Not that call (yet)

Mariah drove herself to school today, as she now does every now and then when she has to stay late. We prefer her to take the bus, for both environmental and economic reasons. But since school is 20 miles away, we're also glad that she can now drive herself on occasion and save us the trip when she has to stay after school for an event.

This morning, though, was her first morning back after two sick days. And she called only forty-five minutes into the school day to say she really wasn't feeling well and she'd be heading home again. After assurances that she was well enough to drive, I agreed that she could and we both hung up.

About twenty minutes later she called again, in tears. She was in a gas station not five miles away from school. The car takes diesel and this station doesn't have it, so she'd pulled in to a parking space to ask the attendant where she could get it. Only--and this took some piecing together--she'd apparently run right up onto the concrete barrier marking the end of the parking space, and in pulling back off it had pulled off some of the lower part of the bumper as well. As I say, this took some piecing together through the tears, brought on as much by her illness as the damage to the car.

After we figured out that she could probably still drive the car, and that she didn't need me to come down and rescue her, we hung up. When she got home she showed me the damage--minimal--and explained how she'd pulled the plastic housing back into place. It will need repair, true, but she'd managed to get the car back in driving shape, find and buy diesel, and drive home.

In the end it turns out to be a story of how she doesn't really need me, how she could manage on her own. I was glad to be at the other end of the phone when she called, but all I did was reassure her. I'm at the far end of the process Caroline has been documenting this fall--again and again I realize it's Mariah's turn now, that she has to take responsibility for herself, and that she can.

Back to School

So it's the Tuesday after Labor Day, back to school day here where we live. Of course Mark went back to school over a week ago, and if I weren't on sabbatical I would have gone back last Monday; fall starts slowly around here. But I put Mariah on her bus at 7 and took Nick into his classroom at 9 this morning, so it really is back-to-school day. Both kids are in their last year at their respective schools. As I was walking Nick in this morning, a woman I know who lives in the neighborhood (whose son is Mariah's age) called out to me, "Aren't you ever leaving this school?" Her kids are in middle and high school, but here I am still walking into the elementary school. Indeed, I've been a parent at this school for 12 years now, ever since Mariah was in kindergarten. Nick started pre-K there the year she started middle school, so they never went to the same school but we haven't had a break, either.

Not that we wanted one. It's been a great elementary school for both kids. If not every teacher was fabulous, still the kids have done fine and over all we've been satisfied. The only teacher both kids had was their fourth grade teacher, and she was wonderful. So were both second grade teachers, one third, one first . . . and so on. In fifth grade, the kids have a "homeroom" but they move around a bit, in preparation for middle school. (They've been switching for math and, last year, science, since third grade anyway.)

Nick's class seemed smaller today when I dropped him off. I know there are fewer fifth grade classes than there were fourth grades--parents start fleeing the elementary schools a year early in the hopes of heading off middle-school woes. So several of Nick's friends won't be around this year, and we're sad about that. Still, he was eager to get started and seemed happy to see old friends when he got in this morning.

Mariah's last year of high school will, of course, involve the college search. We spent so much time thinking about college this summer that right now high school feels like a little bit of a let-down to her. I'm hoping that changes as her classes get started and she settles back into her various activities.

In the meantime I need to put these hours to good use. I have 11-1/2 months of my sabbatical left, and so far it's been slow going. Time to get into gear now.

Update

Mark and I will have been married twenty years in early September. A month or so ago we realized there was no way to get a vacation in together then, as he'll be just starting the new semester in a new job. And the kids will be back in school. So we decided to take a long weekend together alone, and that was last weekend. We went to Asheville, NC (and we'll go back--it was great!), we went whitewater rafting, we ate fabulous food, and we generally had a great time. We hadn't been away alone together in fifteen years (not counting a conference or two, since those aren't vacations). We've decided not to wait another fifteen years.

Mariah is away for a week at her annual songfest with PII (People International, Inc.). She will live in a hotel with a group of kids and adults who come together annually to sing, dance, talk, laugh, eat, and put on a show for charity. So far the text messages suggest that all is well.

Nick's birthday party was yesterday. He did, as promised, bake his own cake--a crazy cake with buttercream frosting (I made the frosting). He frosted the cake and sketched in the designs, which I then (rather inexpertly) applied. As far as we could tell, everyone liked it.

And now Nick is off to camp for five days, leaving tomorrow morning. The house will feel very empty. But Mark starts work this week as well so it's a good time for a little peace and quiet.

random bullets of catching up

• I think I may again be competitive for bad mother award--who else takes her kid to the library and won't let him check out books? Twice? (I saw the librarian looking at me as I was telling Nick that no, we'd agreed we were just there to return books, not to check out, and I really felt bad...)
  
• In my defense, it was the second (and third) time we'd been to the library (three different ones) this week and he still had plenty left to read. And I'm tired of hanging around the graphic novel section finding all the "how to draw anime villains" books.
• We are all (knock wood) recovered from our malaise, but only Mariah is really making use of her good health. She's been working non-stop, baby-sitting and bagging groceries. I expect to be hitting her up for a loan soon.
• When she wasn't working Mariah took Nick to the movies, as I mentioned before. They went to see Ratatouille. Unfortunately Nick decided it was no good so they left before it was over. I'm still not quite sure what he didn't like about it--this is a kid who has sat through Valiant (recently!) with pleasure, after all.
  
• Mariah "treated" Nick to the movies but then had to borrow cash from him. She had deposited all her paychecks in a new bank account and didn't have an ATM card yet. (I know, a likely story!) Maybe I need to be working Nick for a loan rather than Mariah.
  
• Nick is a saver, Mariah a spender. When Nick was about three I brought two large cookies home from some kind of campus event. When I picked the kids up from school/daycare I distributed them. Mariah's was gone before we got home; Nick's was in his lap, still uneaten. Both Mariah and I found this behavior somewhat disturbing. But then again this is a kid whose Hallowe'en candy often lasts until Easter (at which point it has to be thrown away).
  
• We had a wonderful trip to the beach yesterday. Mariah was working, but the rest of us drove out to visit an old friend who was staying there with his family. It was a lovely, low-key visit: mostly sitting on the beach or jumping in the waves and talking. His daughter is a year older than Nick and gets along with him beautifully--it was really nice to see them taking turns on the boogie board, digging in the sand, building a sand-castle.
  
• I am now half-way through my re-reading of Half-Blood Prince and am confident of being ready for the new one when it arrives. Nick is working his way through Order of the Phoenix and I think he's going to make it, too. I get it first; Nick next if he's finished with #6, otherwise Mariah. If he does get it before her, she's allowed to take it at night after he's gone to bed if she promises not to mess with his bookmarks.
• What does it say about us that we have absolutely no routine for the summer, and it is impossible to set up a workable chore schedule, but our reading schedule for Deathly Hallows is already set in stone?
• I have been blogging for four years as of today.
  

Lemonade Season

Nick has a lemonade stand. He and the neighbor boys have done this off and on for a couple of years now, and every now and then they make a little money. This weekend, though, Nick got ambitious. He made up some flyers using ComicLife, named the stand (NCL, for Nick's Corner Lemonade), and printed up a price list. He and I looked up a recipe for lemonade in the Joy of Cooking and we made up a big batch, with about eight lemons. And today he dragged a chair and a crate outside, set up the stand, and waited for cars and walkers to stop.

Mark and I tried to talk him out of it. It's a weekday, it's hot, no one will be walking by, we said.

$14.95 later, we are forced to eat our words. The ice is all melted, the lemonade all sold, and Nick is one happy guy. I have a feeling we'll be doing this a lot this summer. Or, to be precise, he will.

[edited to add: you can click the picture to make it bigger and read the text. He did it all himself. Also, the lemonade was selling for only 25 cents a cup, but people are often generous with the tips.]

Follow Up

So remember I said Nick was sick? Turns out he had pneumonia. So that was fun.

To backtrack: it was a big family weekend. We had a wedding on Saturday in Massachusetts, so a long drive Friday. In fact that's really why I took Nick in to the doctor on Tuesday; it felt a little like overkill, but with a trip coming up I wanted to get him checked out. The doctor didn't find much going on, and said there was a virus going around, so told us to take him home and let him rest, and bring him back if the fever spiked.

It did. Wednesday night it hit 104 and he developed a cough; that made me nervous enough to call the on-call doc, who prescribed a tepid bath and more ibuprofen. We took him back in Thursday morning, when a quick blood test showed no bacterial infection but the doctor now suspected pneumonia so gave us amoxicillin. He said it was fine to travel, but if the fever persisted until Saturday we should find a doctor in Massachusetts.

You've already figured out where this is going. As soon as the bride and groom had said "I do" we were on our way to the emergency room with Nick's temp at 102+. (Luckily the wedding was at their house and it was easy enough to get where we needed to.)

After an hour or so in the waiting room (and another dose of ibuprofen--or was this one tylenol?) Nick's temp was back down to only 99. [Aside: While we sat in the ER we watched a parade of mostly young men come in with various head and arm injuries: arm caught in a rope swing, head bump, arm possibly broken from falling off swing, etc. Fun Saturday in the country!] Nick sat quietly in a chair, leaning on me and watching golf on TV--a sure sign that he wasn't fully well. When we finally got in to the doc, the chest x-ray did show the pneumonia our pediatrician had suspected, and we got a new antibiotic and some further reassurance.

Best exchange with the ER doc:
Mark: So I shouldn't worry if he still has a fever?
ER Doc: You're a parent; you're going to worry. I want you to worry. But, yes, he will still have the fever off and on for a few days.

Best exchange with the ER nurse, who had just asked Nick to take his shirt off and put on a gown:
Nick: This is the second time today I've had to take my shirt off!
ER Nurse: Well, at least I'm not asking you to take a bath!

Thankfully corporate America (today masquerading as CVS) knows us, so it was an easy matter to get the prescription filled. Rather than return to the reception, we headed back to our hotel, stopping for fabulous organic pizza and home-made ice cream on the way. Nick's energy was low for the next three days, but he's definitely on the mend. And we were able to spend most of the next day hanging out with the bride and groom, as well as with other assorted relatives, so missing the reception was no biggie. Nick and Mariah played Guitar Hero and other video games with their cousins, Mark went fishing with his brother the groom, and I chatted with in-laws and knitted. There are worse ways to spend a day, certainly--though I'd rather not repeat the ER visit any time soon.

Kindergarten readiness?

(Cross-posted from the other blog...)

Lots of posts out in the world today about yesterday's NYT article on kindergarten readiness. The take-home lesson I got from it was that if you can afford to think about "red-shirting" your child (keeping him--and it's most often him--home for a year when he's technically eligible for kindergarten), then whether you do or not, he'll probably be fine. That is, school "success" is primarily a socio-economic, not an age, issue. If you need the free day-care, and your kid isn't really ready for school, you'll send him/her anyway and s/he may not "succeed" as well as one might hope. If, on the other hand, you don't need the free day-care, you can probably provide what your kid needs.

Yes, this is reductive. But note that all the "red-shirt" success stories are from people who didn't need free day-care.

Anecdotes:

I was a young starter: with a February birthday I should have started kindergarten at five, but since I knew how to read, I started at four. (I was briefly "held back" when we moved, but then started first grade--in another school--at five.) At my recent college reunion I kept reminding people I was a year further away from fifty than they were. Nice. (Hmm, maybe those social skills still need work?)

I probably should have taken a gap year between high school and college. My parents wanted me to, but I was academically ambitious and up for the challenge. Emotionally/psychologically, maybe not so much, but I got by ok and I don't feel scarred by the experience. As a nerdy kid, I was used to being a bit on the outskirts of things socially anyway--I'm not sure age had a whole lot to do with it. I did take three years between college and graduate school, and that was an absolute necessity, in my case. I think grad school would have chewed me up and spat me out at 21, but at 24 I had supported myself for three years, moved across the country, and figured out that I was both employable and at least marginally date-worthy. I no longer thought my only successes would be academic, and that made grad school's pressures much easier to bear.

Mariah, with her December birthday, is one of the older kids in her grade. One of her best friends, three months older, just graduated from high school; Mariah's got another year. She's academically at the top of her class and seems to be holding her own socially/emotionally. She could have skipped at one point, but we opted for a multi-age grouping (in a Montessori middle school) instead. She doesn't seem to have any regrets, and is considering taking a gap year between HS and college even though this would have her turning 20 as a first-year college student. (I wish all my students would take a gap year...)

Nick, with his early August birthday, is one of the youngest kids in his grade. He's not markedly smaller than other boys--this is the year some are shooting up and some aren't, and he's still right in the middle--nor is he particularly delayed socially as far as I can tell. (He does sometimes cry more easily than other kids, but is that his age or just his temperament? Hard to say...though it's true that his mother was a big cry-baby in elementary school.) Academically, he's doing more than fine. According to "conventional wisdom"--which is that boys mature more slowly, so should redshirt if anyone should--he should have been held back and Mariah sent ahead, but we actually did benefit from the free day-care (public preschool at age four) and never really thought seriously about holding him back. Will he struggle in college? If he's like his sister, maybe we'll suggest a gap year at that point. Right now, though, he's fine.

One more anecdote: when my younger brother was tested for kindergarten, he was asked to draw a man, but drew something else--maybe a table?--instead. He was a bit young (November birthday) but pretty bright. The teacher or principal or someone called my mother and said he wasn't ready, he couldn't draw a man. My mother, though, talked to my brother who said he just didn't feel like drawing a man--and convinced the school administration to take him anyway. Years later he admitted that he really couldn't draw a man--but he did know how to game the system!

So there are my anecdotes. I find myself wishing more and more for flexibility in schooling, for some kind of readiness-testing that looked at the whole child rather than just the age or just a test or two. Obviously that's what home-schooling gives people, and that's absolutely what's most appealing about it. But for those who can't or won't take that option, for whatever reason--what to do?