What School Children Think of Me

Today I was wearing a narrow brown belt to accessorize my outfit, and I removed it after lunch.  I hadn't given up on it yet though, so I was taking it to recess.  Well, whenever I'm carrying a belt like that, I always think about the alternative use of belts, and apparently my kids think the same way.

"What is the belt for, Miss Hall?  Are you going to wallup us?"
"Do you think I would?" - me
"Yes.  Are you going to?"

I had them all in a row.  If they had been a more squirrelly bunch today, I may have been tempted. :D

~~~~~

Once, after reprimanding a student, she piped up with, "When my mom is mad, she sounds like a teacher."  Ha, thanks.

~~~~~

"Miss Hall, is the other Miss Hall your sister?  I thought you were the mom."

~~~~~

"I think it's amazing that you know my name." - a high-school student
"I'm a teacher, I have my sneaky ways of finding out."
"Are you sure you don't just share a mind with the other Miss Hall?"

Cold Weather

I've noticed that people tend to embrace fall with either a joyous exclamation of "I get to wear my lovely sweaters!" or grumbles of disapproval about the cold.  I'm not quite either, but much closer to the lovely sweater side of the spectrum.  Ellie is on the grumbling side, and it makes for some rather amusing moments.

Saturday was the first day that we have had to scrape the ice off of the windsheild.  As I got into the car, and she got out, I chuckled a "Oh, you have to scrape the ice? Exciting!" She wasn't particularly pleased with me.

There have been days where the heater will be on and I would far rather do without the heat and the noise, but will leave it on for her. At times I think she may be cold blooded.

At night time though, we switch parts. I always seem to freeze at night when she is fine.  My bed is piled high with blankets, whereas she has only added one small lap quilt to her summer covers. 

We have similarly opposed reactions to the end of daylight savings time.  I love the fact that you get to sleep in, and that you can sleep in half an hour, and still wake up half an hour early.  She bemoans the fact we now come home from work in the dark (or will very soon). I suppose this means that I value sleep above sunshine.

This morning was mildly annoying though.  My internal clock has finally switched over to the time we get up for school (6 a.m.), taking three months to do so instead of the usual one week (probably due to the move, and stress of a new job, etc.).  Then, right after I start waking up naturally around 5:50, the time changes.  I woke up at 4:30 this morning, dozed on and off until about 5:20, and then was finally able to sleep until 6, when the alarm went off.  Ugh.

NaNoWriMo

Hopefully you all know me well enough to know I won't be doing NaNoWriMo.  That would be rather silly of me.

But I still like pushing myself to do various crazy things.  As mentioned in my last post, I need to post 35 more blogposts in order to reach my modified New Year's Resolution.  If I don't, I will have failed for the first time in my yearly writing goals (established 2012).

So, one post per day for November?  I'll do my best.  I intend to write up several poems and have them ready for days that I really don't feel like posting.  Is that cheating? Even several of my non-poem posts will probably be written in advance. I tend to write in bursts, sitting down at my computer and typing off two or three.  In fact, I'm not sure if I remember ever writing one post in an evening and not starting (if not completing) another post.  That being said, I have a lot of unpresentable drafts here on my blog.

I'm going to have to talk about something if I'm going to post 30 times this month, so I guess I'll have the enjoyment of telling you some about my job. Since I teach 14 5-year-olds, this could get quite fun (provided I can tell general enough of stories not to breach any privacy laws).

Ah, I'm looking forward to this challenge.  And just a little bit, hating the fact that I'm committing to it by posting this.

No excuses.

I think I can finally accept the fact that I am not a blogger. I don't know if there is anything I've wanted so much to be able to keep up, tried so often to start again, and failed so predictably at every time. Oh, except in trying to keep my room consistently clean. That has an even worse track record of good intentions and bad outcomes. 

So I don't know how much I'll try to keep this going. Ugh, I don't want to give up on it, but I'm tired of how guilty I feel when I don't post for a while. Especially considering my goal for this year.

Speaking of goals, I've failed all of them.  Monthly exercise regimes, didn't even make it through January.  Writing a lot on my fiction story?  Ha, almost as soon as I wrote a post about how I'd gotten farther in my story than I have ever in any story before, I hit a wall and have gotten no further. I have been writing various random things frequently, but certainly not every day, and you are all aware of how my one blog post a week has been going. I suppose I did modify that last one to be 52 posts for the year, spread or clumped as I saw fit, but somehow I don't see me posting 35 more posts before the end of the year.

Mom warned me from the start not to be disappointed if I failed my rather ambitious goals, but I alas, heeded her not.

:(

Locked, 9.24.14

The words won't come
They're swarming now
Deep inside my soul

A seething pain
A loneliness
That keeps me never whole

I cannot speak
The words inside
I leave them now unsaid

I'm going mad
With all these thoughts
Locked inside my head

Blackberry Picking

Last night Ellie and I took Nathaniel and Edmund out to pick blackberries.  This is the second time we have gone picking with the kids, both times at Edmund’s invitation.

~~~

The boys flutter from bush to bush like butterflies, picking one or two berries before moving on.  Once they got to the other side of a big patch, Edmund started calling out “Can you come find us Aunt Chava?  Come find me Aunt Ellie!”  Ellie and I, intent on our picking, turned them down.  Edmund asked why, and Ellie told him that we were concentrating on our picking, since that is the right way to do it.

Both Edmund and Nathaniel then went silent, a rather unusual thing, and Ellie and I chatted for a while before I really noticed the odd silence.

“Boys, are you staying close?”

“Yes, Aunt Chava.  We are concentrating on eating our berries, since that is the right way to do it!” was the smart reply from Edmund.

Nathaniel immediately corrected him, telling Edmund that he wasn’t eating his, he was saving them for a “yummy pie”.

~~~

The first time we went out, we also had Jeremiah and Elaine with us.  Elaine, poor girl, is about as tall as the grass that surrounds the blackberry patches, so she would practically swim through the pasture to reach a bush.  Once there, anytime she reached for a berry, she’d find a thorn first, and her hurt and offended “Ow!” was frequently heard.  I commented to Ellie that Elaine was master of the perfect “ow”.

Throughout last night’s picking, any time anyone said ow, Edmund would pipe up, “Was that the perfect ow Chava? [or Ellie, as the case may be]”.  At first we just laughed and said no, but as the picking advanced, we finally explained to him what would qualify as the perfect ow.  He then tried it out several times, so we then explained that the element of true surprise was an integral part of the perfect ow’s makeup.

Very soon after this, Ellie grunted, and then said that she would have just made the perfect ow, but she swallowed it instead.  Nathaniel asked what that meant, and I did my best to explain it.  I love explaining things like this to children.  I told him that it is when you are just about to say something, but you choose not to, and so you swallow it, and it goes back to where your words came from (hey, I can’t be perfectly literal when I explain things, how fun would that be?).  He thought that sounded amusing, so he decided to swallow his next ow, next time he got pricked by a thorn.  Since I didn’t hear him say ow for the rest of the evening, I’m guessing he learned how to swallow his words.

~~~

As the evening progressed, Ellie and I decided to switch places with the boys, and have them look for us around the blackberry bushes.  So I told the boys that Ellie had disappeared, they went to find her, stayed with her for a while, then she returned the favor, with a few additions.

“Your Aunt Chava has disappeared!  I bet she went over to the car to drive away without us, you should go find her!”

Edmund and Nathaniel starting talking and making their way to the car to catch me, when Ellie interrupted.

“I’m joking boys.  She’s somewhere in the patch.  She wouldn’t drive off without you.  She isn’t like me, she’s nice.”

“So what are you Aunt Ellie?”

“I’m mean.”

“No you’re not mean, you’re thin.”  (Actual quote from Nathaniel, I kid you not.)

“What?”

“You’re not mean, you’re nice.” (Smart guy, reword your answer when someone didn’t hear you the first time, makes it easier to understand)

Soon after that we headed back to the car, while discussing a skunk that I had seen earlier in the night.

~~~

Speaking of the skunk, the boys started talking aobut what skunks eat, and then went on to what other animals eat similar things.  When they got to giraffe Edmund gave us the amazing news that giraffes can eat leaves, branches, and thorns.

This was a lovely idea to Nathaniel.  “I wish I was a giraffe so that when I am picking blackberries, and a thorn gets in my way I can chew it up!”

Edmund, always very particular responded with, “You want to have a giraffe head but a human body?”

“No, I just want to be a giraffe!”

“With hands?”

“No, just a regular giraffe!”

“But you said you wished you were a giraffe so that when you were picking, PICKING, blackberries, you could chew up the thorns.”

Long ago in this conversation Ellie and I were laughing uproariously.  Edmund sounded every bit like an attorney cross examining a witness.

Dead Flowers, 12.25.13

Crushed and broken in my hand

Dried leaves crackle

I look in despair

At what I have destroyed

Their colors faded

Nothing compared to their former glory

Green, perhaps?

A dirty grey.

The ferns of an old bunch of roses

The flowers hardly better

Red turned to brown and black

Beautiful in their way

But nothing compared to their former glory