Light rail adventure

Dylan & Ava playing with trains on the light rail train. We had a lovely outing on a cool but sunny day.

We window shopped, people-watched, and I tried to keep a close eye on Dylan, who is so low to the ground and fast, that he can disappear among clothes racks the moment you turn your attention to something else. But I brought some of his little pocket-sized Thomas trains, so those kept him semi-occupied as I tried to speed-peruse the racks. Later, we sat in the sun outside Starbucks at 4th & Pine, people watched in Westlake Park, and ate snacks we'd packed.

As we headed back to the light rail station in the tunnel, the afternoon was marred by discovering we'd been spit on, apparently from an overhead walkway at Westlake station downtown.

Didn't see or feel it, only noticed the goo on me and Dylan as we walked along the platform. Who the
eff spits down into a crowd of people?! "Dirtbags," said a friend on Facebook. True dat.

I was disgusted having to clean it up as best I could with pocket tissues and sanitizer (traveling with kids means being prepared) and rode home seething, knowing I'd have to wash our coats once we arrived.

But I didn't want the kids' day spoiled, so I put on a happy face, which lasted until we arrived back at our car and I went to gas up and discovered gas is now $4.19/gal. At that price, light rail may become more a part of our weekend outings.

Despite all that, it was a lovely day. Dylan conked out a few minutes before we arrived home and I put him in bed to finish his nap and started dinner. Ava buzzed around me as I grated squash and zucchini for turkey meatballs.

"What was your favorite part of today?" I asked.

"This right now," she responded, hugging my leg and stretching up to kiss me. "Just being with you."

*verklempt*

I will try to keep this scene in mind during her next meltdown over something inconsequential.

Role model?

As we made dinner tonight, Ava used an old non-working cell phone to carry on a long conversation about her day with an imaginary person, complete with updates on her meetings, her projects, her emails, and for some reason, extensive use of un-ironic air quotes. 4 year olds can be hilarious.

I do wonder though how she comes up with this stuff. I'll cop to modeling (unintentionally) the robust conversations on meetings and projects and such, but I am not a frequent air quotes abuser. "I swear."

"Riiight... Uh huh. Yeah, my mom's taking my picture AGAIN."

I can bet that I will be able to put together a montage of her in this pose over the next 12 years, assuming we'll still be using phones and not some mind-meld device for communicating.

Cool blog alert: White House Celebrating Black History Month Series

I'm enjoying reading the White House blog, which is doing a retrospective Celebrating Black History Month Series with posts that highlight the work of African Americans across the Obama Administration.

Valentine's Day lesson in living in the moment

I went home sick on Valentine's Day. Years ago this would have been devastating. Now, it's just one less occasion I have to wear pantyhose.

We actually don't celebrate the day and haven't since early in our dating days after we agreed that it's a Hallmark Holiday, meaning it's mainly a way to boost greeting card sales during a slow time of year. Instead, we opt for spontaneous celebrations of our love throughout the year. For us, it's much more meaningful.

Four year old Ava, however, has fully bought in to the hype, asking when we'd be getting her chocolates and whether Daddy would be getting me flowers and a balloon for the day. She was quite disappointed to hear we weren't going to partake in the heart-covered extravaganza.

Since she didn't have school on the day itself, her class celebrated the following Friday with traded valentines and Pajama Day. 'Cause if you're going to have chocolate at school, the only thing better is having it in your PJs!

The teacher sent a list of all the kids' names so that no one would be left out. After hunting around unsuccessfully at a grocery store and drugstores, I found a 32-card valentine multi-pack that was perfect for our needs. But once we opened the pack, Ava decided that she also wanted to do cards for all the teachers at her school. It kind of speaks to how close-knit and small the school is that she felt enough of a connection to them all to A) want to recognize them all, and B) could remember their names.

So in addition to writing out the names for eight classmates and her main teacher, she also did seven other teachers cards and signed each one.

I was so proud of her for her thinking of it and for sticking to it, even though I was rushing to finish and was much less patient than she was since it was after dinner, getting late, and there was still teeth-brushing, pajamas, next day clothes decisions and all the weekday home adminis-trivia to do.

At one point, after discarding a card that she'd written the wrong letters on, I realized that my annoyance was clearly showing (in the form of a sigh and eye roll) because she made another mistake and immediately looked stricken, saying, "I'm SO sorry! I didn't mean to! I really didn't!"

Good grief! I felt like Mommie Dearest sans wire hangers, and we were suddenly a far cry from the evident joy on her face when we'd written together in the past. Just look at the last photo on this post. Clearly I was making this feel more like a task to be perfected than a fun, thoughtful craft for her friends and teachers.

So I took a deep breath, smiled and said, "It's okay. It doesn't have to be perfect. How about if I draw a couple lines on each one to help guide you so that you can see where the letters need to go?" She smiled and eagerly shook her head yes. With that renewed spirit of teamwork, she resumed signing her name on each card and carefully wrote the remaining names as I called out the letters.

I was embarrassed that I was projecting my own sure-to-fail perfectionism on her and nearly ruining what should have been some lovely "Mommy/Ava time" as she calls it. I love doing things like this with her and Dylan, but struggle to fit them into our busy weeks, resulting in the aforementioned rushing and annoyance. It takes all of the fun out of the time we spend together.

So I'm trying to get better at setting aside sufficient time, stopping to just "be" in the moment, and also realizing that some things will just have to give. For example, if Jason's working late and hasn't started dinner, we may need to have cobbled-together leftovers or takeout instead of a more labor-intensive meal if we want to spend part of the evening doing some fun activity that takes a bit of time.

We'll muddle through, but I wonder how other busy families manage this nightly juggle of feeding everyone and spending quality time.

School daze

Last month on Facebook, I posted:

Never thought I'd be touring a potential kindergarten that costs more than my 1st year of college. Hope the fact that we sang Nicki Minaj all the way here isn't an automatic disqualifier.

The comments rolled in, including suggestions from my 1st grade teacher who said:

Provide rich experiences at home and community, put in reg/public preschool w/nice competent staff and save the $$$$ for a superior post grad school. In today's world a BA is not enough. Well, that's my unsolicited opinion. Exception: spend $$$ on a preschool that will give [your] child a second language (Spanish, Chinese). [You] do not have to speak the 2nd language [your]self.

Subsequent comments were from other parents lamenting the poor quality of our local schools and opinions on the two independent schools we were considering.

A middle and high school classmate weighed in that the thread made her feel fortunate that her local public schools back east are high quality. I responded:

You are fortunate! And that's a feeling more communities should be able to experience.
It's crazy to think I ended up at [school] with you because the schools in my neighborhood where I was bussed to 30 years ago weren't adequate for my needs. And we're still having the same conversations!

I know schools are not businesses, but if a company wasn't satisfying a huge portion of its customers year after year, it would be out of business. It would also presumably be learning from customers and improving the product every year.

It's frustrating that that's not happening in a sytematic way across all of the Seattle Public Schools instead of just in certain ones.

I told Jason about the thread and he said, "Kids around here might as well be in 'Waiting for Superman' too" - referring to the movie that came out in 2010 about the failures of the public school system in America and how some families' and kids' only chance at escape is through the random chance of school entrance lotteries.

Because of Ava's September birthday and the now-firm cut-off for kindergarten entrance, we have decide to wait another year on sending her to kindergarten. When Jason and I were kids, we both started early or were skipped ahead because teachers and our parents agreed we could keep up.  Ava will be five in the fall but will have to wait until the following fall when she's just turned six.

I am really bummed for her because I sense that she's more than ready in all the areas of development that they consider for kindergarten acceptance: social, emotional and academic. Her teachers, who are strong proponents of kids waiting that extra year, agreed, saying, "Ava is an exception to our usual preference. We think she's ready." And I don't think they're saying it because they want to get her out of their class sooner. :-)

But the schools we've considered are not flexible in allowing her to start, which seems arbitrary and not in her best interests. But it's out of our hands. So we will keep her at her preschool another year, maybe look at starting a language as my former teacher suggested, and work on academic and arts topics that pique her interest at home until a year and a half from now. Sigh.

I just hope we're doing right by our bright girl. I don't want her development to suffer because of an inflexible and arbitrary administrative rule. We shall see.