SUUSI report, Day 2.
Jul. 22nd, 2007 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaAlex woke us up a little after seven on Monday morning, and after our showers we headed out to breakfast with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bosssio and her boys. Meals with the kids were really the hardest part of SUUSI. We'd haul the kids through the crowded cafeteria - not just SUUSI participants, but incoming freshmen and their parents at VT for orientation, plus undersupervised kids attending various sports camps - to our usual seating area, a large glass-walled room at one end of the dining room where families with small children tended to congregate because the enclosure made supervision easier. One of us would sit with the kids while the others fought the lines for food, and then we'd switch places. Meals were not particularly restful.
After breakfast, Michael took Alex to the dorm housing the youth program, while I went back to our room to pack up her things - including the potty. (We'd put her in a diaper because of the previous night's accidents, but I wanted to encourage her to use the potty if possible.) The nursery and the three- and four-year-old program pretty much took up an entire floor of the dorm. Lounges had been turned into large playrooms, and individual dorm rooms were set up as breakout areas: arts and crafts, baby lunchroom (highchairs), two-year-old lunchroom (tiny picnic tables), multiple nap rooms (mattresses on the floor), a little library room, and so forth. I wasn't sure how Alex would settle in, but after just a moment or two she was deeply involved in toys, and tagging after a nursery staffer who had promised her some apple juice.
I didn't have anything scheduled for the morning, and neither didbosssio. We took a blanket out and sat on the lawn in the SUUSI quad. I worked on my cross-stitch project, and we talked and talked a mile a minute. (I hope she didn't really want to read the newspaper she'd brought along with her.) The weather was cool and pleasant - such a great improvement on last year's blistering hot SUUSI.
Technically, the youth program ran from 9-12 and from 2-4 - the two workshop periods. But Alex's confirmation packet strongly encouraged us not to pick children under three up for lunch. Apparently, they've found that the youngest children are a lot happier when they only have to separate once per day, and when there's an uninterrupted possibility for a midday nap. We had only intended to leave Alex for half a day on Monday, so I suggested that they give her lunch in the nursery and I'd pick her up at 1pm. Instead, I came to the nursery at one to find that she was fast asleep - so now it's official: she'll nap for everyone in the world except her parents. We agreed that they would feed her lunch whenever she woke up, and then call me. And suddenly I had a couple more unexpectedly free hours on my hands. I browsed the SUUSI bookstore for a while, and then went up to take a short nap, which ended when Michael brought a nap-refreshed Alex back to the room.
One of my favorite parts of SUUSI last year was "community time," a loose collection of outdoor activities held on the SUUSI quad. Last year, community time happened every day just before dinnertime. This year, they'd alternated the week's activities so that two days had community time from 5:15-6:15, two days had "family concerts" during that time, and Friday had an early worship service during the same time. Monday was the first community time. Among other things, they had a table set up with nail polish and spray-on temporary hair dye, a sidewalk-chalk-and-giant-legos children's area, helium balloons, a cotton candy machine, a drumming circle, bubbles, and big beach balls. We alternated between the community time part of the quad and the big sandbox/volleyball court.
I painted Alex's finger- and toenails, much to her delight. Much to my delight, the makeover table was largely occupied by a group of preteen boys who were really getting in to adorning each other and any volunteers they could rope in. "I'm really good at painting nails and dyeing hair," one of them remarked to another. There was a little silence. Then he added, "Don't worry, it's just a SUUSI thing.
We went to dinner a bit early, because Michael was signed up for the poker tournament beginning at 7pm. He headed out, and I decided to risk taking Alex to the worship service that was scheduled for 8pm. The service was kind of just okay; the theme of the sermon was the benefits of playing and being childlike, and it seemed a little trite. We both enjoyed the music, though, and Alex enjoyed playing with markers in the back of the room.
It had dawned on me at dinner that we were going to have an evening scheduling problem. Despite advance notice, the childcare co-op[1] people had scheduled Michael for a 9:15-10:35 shift while he was supposed to be playing in the poker tournament. "No problem," I initially said. "I'll do your shift and you can do mine." But then I realized that, after a two-hour nap in the nursery, Alex would hardly be asleep by 9:15.bosssio offered to take the first part of my shift, but when we came back to the room after the worship service I found that she was deeply stressed out, and her 20-month-old son Liam was still awake. She graciously offered to take the first part of childcare co-op duties anyway, and I promised to try to get Alex down very very quickly. Mercifully, she was asleep by 9:30. I went out to the hall to relieve bosssio, who promptly started crying on my shoulder from the sheer stress of trying to do SUUSI single-parently. (I'll let her fill in the details herself, if she wants.)
She got Liam to sleep, and when my shift ended at 10:35 the two of us and Michael signed out with my replacement and went out to the SUUSI over-21 dance club for a nice bracing drink. We drank Magic Hat and decompressed at a corner table, shouting over the best-of-the-70s-and-80s dance music. Michael and I spent a lot of concerted effort trying to convincebosssio that it was really okay to accept the help that people were offering her, and that giving a hand to overwhelmed parents of young children is part of what SUUSIgoers mean by "intentional community." As the conversation went on to other subjects, we meandered back over to the dorms, sat on a low brick wall overlooking the quad, enjoying the relative quiet after the club and the cool night air. Around 12:30, I pointed out that Michael had a nature trip in seven hours, and we went upstairs to bed.
[1] Childcare co-op is the greatest idea ever. Parents of young children were all housed in the same dorm. From 9:15pm to 1:15am (2:15 on Friday), one parent sat in each hallway with a clipboard, cell phone, and walkie-talkie. Once our kids were asleep, we were free to sign out with the on-duty parent, leaving a cell phone number and our planned destination. If any of the kids woke up and needed their parents, the on-duty parent either called the parent or used the walkie-talkie to summon a "runner" to physically go and find them. We each had to do one short shift, and then we had the rest of our evenings totally free. It was awesome.
bosssio and her boys. Meals with the kids were really the hardest part of SUUSI. We'd haul the kids through the crowded cafeteria - not just SUUSI participants, but incoming freshmen and their parents at VT for orientation, plus undersupervised kids attending various sports camps - to our usual seating area, a large glass-walled room at one end of the dining room where families with small children tended to congregate because the enclosure made supervision easier. One of us would sit with the kids while the others fought the lines for food, and then we'd switch places. Meals were not particularly restful.After breakfast, Michael took Alex to the dorm housing the youth program, while I went back to our room to pack up her things - including the potty. (We'd put her in a diaper because of the previous night's accidents, but I wanted to encourage her to use the potty if possible.) The nursery and the three- and four-year-old program pretty much took up an entire floor of the dorm. Lounges had been turned into large playrooms, and individual dorm rooms were set up as breakout areas: arts and crafts, baby lunchroom (highchairs), two-year-old lunchroom (tiny picnic tables), multiple nap rooms (mattresses on the floor), a little library room, and so forth. I wasn't sure how Alex would settle in, but after just a moment or two she was deeply involved in toys, and tagging after a nursery staffer who had promised her some apple juice.
I didn't have anything scheduled for the morning, and neither did
bosssio. We took a blanket out and sat on the lawn in the SUUSI quad. I worked on my cross-stitch project, and we talked and talked a mile a minute. (I hope she didn't really want to read the newspaper she'd brought along with her.) The weather was cool and pleasant - such a great improvement on last year's blistering hot SUUSI.Technically, the youth program ran from 9-12 and from 2-4 - the two workshop periods. But Alex's confirmation packet strongly encouraged us not to pick children under three up for lunch. Apparently, they've found that the youngest children are a lot happier when they only have to separate once per day, and when there's an uninterrupted possibility for a midday nap. We had only intended to leave Alex for half a day on Monday, so I suggested that they give her lunch in the nursery and I'd pick her up at 1pm. Instead, I came to the nursery at one to find that she was fast asleep - so now it's official: she'll nap for everyone in the world except her parents. We agreed that they would feed her lunch whenever she woke up, and then call me. And suddenly I had a couple more unexpectedly free hours on my hands. I browsed the SUUSI bookstore for a while, and then went up to take a short nap, which ended when Michael brought a nap-refreshed Alex back to the room.
One of my favorite parts of SUUSI last year was "community time," a loose collection of outdoor activities held on the SUUSI quad. Last year, community time happened every day just before dinnertime. This year, they'd alternated the week's activities so that two days had community time from 5:15-6:15, two days had "family concerts" during that time, and Friday had an early worship service during the same time. Monday was the first community time. Among other things, they had a table set up with nail polish and spray-on temporary hair dye, a sidewalk-chalk-and-giant-legos children's area, helium balloons, a cotton candy machine, a drumming circle, bubbles, and big beach balls. We alternated between the community time part of the quad and the big sandbox/volleyball court.
I painted Alex's finger- and toenails, much to her delight. Much to my delight, the makeover table was largely occupied by a group of preteen boys who were really getting in to adorning each other and any volunteers they could rope in. "I'm really good at painting nails and dyeing hair," one of them remarked to another. There was a little silence. Then he added, "Don't worry, it's just a SUUSI thing.
We went to dinner a bit early, because Michael was signed up for the poker tournament beginning at 7pm. He headed out, and I decided to risk taking Alex to the worship service that was scheduled for 8pm. The service was kind of just okay; the theme of the sermon was the benefits of playing and being childlike, and it seemed a little trite. We both enjoyed the music, though, and Alex enjoyed playing with markers in the back of the room.
It had dawned on me at dinner that we were going to have an evening scheduling problem. Despite advance notice, the childcare co-op[1] people had scheduled Michael for a 9:15-10:35 shift while he was supposed to be playing in the poker tournament. "No problem," I initially said. "I'll do your shift and you can do mine." But then I realized that, after a two-hour nap in the nursery, Alex would hardly be asleep by 9:15.
bosssio offered to take the first part of my shift, but when we came back to the room after the worship service I found that she was deeply stressed out, and her 20-month-old son Liam was still awake. She graciously offered to take the first part of childcare co-op duties anyway, and I promised to try to get Alex down very very quickly. Mercifully, she was asleep by 9:30. I went out to the hall to relieve bosssio, who promptly started crying on my shoulder from the sheer stress of trying to do SUUSI single-parently. (I'll let her fill in the details herself, if she wants.)She got Liam to sleep, and when my shift ended at 10:35 the two of us and Michael signed out with my replacement and went out to the SUUSI over-21 dance club for a nice bracing drink. We drank Magic Hat and decompressed at a corner table, shouting over the best-of-the-70s-and-80s dance music. Michael and I spent a lot of concerted effort trying to convince
bosssio that it was really okay to accept the help that people were offering her, and that giving a hand to overwhelmed parents of young children is part of what SUUSIgoers mean by "intentional community." As the conversation went on to other subjects, we meandered back over to the dorms, sat on a low brick wall overlooking the quad, enjoying the relative quiet after the club and the cool night air. Around 12:30, I pointed out that Michael had a nature trip in seven hours, and we went upstairs to bed.[1] Childcare co-op is the greatest idea ever. Parents of young children were all housed in the same dorm. From 9:15pm to 1:15am (2:15 on Friday), one parent sat in each hallway with a clipboard, cell phone, and walkie-talkie. Once our kids were asleep, we were free to sign out with the on-duty parent, leaving a cell phone number and our planned destination. If any of the kids woke up and needed their parents, the on-duty parent either called the parent or used the walkie-talkie to summon a "runner" to physically go and find them. We each had to do one short shift, and then we had the rest of our evenings totally free. It was awesome.
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Date: 2007-07-22 08:16 pm (UTC)Okay, that's pretty cool. I can't imagine being free every evening to go wander around and *do* stuff. Wow.
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Date: 2007-07-23 12:07 am (UTC)You know, now that you're on the East Coast, you might consider this for next year. There are great outdoors trips, and all the religious stuff is totally optional.
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Date: 2007-07-23 02:34 am (UTC)>so now it's official: she'll nap for everyone in the world except her parents.
When the local big girl was a toddler (and an only child), she slept much better after other toddlers had been running her around for a few hours. Playing with adults just did not tire her out as thoroughly, even when it looked like she was getting plenty of outdoor play and vigorous exercise.
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Date: 2007-07-23 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 04:27 am (UTC)Some of those pictures are crying out for LOL captions.