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SUUSI, Day 2.
We all woke up kind of early, considering how tired we'd been on Sunday night. It meant that instead of the constant uncomfortable rush I remember from last year, we had time for a reasonably leisured breakfast and got Alex to children's programming right when it opened at 8:45. We met her teachers and got a quick tour of the 3- and 4-year-olds' area: a open room for stories and games, with a couple of mattresses on the floor and little other furniture; an art room; a quiet room; and a playroom featuring a big wading pool full of shredded paper, a tunnel-and-tent setup filled with balls, and a big crate of toys. Alex and
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bosssio's son Anthony got straight to work with the toys and had to be prompted to say goodbye.I hurried away because I was looking forward to Monday morning's Theme Talk, which was being given by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, the President of one of the two UU seminaries and, in fact, apparently the first woman to head up an American theological school. She gave an absolutely fascinating talk about the early history of Christianity. (I know, I know, but it actually was fascinating.) She said that in early Christian art, images of the crucifixion don't appear until the 10th or 11th century. Before that, Christian churches were centered on images of resurrection, liberation, and Paradise. The Church didn't emphasize the central importance of Christ's suffering or the idea that God was pleased with the crucifixion as a necessary act of redemption. She explained her travels to study early Christian art and her speculation about the historical and theological bases for the change. It was really interesting and thought-provoking, and outside the usual realms of what I get exposed to - which is just what a Theme Talk should be.
I didn't have anything else scheduled for Monday morning, so I just came back to the quad where our dorm is located, spread a blanket on the grass, and posted to LJ. It was lovely and relaxing. Michael got out of his morning workshop early, and we went to the SUUSI store together to stock up on T-shirts, books, and CDs, plus a new "civil marriage is a civil right" bumper sticker for our new car. (Although I did kind of like the "thank ? I made it to SUUSI" sticker, as well.) While we were in the store we met up with the teen we're guardianing. She was positively vibrating with happy excitement, and informed us that SUUSI is the Best Thing Ever. Yay.
Picked up Alex for lunch at 12:00. Last year she was still in the nursery, where children are encouraged to stay through the lunch break because it's less disruptive of their naptimes. Children aged three and up spend about two hours with their parents at lunch. Which is nice, except that the children's programming dorm is quite a hike from our part of campus, and we're making the hike eight times a day: there and back in the morning, at lunchtime, after lunch, and at the end of the afternoon. We ate and then wandered back to our quad, where Alex made the aquaintance of an extremely friendly gardener who taught her how to deadhead flowers. She helped him for a while. Then we went back to our room and showed her the things we'd bought her at the bookstore: a SUUSI T-shirt and It's Not the Stork, a really wonderful book aimed at kids aged 4 and up that explains where babies come from, how fetuses develop, and how boys and girls are different. That was a bit of a tactical error, because she wanted to dive right into the book and we had a little trouble getting her ready to go back to children's programming for the afternoon session.
Monday afternoon was my "Science, Religion, and the Universe" workshop. It turned out to be a pretty mixed experience. The instructor was rambling and disconnected - instead of having, say, an outline of what he wanted to talk about, he had a whole sheaf of papers with different quotes and bits on them, which he had to search through every time he wanted to say something. Unfortunately, the general slant he wanted to take was that religion is rather silly compared to science; he kept wanting to focus on exaggerated literalist Christianity, beliefs which were obviously unsympathetic and rather alien to everyone in the room. The workshop was saved by the other participants - intelligent discussion kept breaking out. My father took this workshop too, and we had a good time kind of bouncing off each others' ideas.
After the workshop we picked up Alex and went to Community Time, which is a sort of SUUSIwide late afternoon party/festival. They had a cotton candy machine and lots of balls and hula hoops and things and a nail painting/temporary hair dyeing table and music and a bunch of chairs, and it was good relaxing fun.
Our plan was dinner-worship service-put Alex to bed. This was immediately foiled by Alex, at dinner, when she got very involved in running around the dining hall being silly and then threw a rabid fit when it was time to leave. For at least the next fifteen minutes she howled at the top of her lungs, "I'm HUNGRY! I'm STARVING! You DIDN'T LET ME EAT ENOUGH!" Talk about a kid who knows where her mother's buttons are... it was pretty awful. It quickly became clear that we weren't going to get to worship. Or possibly anywhere. But then Anthony came over and Alex wanted to play with him, and we wound up taking all three kids outside (including Anthony's little brother Liam) so they could play in the cool evening air. I love kids at SUUSI. Liam, who is two and a half, walked right up to a gang of big boys - probably seven to nine years old. They invested a lot of energy into teaching him how to fly a paper airplane. Later, another group of kids tried to teach Liam how to serve a volleyball. Anthony pulled Alex tirelessly around in a wagon while she kept up a running imaginary narrative. The adults lounged around in chairs enjoying the cool of the evening.
At bedtime everything fell apart again. We gave Alex a snack and read her stories, but she wouldn't go to sleep and she wouldn't let me leave the room. From 9 to 10pm. By the time I got out of there at 10:15, it felt too close to my 11:15 childcare co-op shift to make going out worthwhile. So instead I hung out in the hall with
bosssio, her aunt, and Michael. Unbelievably, a seven-year-old boy was also there. Apparently, he couldn't sleep and his parents asked if he could sit in the hall with us. He then proceeded to stay awake until 12:30am, chattering to us and demanding our attention. Charmingly, but still. It would never occur to me to put that kind of burden on the co-op volunteers. We're not supposed to be babysitters. bosssio heroically stayed with me through my co-op shift too, because I was so worn out by that point. She came in very useful indeed when Alex had a string of night terrors around midnight... probably because of the late bedtime and the disrupted routine. Poor kid. The last parents (the seven year old's) came back at 12:40, so I was able to end my shift early and go to bed. They laughed when we told them how late their kid had stayed up, and said that they guessed he'd charmed us to pieces. Huh. But at any rate, once they were home I was able to go back to my room and get some sleep. And that was the second day of SUUSI.
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(Incidentally, she decided she would rather adopt than give birth, until I mentioned epidurals. Heh.)
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