The piano (cont.); bridging; teething

The good news is, we won’t have to keep our new piano in the garage, even if we’re never able to fit it through our front door. We’ve agreed on a “Plan B” destination for it.

The bad news is, that destination is the kitchen.

The other bad news is, we would have to clear a path through the garage and “mud” room to get the piano into the kitchen. A monumental task.

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Samuel completed Kindergarten. We attended his “bridging” ceremony. (“Bridging” is Montessori lingo for graduating.) During the ceremony, students crossed an actual bridge which had been set up in the gymnasium. This symbolized the passage from Kindergarten to the first grade. A first-grader greeted each graduate on the far side of the bridge.

Then the students sang two songs and their parents shot video.

One of the parents I spotted was R., with whom I’d gone to college. “Hi, R.,” I said, “remember me? I’m John-⁠Paul.” “Yeah,” he said, and walked away. A shrinking violet, R.

The next day, Samuel nonchalantly lost a tooth – his first. It lies among his Lego bricks somewhere. Already, a new tooth emerges from his gum.

He has been listening to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

April’s poem

Whenever we open the front door, Daniel – clothed or unclothed – runs outside and hollers:

Owwweee-ah-ee-oh! Owwweee-ah-ee-oh!

I was puzzled for weeks but finally came across the source: a scene from Peppa Pig. Peppa, her schoolmates, and their teacher, Madame Gazelle, travel to the Swiss Alps; Peppa’s voice echoes off the mountains; Madame Gazelle demonstrates yodeling to her charges. Later, they pitch their tents and sing campfire songs.

Daniel loves this sort of thing. He also enjoys Story Hour at the library. He’s ripe for pre-K.

He’s fairly advanced, mathematically, too.

If only he’d behave.

This month’s poem is from Peppa Pig.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace

And harmony

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I’m glad that Daniel watches Peppa Pig, a calming influence.

Chicken tikka masala

Samuel’s options for school lunch:

• chicken tikka masala
or
• hot dog

He eats the hot dog.

It’s years away, but … should he ever wish to enroll in the high school’s International Baccalaureate program, he’ll have to start choosing the chicken tikka masala. (Surely, its presence on the menu is a sorting device.)

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His teacher has given him a daily homework assignment: twenty minutes’ reading.

We let him choose what to read the first day. During the allotted time, he took up books randomly and flipped through the pages.

Since then, I’ve been forcing him to read the Babar series. In order. After twenty minutes, he puts his bookmark in the omnibus and goes off to play, and we all sigh with relief.

Do you like Babar, I ask him.

No, he says.

Well, stick with it.

He usually reads out loud. Karin, who wasn’t raised on Babar, casts funny glances whenever she hears references to cannibals (for instance).

I give Samuel his Sundays off.

Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

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As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

Plumb tuckered out

An absolute knackering (knacking?) this day, what with the intensive cleaning of various ground-floor rooms. I have been dozing intermittently since 8:00pm. The boys, for the third or fourth time since the floor’s uncluttering, are running in circles, as in Alice in Wonderland’s Caucus Race. This is lively even by their standards – doubtless a spillover of last night’s mirth (we attended an “open house” at Samuel’s new school; I spent most of it chasing Daniel through the halls).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I saw very little of the Olympics – none of it in “real” time – but was taken with this handballer’s story (NYT). He, too, has sleep apnea. Yes, this is what it’s like.

Earlier today I was slumped on the sofa, unable to remain fully conscious, while Samuel and Daniel crawled over me. I’d beg them to do a little cleaning. They wouldn’t. At last I rallied, was a virtual tornado for an hour and a half, and made the place spotless. The boys helped enough to earn some basement TV time. Then they came back upstairs, beheld the emptiness, and ran their first Caucus Race. Samuel tackled Daniel a few times. Daniel would urge him to stand up and keep running. High spirits.

I actually am the least tired adult in the house. Karin is pregnant again, you see.

Lord willing, our third son will be born the first week of December.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. The boys have been watching the infamous (but, to my mind, charming) Peppa Pig show. Samuel now calls himself Peppa; Daniel, he calls George; Karin, Mommy Pig; and yours truly, Daddy Pig. My parents visited; they are, respectively, Abuela and Abuelo Pig.