Going it Alone

It’s late, and I am raising my mug of tea in solidarity to all of the parents out there whose partners travel for work, who don’t have partners and who don’t have outside help. Alec left for a conference in Montreal on Monday and, while the kids and I have been having a great week (we are all recovered from whatever it is that grabbed hold of us), it’s all I can do to keep everyone pointed in the right direction, much less tend to my blog.

In our household, when one parent is gone, the other tends to play to his or her strengths and make like the kids are getting a good deal, doing things that the other parent would never do.  In my case that means reading stories at the table, eating chocolate chip pancakes for dinner, and going straight from school to the movies.

On Tuesday, C.C. got to wear her nightgown with dragons on it to play Ming Lo’s wife in her class production of “Ming Lo Moves the Mountain.”  The “wife” does not have a name, but she did have a lot of lines.  Thrilled that she could essentially wear her pajamas to school, C.C. informed me on our way into school that morning that she planned to shout her lines.  I had my misgivings, but she did the right thing.  They performed the play in the cafeteria, and with the hum of refrigerators and other equipment, her shouting ended up being pitch perfect.

This has also been “green week” at BFIS, and the kindergarten classes have been tending the school garden all year.  Milo joined his colleagues after school today to sell the harvest of lettuce, escarole, herbs and lima beans.  My evening tea is a bunch of mint leaves on which I’ve poured boiling water and added some honey.  Delicious.

And our third noteworthy event of the week is that we’ve had a houseguest, September, who is Milo’s class pet. September is a very sweet stuffed monkey.  He travels in a backpack, along with his notebook and crayons, and the children take turns taking him home and hosting him for a couple of days.  September came home with us yesterday.  Each child is supposed to teach September some manners and then draw a picture of himself with the new and improved September in the notebook, along with an explanation of what the monkey learned.  Other children have taught September how to use a fork, how to water the plants, and how to say, “thank you.” 

Milo decided to teach September not to burp and fart at the table.  In the picture Milo drew, he and September are sitting at the table, smiling.  A big green cloud emanates from September’s butt, and a speech bubble says “imscuse” which, Milo says, reads as “Excuse me.”  This morning, after only one night, Milo announced that he would be bringing September back to school a day early because he had learned his lesson and would no longer be burping and farting at meals.  But I convinced him that it might be nice to take care of September for one more day, and so the two of them are soundly snoozing.