orders, because I know it allows teachers to get books for the classroom, but I try to avoid any other business with them. Although they sell the occasional Newberry Award Winner, most of their books are simply poorly crafted spin-offs from TV and movies, and certainly not worth reading. So, yuck to this change.

I've sent an email to the Director, just on the off-chance I might get some answers.