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Does the turtledove mate for life?

It's the time of the year where I wonder about such things.
I'm teaching my TK a lot of songs to brighten the darkest month.

Yesterday was my 30th or 29th Anniversary. It has been a bone of contention for at least 25 years which anniversary we are celebrating. Since we lived together for a year I win anyway by falling back and referencing that. I thought this was 30.

We actually were waiting to get married that year until year's end,  so we could marry on Christmas Eve with our families at a Bed and Breakfast in Monterey, terrifically romantic and intimate but Jack's father and Aunt died in that November time and it took our breath away. His father was 51, and both died of heart attacks. With my husband now in his 50's I spend each day in fear and thankfulness- a particularly difficult combination. He does go to a heart doc but I have no idea if this is helping, he doesn't eat red meat and he is seemingly fit. A week ago he came in saying, "I beat the sh*t out of that stress test." Good.

I mated for life.

You don't know. And you can't know about what the other person might be deeply interiorly feeling.
Except I did. Somehow. And in a difficult year of 2015 my rock was Gilbralter. I can't explain better than that, because I can't tell the whole story about why this was the hardest year of my life- except to say that it remained everyday a year where my heart did not beat right-both literally and figuratively and we haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. It beat irregularly and too fast.  Broken.

I wanted to write this yesterday, on the 12th, our day, but I was in Santa Barbara celebrating my anniversary by going to the art museum and shopping for my kids Christmas a tiny bit-eating at a sidewalk cafe, having the first Irish coffee in my life (well known I do not drink-ever) and having a lovely piece of coconut cake at the Lilac Patissere which is a h*ll of a bakery.  It was just a sweet day. The cake tasted like one my Mom made so that brought her care into my day. But I woke up to this, completely unexpected:

 So he got a present. We kind of, I thought, had this tacit agreement to just wait on that.
I've had a wicked cold and been at the end of my rope. As I said-not a good year.
But I opened my gift, Jack was at the gym, I wasn't waiting.
It came with a beautiful card he made in French.
And then I saw this:

Now I have "wanted" and certainly not needed a ring for my right hand for a long time. I wore a tiny, wonderful tiny ruby ring on my "right" hand for twenty years in kidhood until it broke in my twenties. My Aunt Lenore and Uncle Tony gave it to me. I took it to a jeweler to fix and he "lost it." That was a heart break in Morgantown, WV. I should have gone to Yagel's but at the time I didn't think they'd fix a ring that was so child-like and so destroyed. That ring was one of the first solutions I had to a life problem. Lenore suggested it I think. (Or my memory says this.) I could not, and cannot, tell left from right. A certain percentage of people have this orientation issue so each day during flag salute I faced the humiliation of correction at school for the wrong hand on my heart. The ring on the right solved this. A ruby was right.

I don't think I've shared this story. It was a private inadequacy, along with my many others.

So seeing this ring, with it's tiny rubies, that felt so right.


It is a perfect fit too, something he does somehow without measuring or knowing.
It made me think of two turtledoves.
I'm lucky my marriage outlasted my folks marriage by a good bit, and was certainly quite a different thing. But as we sat enjoying our cake, and Jack was telling me that I had actually changed him and actualized my feelings about art and future and children in his work-a touching moment in our very private lives, I thought about Mom's coconut pound cake and how much this gold band symbolized. At 50 something, my age, my father killed my mother mentally, threw kids to the side to go have a child with "his values" married, divorced, married, divorced and is in his 80's living with another that I think is part servant part ridiculous situation of nursemaid bound by his money and her immigration issues.
I thought for a brief second about how in his eyes my brother and I were not "good enough", never the wonderkids he deserved. How  difficult it was to see the parade of wives for me-all of them good, good people caught in the web. All escaping. I thought of the stroke Mom had in her 50's. I thought how close i came to believing his narrative of me, how much his damage affected my life. How much it did do but also how far I came. Thank you father, I did learn from your examples. Actual gratitude.
I saw the pitfalls.
When he divorced her and tried to do as much hurt as he could get away with, I thought about that deeply.

And I blinked and looked at this:




Some birds mate for life.
This one did.

I was sent this piece by Anthony Cody and this writing is to him and I'm placing here because I would like to share it.
And I'm going to respond:

"Art is healing and meditative for children and teachers. It is inspiring and allows a different kind of space for free and creative expression. Art builds self-confidence in a way that children need. It develops listening skills and an ability to work from part-to-whole. It develops trust in one's teacher.
Art develops executive functioning skills, impulse control, delayed gratification skills, planning and organizing skills, fine motor skills, and visual spatial skills. Art develops meta-cognition skills, problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Art increases experiences of joy in all children and during the process of a shared joyful Art experience, our immune systems get the same kind of boost as a hug provides. Shared Art experience creates a strong sense of community. Art creates a sense of peace and satisfaction. Art creates children who think outside the box and can help students stand up for themselves and others. Art develops empathy. Art helps us learn about our world sometimes in a way nothing else could replace. Art can be full-on play! Art can create wonder and Art can answer wonderings. Art can be fiction or non-fiction. Art can come from within or from a power outside of oneself. ‪#‎Art‬ can incite emotion. Art can be visual music with rhythm and a melody of pattern. Art can engage all of our senses. Art can be science. Art is math. Art is visual poetry. Art can be social studies. Art can incite social justice! Art can be dangerous to the elite! Art can disrupt and disturb oppression. Art can heal depression and trauma. Art is worth doing for the sake of Art alone, but Art does all these things! ‪#‎OccupyMyClassroom‬"



When I was in training, in university, my Art Education teacher Bill Thomas once said something to the effect that if we can connect the home, and world in that home of the student, to our projects in an art room-if we can glimpse who the student is-then our lesson design was doing something profound.

He was teaching how to design starting points for children's work as an art educator. Something we needed fieldwork to experience and understand but those days were in front of us. And indeed over my many years working as teacher and artist, art teacher,  I saw the bridge, but rarely.
He understood the elusive edge. To connect to who that child is, that was his point.

One time I glimpsed it I had set up an "Olympics" for a wild two classes- days and days of events that I ran with two 6th grade classes-Mrs. S abandoning her kids to me at the end of the year, and my having everything from ringtoss to how high can you reach, along with more traditional events I one by one ran for medals I made out of yarn and tag. How was this art?
We did manufacture the medals as I recall now, but at the cardboard covered pavement art came to exist. And not even at the chalkdrawing competition. A student, Kevin, came to the dance off, where it was 12 girls and a great breakdancer from my class who could easily go to LA and dance on the Santa Monica pier for money. Armed with his expensive and going to be ruined tap shoes, Kevin waded into some pretty determined kids. He was a student in S's room- student getting the A's but often teased by his class, sometimes unmercifully for certain things like his love of and collection of pewter. (which we shared btw as a passion). He came and bar none in my Life-in a dancing family-tapped with the greats-it was barrel rolls that topped my daughter's who stunned her studio. No one had ANY idea he was a competitive tapper, and almost no kid had ever seen tap dance. Great way to learn it exists. He brought his own player and I had to jerry-rig extension cords as I recall. I have never seen talent in a leotard to match that. Every child there had never seen a guy in a leotard in our barrio. And he took dance, the art that it is, and killed it.
No one looked at Kevin the same way, that I can tell you.

I saw this as the potentials, home lives, abilities we never tap in school, that art bridged.

My husband had a short little conversation maybe two years ago with a person in his district that was working in the library. We lost librarians before my career started. I suppose librarian clerks at minimal wages are forced to do what training and degrees might help, but she expressed a desire to do some art with kids, and he HEARD her. She began and he encouraged her setting up, or supporting her trying something in her library art connected.
He decided around this time after re-instituting full music programs, within his district, to pursue art as well as music teachers. He hired art teachers, with the support of Board and district,  and one new hire at the last second left, leaving him with a year starting and no art teacher. (Totally professional she had applied and taken one job while working out another.) That turned out to be the best thing that ever happened for children because the district team put into place that library clerk, she had some ed training, degree, and a hunger to teach art. Now her blog might say this better than I can, if you can scroll it.
createelrio.wordpress.com 
I go there and just literally laugh with the joy of it. (or here https://twitter.com/MrsGuzik)

If you look through her year so far, the images you will SEE play, invention, support of core standards, art ed principles, joy, delight, connection, bridges to culture, samples of  recurrent themes, her adjusting to student levels, you'll pretty much take a course in what an art teacher can do K-8.
If you can scroll with time you'll see how over time she is changing and her students are changing. In short, I'm looking somewhat at myself early in my career-if I had one heck of a cognitive boost and a camera.
AND I see her pulling her children through art movements, art history too with pieces like her recent POP art volcanoes, or the works studying Kandinsky. Since art is embedded in culture, since in the 20th century it drove us forward through massive wars, change, technological growth-you see her students glimpsing the enormity that is "man".

What is man? Who are we? What is the reason?
These things have lined the inner world of artist and humans since time began. I would venture that right this minute as folks around our world are deciding life is something to be blown apart, hurled, to crush the other-as these themes are reverberating we COULD look at what was spawned when a version of that paralyzed our grandparents in the 1950's. as nuclear war loomed and drills for potential nuclear disaster hit, even in schools, as folks dug and lead walled a room in the backyard, art sprang forward with the abstract expressionists.
My brother just the other day commented on Pollock. He still feels his approach as a laziness, a gesture. A cheat.
And I think, when life is meaningless and a man contemplates with his brotheren mass extinction, what image captures that inner awareness. So I know the students sitting before me in my little TK, given the bridge to the arts may well represent to their peer group one day the times we are in. And in doing so, help us once more to work on, who are we? Why are we here? To make visual and give meaning to the hidden.

These young art teachers who largely do not exist thanks to NCLB, thanks to the painter George Bush's policies, may well help us to examine our feet in a tub of hotwater as Bush has, help us to put our relationship to one another into portrait form. Help us move into reality and out of our head. Art is ultimately on the plain of doing. It is zen, it is movement, form, feeling, systems, structures, it is both language and meaning, metaphor embedded in actual physical reality. It serves a broader purpose so necessary to human life. It is a bridge to experience, planet, others, emotion, meaning.
When I was young we were satified saying "art is."

If I put a sign on my door tomorrow, at my school, with permission of course, or not, "art classes at two thirty" adults and children welcome- within a few days I would not be able to sit the crowd. As we made things together I'd have to have the Monday folks, the Tuesdays, the Wednesdays and so on. I doubt I could affort the supplies though I'd try. And I'd be carried along into something I'd do even if exhausted, sick, and not feel anything but the excitement. Of course I know this. And from engineer's child to the child of the mom with a second grade education the playing field would be level enough we could start and learn from one another.

One time I thought about rocks. I pictured rocks one could hold in your hand, worry stones. My husband that year asked me as he always does to suggest and teach his summer school art, for about two hundred kids. He sent out his head custodian to get me some stones, and he did. In came these gigantic, rounded many ton rocks. Hundreds. So we painted rocks with acrylic and sealant in exuberant  sessions on long, long tables covered with bright paper. I can imagine we spent a fortune on the paint, but we really took all my craft paint from years of saving it. And bought some too. Children produced amazing garden stones and after sealed and displayed I went back home enjoying summer, while they lined areas of the school garden, and rocks went home on buses in what I would call a rather questionable moment in his thinking. But I suppose my point is-within the happening adults to child, community was created. No one forgets it.Not worry at all. Not a bit.

Art is happening. 
Art is love, it is all you feel, it is a training, a passion, a compulsion, a precision, a methodology, a core of your humanity.

It would be amazingly great to see it returned to our children so they can gift us with a tomorrow that can consider itself.

On this blog I have often posted my 100 Standards for children.
Early on, when I wrote the 100 Standards Puglisi-style, a Principal from back east came on-line encouraging my voice. He sent me his book, that book was rooted in love as the underpinning of school, of our work. Brain science now tells everyone this can no longer be put down-it IS the work in early childhood education.. But our writing to one another was so positive and encouraging. I needed someone who would periodically tweet me out on the net and encourage me as having something of value. We all need this!
Richard Lakin did that for me, now I read on-line he has passed away this morning (for me morning) a victim of terrorism in Israel. Our sky here was full of fury and beauty.


So thinking of him I am going to reprint those things I feel DO matter-research into children is revealing these actually are the things that matter. My Mrs. Puglisi 100 Standards.
We must realize this. We must build a peaceful, compassionate, empathetic, caring world.
In memory of a man killed by terrorism that stood for peace.


This appeared in March of 2010:

I just read a nice editorial about HOW RELIEVED a newspaper is if we have National Standards.
In the New York Times, you can read it here.
Finally, it said, as if stranded in the desert seeing at the very last moment of possibility the solution to their thirst there at the oasis on the horizon. And like that, it's probably a mirage.
At least this writer isn't aware how much we are and have been standards driven in the 30 some years I've been working in the field. But it must feel more "right" if the nation says "knows the 50 states" or "understands separation of church and state" or more importantly "understands the role of the free press in democracy." Yeah, well, national control, now that's a cheering thought, so much works so well once that gets going.

My mom had printed out the commentary and before you knew it, I read the thing.

For months I've tried not to read too much she handed over fearing it might contain yet another blow. Being a teacher right now is open season. I believe they expanded the season.
I work in an Underperforming school, in some very difficult poverty, and therefore the Secretary of Education and my President may well label me "bad." Neat. That's the reality, among many now sadly. My close friend and partner teacher continually invites this National leadership to her classroom. To spend real time, and then maybe open awareness, dialog and learn about the realities. So far, no helicopter on the lawn.

Last night I began thinking about my own "standards" what I'd wish for children.
What I OFTEN do not see. But we aren't allowed to talk about that. And all too often as teachers we have been labeled if we did talk, about that anyway. Labeled as excuse makers. But just the same I'd like to see these things as standard.
I know that's not what's being talked about. Still, it's what I assert matters "nationally."

What I'd wish for the children I work with is this kind of bottom line. A set of standards. According to the best theory we have our not attending to these underpinnings of care and security prevent educational, personal, community health, well being, and stunt normal development. But that's not as easy as saying the teacher is bad. Not as target ready. Rather than fire, you might have to approach the entire situation by building good facilities, launching into community health, figuring out how to provide work, you might have to build a butterfly pavilion in every community, imagine, or cough up some art supplies, time, you might need to drive where I drive and really in-depth and individually look at things.

So Today, before I do other things that I need to do, I'm going to list my standards:

1. All children should know love.

2. All children should know that they have a bed to sleep in tonight, and next week, and for their life.

3. All children should have adequate, even delicious food, and know all about their food.

4. All children should have support within the walls of their homes.

5. All children should have the experience of play.

6. All children should know nature, value nature, interact within nature, and be in families that have some capacity to do the same.

7. All children should know, have, and be able to be friends.

8. All children should have clothes to wear that help keep them warm, and expresses their beauty.

9. All children should feel that their family is accepted, and is of value.

10. All children should learn language, learn to speak by finding their world one that enjoys communication, the more languages that they know the more broadened the understanding.

11. All children should have health and DENTAL care that their families are not fearful about, or simply can't afford or have, and know illness cannot bankrupt them. They need health care that attends to their well being.

12. All children should be regarded as potentially, and individually, and instantly a part of whatever cosmic beauty, goodness,whatever we wish to call it, that exists and as such is the reason we all live with hope and possibility.

13. All children should be permitted to listen to adults that are permitted to think.

14. All children should be assured of schools, fair schools, schools where we do not reinforce unfair notions that already existed at birth, like if your family "has more" or lives on some piece of real estate or is somehow smarter or edging out another, then your school will be better. This unfortunately underpins the current national policy. That even includes the President. Whoever they are every child deserves a very nice school. Not a me, then everyone else educational model. (Check out Finland)

15. All children should have books. Libraries are great.

16. All children should have toys, but maybe ones parents make as well as buy.

17. All children should have parents, family, neighbors, mentors that make things.

18. All children should have systems at work within their lives that build healthy communities seeing them as the reason the community exists.

19. All children should have adults that can cooperate, hear one another, resolve conflict, have the capacity to demonstrate love, attention, concern, solutions, turn taking, deference.

20. All children should have paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, sprinkles, cookies, cups,cans, materials, glue, paste, making and doing.

21. All children should have adequate sleep and rest.

22. All children should have music. Every form, in utero on, to listen and sing to, in choir, to play, as a part of life. As a part of study.

23. All children should be involved in learning projects.

24. All children should know transportation systems to get them around safely.

25. All children should enjoy celebrations, the most important at least once per year a celebration of that child and their value to our life.

26. All children should begin the process of literacy not as a race but as a right, a joy, an exploration, and a normal function.

27. All children should enter school believing and maintaining as long as possible a joy in learning, and a belief in self as not "behind", not labeled, not seen as less.

28. All children should experience lives without bullies, and when there are bullies, teasing, cruelty, be able to easily find the resources, the support, the fairness to have access to help. To be heard.

29. All children should know technology.

30. All children should be given opportunities to demonstrate understandings.

31. All children should learn within family and school to cook and care for their food.

32. All children should be served food at school that is interesting, fresh, well made, delicious and not a frozen, re-baked, cultural wasteland.

33. All children should be allowed to respect, care about, and return to teachers as important to their lives. They should know Mrs. P may well be in the same school in her room waiting 20 years later to see you again!

34. All children should have time with the adults that conceived them. Daycare should be an option that is last on the list.

35. All children should be allowed comfortable school furniture. Very comfortable.

36. All children should do more each day in a school than they sit, or rarely be engaged in passive workbooking.

37. All children should be educated in reasonable, perhaps even outrageously small groups, so that each child can and does get the care they need. No more than 15.

38. Children should have opportunities to draw, color, illustrate, print make, dye, batik, sketch, paste, cut, collage, design, sparkle, explore, respond within art so that they have experienced quality materials and competent artists actively. Real papers, real crayolas, real inks, paints, that allow them to become human through art. And not bought by their underpaid teacher.

39. All children need to hear the big pictures, even when we are still engaged in understanding the big pictures.

40. All children should learn about their brain, body, systems, and how they work.

41. All children should see the differences in cultures, people, societies as opportunities to become aware and to be amazed.

42. All children should find mathematics from the time they hold the concept of three, until they are fully grown, as a part of everything we do, that mathematics has history, context, thought, theory and that they can find themselves perfectly a part of the understandings of this within its forms and functions. Male or female, rich or poor. (I'm pleased this worked out to be number 42)

43. All children should learn to observe, should learn this within natural settings.

44. All children should be engaged in science.

45. All children should know animals, their care, to care for animals, support, raise and love them and understand as well the cycle of life.

46. All children should know schools that support all of the above, and fight for these things ahead of anything else.

47. All children should run on beaches, in grass, have playgrounds, feel forest floors, fly kites, gather leaves, cross streets safely, visit fire stations, meet the police in nice days to learn about hard jobs with the ability to ask them about their work, go to groceries, learn about money, see movies, roll down hills, sled, walk by crocus, talk to grandmas and grandpas, collect and recycle, play cards, take turns, have dice, play Candyland, do dance, gymnastics, try waterslides, learn swimming safety, go to farms, pet animals, cut pumpkins, smell pine, wash the floor with a friend, have chores, taste baked bread, knead dough, water plants, grow seeds, take care of fish, walk in lines, put on shows, sing with friends, flop on the floor, use blocks, without feeling anything but how good all of that feels.

48. All children should develop constructs of learning that set and achieve goals, with the child involved.

49. All children should be read to and start to read in a lap in a house or a home.

50. All children should be cleaned, bathed, cared for as if they were a joy.

51. All children should have shoes.

52. All children should have coats and sweaters, gloves, hats and people that care whether or not they are wearing them or have them. And possibly make them for them.

53. All children should have rules, limits, safety nets, systems, understandable patterns, routines, mentors, and those that love them well enough to have flexibility and judgment in using them ahead of rigidity and power.

54. Children should be able to learn about work.

55. Children should learn about how their society functions in terms of money, jobs, labor, roles, learning of others and their situations and within something hard to define, with open minds, with introduction of the complexity in society, the stratification.

56. All children should feel that their family has capacity, intelligence, worth and intrinsic value.

57. All children should sometimes ask and receive.

58. All children should sometimes cope with a no.

59. All children should have sharing time, if possible far longer than adults teaching them want to tolerate.

60. All children should be allowed to wash their hands before eating, after play times as a normal experience.

61. All children should attend schools, live in houses with adequate facilities to know a toilet, a bath, a way to clean clothes and to enjoy being clean.

62. All children should live in a world where if mental illness affects the family there are ways to have, find, sustain help for them, and not drown.

63. All children should have bandaids, both the real thing and the metaphorical kind. To heal.

64. All children should be able to hear stories of kith and kin, hear other children's story, and grow within structures that value these experiences of "our story" above all else.

65. All children should move in dance.

66. All children should know sport.

67. All children should watch Reading Rainbows, once per week well through 8th grade.

68. All children should learn to build a fire, how to use a compass, how to set up a tent, ways to safely do the things that ensure our survival, taught in ways that don't frighten, but do allow them confidences and maturation. Camp, they should get to go to camp and ALL children need a trip to the nations capitol and to museums.

69. All children should skip a stone over a pond, catch and cook a fish, throw back more than they catch, know snow, understand seasons, begin to feel the earth under their feet, be taught the earth's movement, time, the calendaring systems with contexts that engage them fully in experiential learning.

70. All children should make large sidewalk drawings in chalk.

71. All children should make presentations, displays, have fairs and experiences to present to families that come, watch, interact, appreciate and value as community experience.

72. All children should learn about feelings.

73. All children should make, have, use puppets, experience drama and plays.

74. All children should find that they are valued for their opinion, and asked why, and expected to be heard as well as listen to another.

75. All children should have literacy as a foundational right, have books be the center of educational experiences, find that what they read, experience within words to be valued as highly as possible.

76. All children need access and understanding of history, time-lines, historical figures, historical perspectives, historical understanding of things we have learned from both our successes, but also our mistakes.

77. All children should write, read and engage with poetry.

78. All children should respect their own learning, and understand that their achievements help them individually to evolve, not to better over others, but to become more fully alive. And thus of value to others.

79. All children should learn about the systems of religion, philosophy, schools of thought.

80. All children should learn about death, in caring ways we should allow them to develop their understandings so they are not paralyzed by both their fears, but the realities they will face.

81. All children should have a backpack.

82. All children should look forward to each day.

83. All children should be allowed to wear hats. Sunglasses too.

84. All children should have someplace to do their homework, and someone that cares to talk about it with them.

85. All children should find their talents and learn to use their strengths understanding as well their weaknesses.

86. All children should laugh.

87. All children should watch the sky. Value weather, learn about the earth, be engaged in the atmosphere, understand water tables, be aware of how these systems work.

88. All children should learn to answer a phone, safely , and intelligently.

89. All children should write, in a multiplicity of ways, all day and as a part of understanding, as a tool.

90. All children should one day look up in their classrooms and rather than seeing an authority in the "watch" their teacher mode, see a President or an Ed Secretary or other important folk in looking at all the things they are doing, valuing their learning, finding within that community things to see as right in their learning.

91. All children should take turns and know they will have a turn.

92. All children should understand that if they do work, try, show themselves to be willing to learn, make mistakes and process them, that they can enter into fields they choose, that no door is closed because they are not rich, they should understand careers and opportunities and their roles, as well as community roles, in seeing them into futures.It should not be a mystery.

93. All children when they fall, need a helping hand.

94. All children should feel that they work within dynamics that see success over failure.

95. All children should know the warmth of a heater, the light of a bulb, the luxury of air conditioning in rooms over 80. All children should see the value in those comforts and fully understand how that is provided to them.

96. All children should get gifts.

97. All children should make and give cards and gifts as expressions of thankfulness and connection.

98. All children should have a blog in a child safe atmosphere.

99. All children should learn within local settings that help to set goals and standards and to maintain ways to over see this.

100. All children should be integrated, rich, poor, black, white, restricted by disability, glasses wearing, free thinking, Republican household, Democratic, representing every color, creed, view, and from such a base learn about self and others to the best of our ability to mix ourselves together within community, neighborhood, nation, to think of such things as more important than writing a bunch of standards and thinking that was the same as doing all of the above.


I have more but I have work to do.
I've taught children missing all of the above.
I've taught these last 27 years knowing stories of kids that might break your heart that renders much of what I hear "proposed" into a joke like stance for some of our children while I was, and teachers like me were, scapegoated over understanding the complexities of the issues. Children deserve better than that. They deserve thinking adults. And schools and systems designed for them to do well. If this is addressed as the NY Times writer thought by these standards then I assume the above has been articulated into systems, structures and supports.

A Farewell To Arne
Sarah Puglisi

Life threw me a curve as of September 12 or so. I started having blood in my urine. And yet another kidney stone that wasn't like others I've had because it didn't pass.
It turns out it's lodged at the top of the ureter on the left side.
I have a fever. I'm going to surgery tomorrow for a stent.
I have a sub in place for my little guys.
I had this resolve for this year to go unless I was in a hospital-and it looks like that flew out that window.

This is just a post to ask for prayers, especially for my family. Hoping it gets better.
It's darn aggravating to learn there is a drug I could have been taking to prevent them forming. I have them about every 4 months, that might have been a good idea all along. I did always ask.

If I go by how I feel, I'm in a scary place.

I invested this September in a couple expensive items for my Transitional K classroom. Not that  I can afford it. And happily I chose these items because they were significantly reduced on Amazon. I know why now, assembly = pure torture. But they are assembled and in my classroom thanks, in part, to Luca and Jack doing a lot of the putting together- when it was clear the KidKraft way is LONG on assembly. And after I cried.

It's a fire station.
And I punched a huge hole in my thumb trying to make two parts left out of the box with a cork. They hold the elevator in place.

I am teaching Fire Safety or "Fire Helpers" this week, we'll make a firetruck in paper and see a cute video. Songs and Poems have yet to get together and I do have resources I just need to get them out and set up. So I thought about it and got the fire station because I do like these engaging doll house like structures in center time. It may well be my class this year has plenty of opportunity to engage with these kinds of toys, but I think looking back at my childhood, I'd have liked that opportunity. My own kids liked these play areas, once.

 About three weeks ago I built and added this puppet theater. It's a lot of fun, but so far we haven't totally got it down how to play with it in centers. Every Thursday I have students act out our month's fairy tale. Very soon we are going to start Three Billy Goats Gruff. That ought to be fun.

I think.


 Here are the two sitting at home getting ready to be hauled over to my class.
 In class ready for tomorrow!
 This Little Kitchen looks so small in my classroom!

There are so many things to do in a TK, and so much to set up and help happen. I get overwhelmed much of the time.
But in terms of darling things for play-I added a few things.

Meanwhile my district is adding kids at a rate that makes it very hard to do the job. But that's another story for another day. Maybe over coffee.

It seems the world has pretty much suffered the pain of 9-11, even to the point of waking to realize our earth is struggling with the damages to our environment, from the actions of humans. Suffering, terror, pain all roll up into a giant aspect of our world that I cannot allow to take over my consciousness. News everyday speaking of suffering, terror, and it is so stressing I often cannot think.

For September 11th, two days after the birthday of my first child, Sylvia and the day OF the birthday of Stacy, Nicole and many other children I've taught and people I've known-a day that brought so much- I'd like to place a poem my daughter wrote I return to here yearly. It's a beautiful poem and has been performed nationally. I've never seen a better one about how this event affected a nation of just...people.

Today in a kinder group I joined on Facebook a teacher asked what to do with her kinder class on that day, and my advise was say very little of this day, say it saddened your parents perhaps, though their parents were at the age of my daughter-very young-a day  that this poem describes. Too young. Perhaps it is a time to begin your study of our fire and police heroes. I start that with 9-11, ALWAYS. But, it would be still too early to talk too long about terrorism. About the suffering, unless you chose to talk about the good folk, look to those Mr. Rogers told us in his sage wisdom. We have so many.

Here's the older piece-with an explanation, for September 11, 2015.

For September 11

I invented Spatula Puppets, I'm calling them Spuppets for my puppet theater to be.
And that made me think of a center where they make puppets, or faces on the spatulas,  or a lot of ideas,  as well as my making them act out stories we learn each month. Our first is Goldie Locks.
I tried them out, easy to hold, a perfect fit for my puppet stage.
So that invention was fun.


 Here I put on puffy paint covers I have no idea why, except I had puffy paint.









So that's not a "worksheet" and I think it'll be fun.
Chow.