Looky, Daddy!

My Second Grade Pencil

I know I promised you an Ask The Dad today, yesterday, two days ago, but one e-mail I received--in a misguided attempt at getting real advice--requested a response not from me but from The Mom, and Monday night, when I passed the laptop over to The Mom, she promptly coughed a lung onto it. So that will have to wait a few more days. But as you know, marriage is nothing if not a competition, so that same Monday night, as I looked at my wife drowning in her own phlegm, I said, "Oh yeah? If you think you are suffering, watch this!" and I promptly signed myself up as a chaperone on Kathryn's second grade field trip.

I won.

Actually, ever since Kathryn made the extremely inconsiderate decision of contracting epilepsy (One week seizure free, by the way! Thank you and thank you again for your concern and well-wishes.) her school, fearing an episode away from home, has been pestering me to come along on field trips, and they have not been very gracious accepting my normal response: laughing and hanging up. But that boost of seizures Kathryn had this month made me rethink the issue and, before I knew it, I was calling the school to see if there was room for one more person on the bus. And, god help me, there was.

Second graders should not be allowed to talk about intangible events or objects. Their conversation should be limited to concrete objects that they are holding in their hands at that moment. For example, if someone happens to be holding a pencil, they should be allowed to say, "I have a pencil." If they choose to, they could describe the pencil. "It is yellow. It has an eraser." At this point, others could chime in. "Yes, and it has a silver metal band. The band holds the eraser to the wood." Or, if someone happens to have a pencil of their own, they could produce it and say a few things about it as well. "My pencil is blue," and so on.

Under no circumstances should they be allowed to talk of pencils they have seen, or once had, or heard about from someone else. Because I guarantee you, each and every second grader has seen, or had, or heard about the coolest pencil in the world, and they will not rest--or lower their voice--until their pencil is crowned the champion of all pencils, and award that apparently goes to the student lying the most and yelling the loudest when an adult finally breaks down and asks everyone to please shut up. FOUR FEET LONG WITH SCALES LIKE A SNAKE AND FEATHERS ON TOP THAT REALLY ERASE AND LIGHTS THAT RUN UP AND DOWN THE SIDES AS YOU WRITE AND AN ALARM THAT SOUNDS WHEN YOU MAKE A MISTAKE AND--- and I was looking around for my own 'coolest pencil in the world,' one sharp enough to end my miserable life then and there.

When I got home, I made a sign out of cardboard nailed to a wooden stake reading "BULLSHIT!" If I am ever coerced into attending another of these field trips, I will take it with me and hold it up as needed.

Which will be always.

A Simple Lesson in Probability

If you flip a coin, you have a one in two chance of it landing on heads. If you flip two coins, you have a three out of four chance of at least one of them landing on heads. Think about it: Heads-heads, heads-tails, tails-heads, and tails-tails. Three out of four show heads. That's pretty good odds. Betting odds, you might say.

Now re-read that paragraph, reading the words "flip a coin" as "take a two-year-old to preschool," and the words "landing on heads" as "losing her shit."

I was not ready for that. I was not ready for the kick in the gut that comes from pulling my girls' hands apart as they wrapped around each of my legs, begging and pleading for me not to walk out of the door. I tell you it was a horrible feeling, a terrible overflow of emotion of pity and self-doubt and self-loathing, a feeling that almost lasted all the way though my first expensive espresso drink of each day.

Almost.

But now even that moment is a thing of the past. Now, the twins love school. They love it. They would gladly step over my beaten and bleeding body to get into that classroom, with its delirious mixture of toys, markers, and glue sticks. And beaten and bleeding I am by the time I get everybody there, because as much as they love school, it does not seem to occur to any of my three girls that they need to voluntarily participate in any of the daily activities that lead up to it. As nutmeg once wrote in one of the funniest one-liners I've read, the only way to ensure that all of your children can find the shoes they need when it’s time to walk out the door is to cut off their feet. So now, if I can just find a saw, my days should be completely worry free.

Day Three

And just like that, they're gone. Poof. And what have I done with my time? Bugger-all. I've done bugger-all with my time.

Litter box? Uncleaned.

Grocery store? Unshopped.

Dishes? Unscrubbed.

Novel? Unwritten.

Email? Unreplied.

Coffee? Okay, coffee's been drunk. Let's be serious here.

I think I have a disorder, some sort of Post Twins Stress Disorder. I pace my house, room to room, stepping over crap, wondering just where to start, and the time goes *whoop* just like that.

Imagine this: Imagine that one morning, zoo animals all awoke to find their fences gone, their cages open. What would they do? Yes, there would be those who noticed and immediately made a run for it, but I dare say that others would wake up and follow that same trail they had been walking for the past umpteen years. There would be mountain lions who would pace back and forth, padded feet falling in that same well-worn path. There would be tigers who got up, stretched, and lumbered around where the cage used to be, then went back to sleep in their old familiar place. And there would be the monkeys who continued to swing from the same sawed-off branches, following the same pattern they always followed and to whom, perhaps, the lack of cage would only become apparent when they realized they now had an unencumbered trajectory through which to hurl their poo at passersby. Guess which one I am.

While I'm pacing, though, I want to say a quick thanks to all those who have enjoyed and shared the video of the twins' first day of preschool. Your response has almost made the last two-and-a-half years with them worthwhile.

Not quite, but almost.

A New Day Dawns

The First Day of Preschool from Brian Sargent on Vimeo.

T-Minus 24 Hours and Bleeeeuuuuurgh

There are a few places left where Lila has not vomited. She hasn't vomited in the basement, for example. Nor has she vomited in my closet. And by vomit, I mean gently tilting her head back and using her throat to open a direct channel to the bowels of hell. This is vomit like I've never experienced. Honestly. Given a Lila-sized water balloon and a straight pin, I would not be able to replicate what this sweet child can do with just a stomach.

I know they say the human body is 65% fluid, I just don't expect to see all of it at any given moment. Especially with so little warning.

And this is really not a good time for this. Her first day of preschool is tomorrow.

How long does a child need to be vomit-free before they can attend school? Two days? One? Twenty minutes?

She didn't vomit at all yesterday, which gives me some hope. Of course, when she didn't vomit on Friday, it gave me hope then. Hope enough to go grocery shopping.

Clean-up on aisle six.

Updated on Sept. 11: First let me say that it is with no great surprise that almost all of you endorsed sending the kids no matter how much puke Lila was spewing. And I'm glad my kids don't go to school with yours is all I'm going to say.

Still, it has been 48 hours since Lila last "called Australia" (It's a phrase from my Czech friend David. For a while, he was on a campaign to make everyone admit that the name "Melbourne" sounding like someone vomiting. I'm not sure if it ever caught on over there. In his early twenties, David had as many euphemisms for puking as the Inuit have for snow.) So off to school she goes. Huzzah! Stay tuned later today for my first child-free post since this blog  began.

More from the Arttis

Another piece from Kathryn's school portfolio:

Is that a stick being brandished? That can't be good.

I have no idea what's going on here, but I do have a guess. Do you?

No More Gallery Visits for This One

Either Kathryn forgot a letter 't' or she has an understanding of the art world that far exceeds her age.

Long. Live. First. Grade.

First grade is fighting for its life and Kathryn is trying to wring every last ounce of bizarre and mildly anti-social behavior out of it before she puts it down for the count.

It was a physical year for Kathryn, a year that began with Kathryn limping at break-neck speed from the school doors that first day, left knee wrapped enough tape and gauze to support Doctors Without Borders for a calendar year, calling out, "Daddy! Daddy! I met the nurse!"

And a few weeks later, I received one of the most unusual introductions to one of Kathryn's teachers I've ever had.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Mr Sargent? This is Mrs. P. I just want you to know I would never, never, intentionally hurt your child."

"Oh, dear."

It was a year that Kathryn answered virtually every inquiry about her day with, "Please don't be mad," as in, "Please don't be mad, but we were on the playground playing a game where you had to hurt someone to live and so I hurt someone in the head and it went into his eye and he had to go to the nurse." Which left me wondering if a game where you have to "hurt someone to live" was somehow an initiation to a starter gang, like the Brownie version of the Crips. (I've heard the Bloods have Webelos.)

Intellectually, Kathryn grew by leaps and bounds this year, learning about punctuation and the mystery of the silent "e" and by mid-year she wase. writinge. alle. ofe. here. sentencese. like. thise. which I guess will make her work easier to recognize when we start finding "Cripse. Forevere." spray-painted behind the old train station. Of course, while she was wildly punctuating her written work, her spoken work begantosoundmorelikethis withnotasinglepauseforbreathormoreimportantlythought.

She also grew from a child who couldn't read to a child who doesn't read, which is an improvement of sorts. For the betterment of the environment, we've given up trying to get her to read aloud, because her dramatic sighs at every word that was not "cat" were surely contributing more than our family's fair share to Global Warming.

It was a year that soccer practice morphed into actual soccer games and Kathryn, in turn, morphed into the most single-minded halfback in the game, ready to kick the ball out of the possession of any girl who happened to dribble it past her, color of her jersey be damned. "She's remarkably, um, focused," her coach once remarked to me. I chose to take it as a compliment.

But first grade will give up the ghost soon, and with it, so will whatever sense of domestic tranquility I've been able to achieve this past year. But they will both be replaced with Kathryn's shining eyes and sweat-matted brow, and that's a trade I'm willing to make. For a few months, at least.

That Grandma, She's a Sharp One

Here is the second page of a three-page story Kathryn made at school today. It was titled A Day at the Park.

"Grandma noticed. I was bleeding through my head."

This is why all of our parent/teacher conferences include at least one remark that Kathryn frightens the other children. 

Something Borrowed, Something Green

Five years ago every elementary-aged kid traded Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Two years before that it was Pokemon. Back when I went to school it was Star Wars trading cards.

And what are all the kids trading at school today? I don't know for sure, but I have a suspicion: Viruses.

"Hey Kathryn! Guess what I've got? My nanny just came back from a trip to her home, she's from like an island or something, and she brought back a nasty stomach bug and then she gave it to me. You want it?"

"Sure! I'll trade you my sniffles and hacking cough."

"Hmm. I dunno. I've already got a cough. Got anything else?"

"Well, both of my little sisters have the green eleven. I can bring you that tomorrow."

"What's the green eleven?"

"That's those two fluorescent green boogers that hang down from your nose all the time."

"Awesome!"

"Spit in your hand and we'll shake on it."

Can't you just picture it? How else could our kids possibly get so sick so often? Of course, maybe it is not the kids at all. Maybe it's the school. Maybe it's some sort of Department of Education initiative--a bizarre combination of No Child Left Behind and those missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"Hey Kathryn, what did you do at school today?"

"Nothing, Dad. We mostly just sat around."

"And did what?"

"Well...mostly we just shared germs. It was during circle time. We all sat together, then the teacher told us to cough on the person sitting next to us. I got to cough on Sarah, but Billy coughed on me. He has yucky breath. He eats tuna fish.

"Then at lunch we played musical sandwiches. The cafeteria ladies play music and we all pass around our lunches. When they stop the music, we all have to take a bite out of the sandwich we are holding. You know, just like musical chairs. Except Bobby can't play. He's allergic to peanuts, so instead we all just lick his sandwich first before he eats it."

So which is it? Or do we even want to know? I'm pretty sure I don't. The truth is probably even worse than I imagine.