P and I got up early yesterday morning with plans to engage in all sorts of autumnal mother/daughter activities. The first activity on our list? S’more making. Turns out, I have zero fire starting skills. Zero. I’m pretty good at rustling up a bunch of smoke, but it seems that marshmallow roasting requires actual flames. I eventually threw in the towel and called Chris out to help. I quickly discovered that he’s as good as I am at smoke production.
P’s first best friend’s birthday is today. In her honor, here’s a video of the two of them performing a little Mandarin ditty. I think the song is about a duckling, but who knows.
One year ago today, Wee P was doing this.
Okay, so it’s no New England, but this place is pretty great this time of year. This morning, we stumbled upon the coolest pumpkin patch ever.
P picked out two books tonight and asked me to choose one to read for her bedtime story.
The first option was Four Fish Fly in the High, Yellow Sun.
My Uruguayan friend/sister, Marta, just emailed me to tell me about her country’s latest achievement – it’s become the first nation in the world to reach the goal of providing a laptop to every single elementary school student in the country. This is incredible! Although I’m thrilled for Uruguay, I find myself contrasting this achievement with the vivid stories presented in Jonathan Kozal’s Savage Inequalities about what life is like in America’s poorest schools. When I think about this, I feel sad and a little ashamed.
If Gandhi and others were right about being able to judge a society by how it treats its weakest members, Uruguayans should be feeling pretty darn proud right now. Americans? Not so much.
Soon before we left for China, Chris had the following exchange with P:
It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything here. One reason is that I’ve been back at work for the first time in almost a year, and the adjustment has left me exhausted. Lately, it seems that if I stay up a minute past 8:30pm, I spend the better part of the following day in a lumbering, slow-brained stupor. For a while, I was blaming my back-to-school exhaustion on my advancing age, but I happened upon an old diary the other day, and reading it, I realized I’ve always struggled with this time of year.
I seem to start out with a lot of enthusiasm and energy for each new school year. Take, for example, my entry from August 26, 1981 (Note: please read with a strong Southern twang):
Is it bad that in my four years of parenthood, I’ve yet to throw a real birthday party? By “real” I mean the kind with other kids, party favors, and an organized game or two. I’ve just never managed to get it together enough to pull off such an event. Today is Wee P’s first birthday, and rather than preparing for my first class of the semester, which begins in 20 minutes, I’m sitting in my office trying to justify my failure (once again) to plan a party.
Here’s the rationale I’ve been offering myself:
