Hair

Tonight we had a hotdog party in the basement and watched Tangled, which I had previously listened to three times when it played behind my head on our roadtrip to and from the Dunes.  Pretty good movie.  I can see why Lyla wants to be Rapunzel.  But hopefully she'll keep her hair a tad shorter.

Dumb truck

I bought Lyla this stupid toy that involves using a magnet pen to move little colored circles onto a grid to make designs and pictures.  "But that sounds so fun."  Shut up, it sucks.  The magnet pen is so weak that it wouldn't even stick to your fridge, so half the time you're pounding on the screen to try to finally attract one of the pieces.

Plus, if you've slid in one of the design cards, which gives you a colored magnet grid equivalent of a paint by number, you have to drag in the inner pieces first and work your way outward, otherwise later you're dragging pieces over other pieces, resulting in pieces sticking together and screwing up your entire monkey or whatever.  Stupid frickin' thing.

So after like half an hour of painstaking piece moving, I successfully made the truck, wheels and everything.  Seriously, I felt like a surgeon after a reconstruction.  "Come here, Lyla!  Look at the truck!  But leave it flat on the table.  Don't shake it."

"Gee, Dad!" I expected her to say.  "Gee!"  But instead:

Pre-K

"And Daddy, there's no scribble-scrabble allowed in our journals."  Lyla showed me the page of numbers and words she'd written.  Her new daycare teacher is awesome.  In the center, he has the reputation of not quite following the mold of the other teachers, but everyone agrees that if anyone gets the kids ready for kindergarten, it's him.

"Daddy, we use the sink quietly because then we don't splash, and we don't waste water."

Princess legislation

"Daddy, what's a law?"

"A big rule that everyone has to follow."

"Like with princess castles?"

"Princess castles?"

"You can't go into princess castles unless you're a princess."

"I see.  That's a law?"

"Yeah.  But I can go into princess castles."

"Because you're a princess."

"Yeah."

Back to school

Lyla's in the Fives Room, where kids are five or almost five.  Rowan's in the Monkey Room, where kids enter wearing diapers and exit wearing underwear.

My first day of my 13th year of teaching.  Here are some honest truths about teaching and parenting:

1. I decided I truly loved my job in September of 2009, when I returned to school after spending six months at home with an infant Lyla.  That sounds horrible to say, but there it is.  Infants are hard, and teaching English is a different kind of hard, which felt easy. 

2. September of 2010, same feeling.  Fun summer, but challenging to navigate the mood swings of a one-year-old.  Teaching comma splice avoidance delighted me. 

3. September of 2011, teaching was the greatest career of all.  Rowan had been born the previous January, so with summer and my parenting leave, I spent 17 weeks wrangling two kids who were on completely different nap schedules.  To Kill a Mockingbird never felt so fascinating.

4. September of 2012, good to be back in school.  A summer spent unsuccessfully looking for a new house.  Kids still on different nap schedules.  Grading papers sounded relaxing.

5. Today, September of 2013, suddenly it's hard to go back.  Lyla and Rowan run and climb and talk.  They like each other, and they like me, often for several consecutive minutes.  They nap reliably and simultaneously.  I still don't have the temperament or skill to do full-time what the kids' daycare teachers do, but the onset of fall didn't present nearly as relieving a scenario this time around.  I met my 167 students today with a definite pit in my stomach; it'll dissipate once I get more into the swing of things, at least I hope it does.  It's so bizarre to think about, but with respect to my job, I was totally spoiled by living with shrieking, demanding infants.

T-minus one year

A year from now, Lyla will start kindergarten.  "Colleges look at your kindergarten transcript," we'll tell her. 

12 years in the future

Went in a time machine and found teenaged Lyla typing on an antique laptop, totally ignoring a majestic fire.  Those kids and their technology, I tell you: a constant distraction.  Of course, I'm not exactly one to talk, seeing as how I'm the one with the time machine.