Caitlyn’s school issues monthly “20/20 Reading Challenges”, encouraging the kids to find someone to read to them for 20 minutes for 20 days out of every month. After the post-school snack, Caitlyn and I sit down and she reads one book to me and I read two or three to her. The other day, she read I am Invited to a Party! by Mo Willems to me and I read Three Little Kittens, One Smart Cookie (which I think is cute but she thinks is boring), and The Adventure to her. Later, while I was attempting to find a quiet …
Category: Caitlyn
Evenings can be kind of stressful for me. There’s the getting dinner together (which sometimes starts right after lunch), getting Caitlyn home and doing the after-school routine, then eating and cleaning and prepping lunch for the next day, all before bedtime. I’m wearing down at this point and want nothing more than quiet and maybe a cup of tea; Caitlyn is getting increasingly crazy as the evening goes on, babbling and dancing and interrupting and fidgeting. She interprets things as narrowly as possible, so that telling her to stop sitting on the radiator also requires telling her to stop leaning …
I am uncertain of my relationship with the notion of “childhood”. There seems to be this pervasive contemporary cultural sense that children should be protected and sheltered from all sorts of things, and that childhood is a time of magical, blissful ignorance. And while it’s certainly too true that there are American children (and others, too) who face too much too soon – hunger, poverty, abuse, homelessness, disease, etc – there are plenty who are indulged and coddled and sheltered from the burden of Responsibility for far too long. I have no problem with kids believing in the Tooth Fairy, …
Big shout out to our neighborhood’s park’s maintenance crew, who has left a huge pile of leaves in the park across the street from us. I don’t know if they planned this deliberately for the enjoyment of the neighborhood’s kids or if they’ve just gotten busy elsewhere. Doesn’t matter, and I don’t care – this pile has been leapt in, rolled in, scuffed through, thrown in all directions both before and after school, and will be one of Caitlyn’s favorite fall memories for at least the next 12 months. Save
It can rain now. The trick or treating is over, Caitlyn has an enormous haul of sugar (yay for our neighborhood and Columbia City businesses – no gum or jaw breakers this year and lots of Reese’s, Milky Ways, and Whoppers!), and we had gorgeous weather despite previous forecasts that had us trying to adjust Caitlyn’s expectations into last year’s costume. But while the clouds did move in this afternoon, the rain held off. And so Caitlyn wore the new costume. It’s a little too big in the top, and the hemline will probably start marching toward her knees next …
Caitlyn: “There’s mail that you get, like a letter in the mailbox. And there’s male like a boy. Isn’t that odd, that it’s the same word?” Me: “Yes, but the words are spelled differently. Mail, like letters, is m-a-i-l and the other one is male, m-a-l-e.” Caitlyn: “We are female, and Papa is male because he’s a boy.” Me: “That’s true. Female is spelled f-e-m-a-l-e.” Caitlyn: “And so there’s fee-mail, mail that you have to pay for.”