rivka

Yesterday I chaperoned Alex's nursery school class to a performance of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. My expectations were pretty low. It was a special concert aimed at children aged 6 and under, and the title of the show was "Goldilocks and Other Fairy Tales." I thought the kids would find it exciting to be at a concert and see orchestra instruments, but I wasn't anticipating any enjoyment for myself.

I was pleasantly surprised.

In the 45-minute program, there was only one piece that I considered to be musical pandering: a subset of the brass and percussion sections of the orchestra performed "Under the Sea," from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Otherwise, it was all real orchestral music: a dashing, exciting Rimsky-Korsakov piece called "The Snow Maiden," a piece from the Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty and another from the the opera Hansel and Gretel, and "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt. There was a sort of a tone poem based on the fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" and accompanied by a storyteller, and a ballet of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" written by a modern composer whose name I didn't catch.

A pair of adult ballet dancers appeared during the Tchaikovsky piece, and students at the Baltimore School for the Arts performed the Goldilocks ballet. The bit from Hansel and Gretel was sung and danced. All in all, there was a nice mix of visual elements with purely symphonic experiences.

The program had a narrator, who used a brief and (I thought) very effective script. For "In the Hall of the Mountain King," in a few sentences she evoked a vivid picture of Peer Gynt tiptoeing into a cave, the goblins circling and creeping around him, and the mad final chase. Alex kept returning to that afterward, wanting to relate the story again and again. The narrator also deftly introduced basic orchestral and musical concepts without sounding like she was lecturing: tuning, the roles of the concertmaster and conductor, the definitions of "opera" and "ballet," and the idea of a musical motif. Before "The Tortoise and the Hare," she explained that the contrabassoon would play music for the tortoise and the clarinet would play for the hare, and had the musicians play a bar or two of each to help the children pick the motifs out later.

The entire row of Alex's 3- and 4-year-old classmates sat captivated throughout the concert. (The 4- and 5-year-olds sitting behind us were less rapt and more inclined to talk.) During "In the Hall of the Mountain King" I wound up with two little girls in my lap, but they thoroughly enjoyed the "scary" music.

But I really knew the concert had been a success that evening. Michael and Alex were together in the playroom, when Alex came running in and asked me to be their conductor. I came in and discovered that she had lined up all the chairs and couches from her dollhouse in rows. A tiny plastic animal was perched on each one. Alex and Michael were ready to make music by banging blocks together - they were only waiting for me to conduct. Michael told me afterward that she had organized the audience of animals completely of her own volition, telling him that "they came to watch some music." Yay.

Alex's nursery school newsletter this month brought the news that "Bolton Hill Nursery will be the recipient of a free nutrition education program - Food Is Elementary - for preschool and elementary school students. [...] The Food Studies Institute is devoted to changing the health destinies of children through proper nutrition and education. The curriculum is designed to create a positive experience of plant-based (fruits, veggies, grains) foods and food preparation that is fun, hands-on, and sensory-based."

Well, that sounds nice, but I read Junkfood Science, and it's made me skeptical of "nutrition education" as it tends to be offered in schools. So I looked up the Food Studies Institute and found this description of the lessons.

Now I am writing a letter to the parent and Board member who is listed as a contact person for the program. I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions people may have, especially from a Size Acceptance/Health At Any Size perspective and/or an "I know preschoolers" perspective.

( draft letter below. )

I was the lead teacher for preschool Religious Education again today. Today's theme: "I Can Help." It went great. ( Read more... )

I posted those developmental updates while I was away from home yesterday, so I didn't have a chance to add a photo. Here is Alex pretending she can make pie crust singlehandedly.

</a

I've recently started reading chapter books to Alex.

Her attention span for books is good - for example, she can stay interested in long fairy tales that have a high text-to-picture ratio. So I started keeping my eyes open for longer books that we could read, a chapter or two at a time.

My first thought was The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. We tried a few of the stories, and she seemed to enjoy them well enough. But I realized that the humor in many of the stories is over her head. "Winnie-the-Pooh and the Bee Tree," sure, or the one where he gets stuck in Rabbit's hole after eating too much honey. But a lot of the stories are more subtle. Maybe in a couple of years...

My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, is a book I never read as a child but have frequently seen recommended as a good first chapter book. I picked up a copy on my Wild Woman Weekend, with the idea that we'd go through its 77 pages a chapter or two at a time. Alex had different ideas. We wound up reading the whole book in one big gulp. It really is a perfect chapter book for a preschooler: action-packed, funny, suspenseful and exciting without being scary. The day after we finished it, she lay with it on the couch retelling it to herself, using the pictures to prompt her memory. She'd clearly taken in quite a lot. Fortunately, there are sequels.

Now we're trying out Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We've read two chapters so far, one per night. I'm skipping over some of the more long-winded descriptions. Alex really seems to like it - we've read some of the "My First Little House" picture book series, and so she was excited to have a whole long book about Laura and Mary.

It's hard to think of good chapter books for a 3.5-year-old. Alex may be a smart kid with a big vocabulary, but she lacks the life experience needed to make sense out of most books aimed at older children. And I don't really want to introduce scary or violent themes at this age. Internet discussions of what books people read to their preschoolers have often not been tremendously helpful. (You read The Hobbit to your three-year-old? Really? And The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Either my kid is sheltered and unsophisticated, or your kids are baby geniuses, or you're lying about how much they got out of it.)

Does anyone have any recommendations? I was thinking maybe Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle could come next, but it would probably be good to find some books that were written less than 50 years ago, for the sake of variety.

This weekend I left my home and my family and went off into the wilds of Virginia to hang out with my friends, completely and utterly without responsibilities. It was AWESOME.

The six of us have been planning this since SUUSI. bosssio, Brenna, Daria, Molly, Lo, and me, all Unitarian-Universalists, all mothers of kids ranging in age from -4 months (i.e., the Niblet) to eight. We love spending time together at SUUSI, but we also wanted to carve out some all-women, all-adult space. So the Wild Woman Weekend was born.

When I say "wild," you have to understand that we are all mothers and Sunday School teachers (present or former) who are fast approaching middle age. We tooled around in a minivan and gave serious consideration to going to church on Sunday morning. Theology was discussed. A recommended-reading list was compiled. But for me, at least, it felt a little wild just to go away for my own enjoyment, rather than for something improving like a work conference or OWL training. Just for grownup fun.

( things we did: talking, eating, book buying, eating, talking. )It was an amazing weekend. Obviously I can't write about the intensest parts here, because they involved the sharing of pain and secrets and the loving response of friends. But the atmosphere of trust, cameraderie, and shared values was so good, and filled a deep hunger I barely knew I had. It was such a long, extended period of uninterrupted communication and connection. No kids' needs, no mundane responsibilities, no pull of other friends or activities.

Just six women, and love, and plenty of time.

Three and a half hours later, the auditors are gone. And I think they're only gone now because I told them I had to be in the clinic at 1pm today, because they returned my source documents at precisely the moment I told them I would need to leave for the clinic.

They want to schedule an EXIT INTERVIEW. For next week. After they've had a chance to write up their report. I can't believe how much time this is taking. And for my tiny little study! Imagine if they'd audited Lydia's 5-year, 200-person research extravaganza.

So far things to be more-or-less okay. Nothing but minor corrections. They're here, I am told, to help me.

"Army ants are killers, right?" Alex asked eagerly. Ants were on her mind because she'd found some small ones in the pantry earlier. Her idea was that we should immediately go out and find an ant lion to deal with them, and she was taken aback when I said that I would rather have ants in my pantry than one of these. (Link not for the bug-phobic.)

She launched into a long story about some ants she'd seen on the big playground at school. "And Mr. C said 'those are red ants,' and I was thinking and thinking, and I thought they were army ants. I stayed back from the tree and I poked at them with a stick."

We suggested that army ants were unlikely to be found in Baltimore because the climate is so unfavorable. She was momentarily intrigued by that discussion, but she was also anxious to clarify exactly how she had reached her conclusion, and went on to explain with some urgency.

"I stopped a little back from the tree, and I folded my arms like this" - across her chest - "and a little cloud came out of my head, and I was thinking, 'Army ants!' And that's how I discovered they were army ants."

A little cloud came out of my head. That's a thought bubble, is what that is. She knows they were army ants because she intuited it in a thought bubble.

That's the kind of kid we have.

I read until 1:30am, last night. Didn't sleep very well, mostly because the no-sleeping-on-your-back thing is killing me. And then Alex woke up at 6:30am with a nightmare and neither one of us got back to sleep.

I am so tired.

I'm reading a YA book called Long May She Reign, by Ellen Emerson White. I picked it up on impulse because the girl on the cover was wearing a Williams sweatshirt, and then the back cover description was intriguing, and then suddenly it was 1am and I knew I was hurting myself by staying up so late and I still couldn't stop myself from sucking down one more chapter. And one more after that. And one more after that.

The book is about the eighteen-year-old daughter of the first female President of the United States. A few months before the book starts, Meg was kidnapped by terrorists, beaten, starved, and left for dead in an abandoned mine shaft. She had to crush her own hand to escape, and then wander out of the woods under her own power. With a smashed knee. Now she is permanently disabled, in crippling pain, and suffering from PTSD - all under the harsh spotlight of relentless public attention. And her family is privately falling apart from the strain, in large part due to her mother the President's public statement, while she was missing, that she "can not, have not, and will not negotiate with terrorists."

It's painfully real - so much so that tears kept leaking out of my eyes while I read. White doesn't go for simplistic. Meg is unbelievably damaged and spilling over with bottled-up fury, and yet she's also someone who has been trained for years to be poised and careful and consider the political implications of every word and facial expression. Her feelings sort of leak out sideways instead of erupting in scenery-chewing melodrama. White sticks to a tight third-person perspective, but shows how Meg's judgments and perceptions are warped by her experiences, both in ways she recognizes (she can pinpoint what stimuli trigger a panic attack, for example) and in ways she doesn't recognize (she resents the hovering White House servants, but is completely oblivious to how much she simultaneously depends on them and takes them for granted, even after she goes away to college and can't meet her basic needs without them).

When I was first reading the book, I kept thinking how interesting (although not unique, I know) it was to write an entire book about the aftermath of a trauma, with only bits and pieces of the kidnapping, and Meg's life before the kidnapping, slipped in retrospectively. Then, uh, I flipped to the back cover to read "about the author" and learned that this book is the fourth in a series. So never mind. White does a great job with inclueing all the same - obviously, given that I couldn't tell that I had missed earlier books.

Anyway. It's a really good book. And I don't know how I'm going to tolerate another 430 pages of it, because it just hurts that much.