Circle up ya'll it's story time!

    What seems like eons ago I taught Pre-School. It was one of the best, most life changing, self discovering times in my whole life. The best way to get to know who you really are and where you want to be in life, is to continuously get unsolicited advice and correction from a group of 4 year olds. I really mean that. I had some extremely good teachers alongside me in the role of guiding these tiny people and governing their days, Sending them off into public school with high hopes they stay kind and unique and amazing. One of the best groups of grown ups I have worked with and it felt more like a club. It's a harder job than I knew before living it.

   I miss it from time to time when I remember the fantastic things that happened. Last night I had one of those dreams where you relive an event accurately like it happened right then. With no strange additions or subtractions. Just a memory. I woke up so happy and had to blog it.

  There was a boy with the most perfectly round charlie brown head and a slight lisp. I won't post his name because you just never know (and also this is embarrassing stuff). This boy was a character and a half and I could usually count on him for the levity in my day when he was there. And when he wasn't there I missed him. You could say he was a favorite. I know I shouldn't have had favorites blah blah blah. Every teacher has them or they aren't human. It's just something you smile about later in life. Those are the children that a teacher hopes to someday have children like. I had several different ones I dreamed of having a perfect son made of. If that makes any sense. Anyhow, this particular kid left me speechless with his natural comic ability daily. And the joy of actual joys was that his mother was a kind saintly sweet lady that I could take aside at pick up time and tell her the funny of the day. And she would smile and cringe and sigh all at once. I looked forward to that expected and predictable reaction. She knew her son well and knew how much joy his antics brought me. We had just about the best teacher parent bond ever. Because she appreciated his spirit fully.

 Our class curriculum included drawing assignments for the letter we were studying. This boy had a love for building and jumping and playing. Not for drawing. He was clever and came up with what he thought to be a brilliant solution to his "have to get work done before I can go back to building towers" problem. He drew a nut. A single nut. For every flippin letter for a few weeks until I sat down and told him he HAD to be more creative. "This" pointing at his B drawing "is a brown nut". It was in fact a brown nut. But so were the other drawings. "But this" points at the S drawing " is a small nut. He was not wrong, it was smaller than the other ones. I was dying on the inside because his logic and defense were solid and his face so damn serious. Not a con. Totally legit. He agreed to drawing something else for his next letter assignment ( probably so he could get away from me as I was clearly wasting his outside time with talking) and I went on with my day. A week or so later we have the letter N on our board and I died. After a brown nut, a small nut, a round nut, and a large nut I felt like the stars had aligned for N to be one he had to get with the program on.

  He drew and drew and drew. Thoughtfully and with purpose. And when he handed in his art it was not colored in but just a simple pencil drawn man. But what? You ask. Man doesn't start with N. That's what I said as he hustled toward the back door putting his jacket on for playground time. And he completely innocently shouts over his shoulder as goes "Nope. It's a naked man".

( name has been blocked out for privacy but man I love the little kid handwriting I had to hide)

 It sure was.



  You bet your ass I saved this all those years!!! His mom and I had the most ruckus laughter filled talk that afternoon and she insisted I keep it but could I please make her a photocopy for his baby book. I have hung on to this folded up crudely drawn letter N drawing and pinned it near my work station at every job I have had since. Folded closed as not to offend anyone. But right there nearby all the time. So when I had a horrid day in a collections call center I would just see the purple paper ( yep, purple. I don't even know why but I love it) and smile to myself. I have this pinned next to my work bench in the garage now and it serves the same purpose it always has.


  Hands down the very best thing I still have from my teaching days. I constantly wonder how all my students are doing now and sometimes I am lucky enough to creep one or two out when the see me pick up my girl (crazy life gave me a stepkid the same age) because they remember me kinda sorta. I think this little guy moved far away but I have no doubt he is somebody wonderful. Though if I remember correctly, he reverted back to the nut drawing solution in our Private Kindergarten program the very next year.













 I have a couple more favorite kiddos I want to write about but need the okay from their mommas. But it's worth the wait and I think they will say yes because they want to relive the good times too.



You are welcome.

liar liar pants on fire

I am encountering a tween. A pre-tween if you will. But I feel like I handled what I like to call a "learning moment" very well today. My normally extremely honest ( almost to a fault) step daughter was weaving me a doozie. I caught on at about the third sentence as it was full of "um" and "so I was thinking". Classic panic and stall tactics. The amusing part is that she was trying to get her way on a topic that I would have totally agreed on anyhow. So it was a pointless elaborate reason given before the actual request. It was unnecessary ass covering. Considering what a royal pain I was as a youth, I can smell it all a mile away. I felt my eyebrow raising with every word she spoke. And then, calmly sat in front of her, made direct eye contact and said "try again. And this time give me the real reason. Keep in mind, I was you about 20-something years ago and I did this better". She sighed and told me the real version. Afterward I explained that I would have said yes if she was straight with me the first time. She was kinda taken aback and said ok like I was going to say "just kidding you're grounded" and hugged me and quickly went to her room. I felt like laughing. Only because she doesn't get that I have done all this crap when I was her age. While having this episode of the twilight zone, I thought back to the times my Dad was totally onto my bullshit techniques and I gasped. Oh yes. Alternate universe type stuff right there. It all makes sense. When he would throw up his hands and say things like "you'll get it when you're a parent" I rolled my eyes at 15. But he was so right. darnit.


I thought about it a lot today and then had some annoyance at those that think I am a less than perfect parent. I don't think there are any perfect parents. Mainly because of the simple fact that there are no perfect people. Moms and Dads are winging it as they go, using they skills they learned through life to shape the tiny people they created (and top it off that each kid is different. Even if you have a dozen). And it is a crazy chain reaction because those Moms and Dads were raised by their own imperfect yet probably just fine parents. So the idiots that judge others are just showing their own insecurities. The best part of this world is that even if by some freak amazing wonder there was in fact a perfect person, the odds of them parenting to perfection is impossible. Because a child is just a little person with limited life experience and without the foresight of understanding that their own parents were once children pulling the same old crap ages ago ( which makes the appear to be psychic at the time and man it's fun being on the other side of that btw). And the odds of that "perfect" person having a perfect child would be alien and robotic and fiction.

With that said, I am doing awesome at parenting this kid that probably thinks she is a fibbing pioneer. And it's hilarious.

Before you even say it, I do know this will be less fun and funny as she really lands in teenagerness and hormones. For right now it's like training wheels are just coming off our Stepmom Stepkid relationship. So far so good. Plus, I was hellish, so I am ready for when her head spins around.


good night ya'll.