We had our first game yesterday, I finally realized that we only have training once a week and the cuteness going on during the game was just too much!
There was wild dancing and hopping, chats during the pitching, general confusion, utter politeness when an adults caught the ball (Thank you!), limited sight due to slipping helmets and baseball hats, forgotten gloves when catching, pint-size Joe DiMaggios in the making!
'Teacher, I can't hand in my homework because I forgot it in the pub my mom took me to after work on Saturday'
(Bad mom, baaaaad mom!)
'Teacher, I can't hand in my homework because I forgot in the pub my mom took me to after work on Saturday'
(Bad mom, baaaaad mom!)
T. showed C. the new video he put on his blog.
"The guy wacked his wife?!" exclaimed C.
"No, this wife is still there... he build a trap for the car!"
"He wacked the driver?"
...at this point, a pole came done from the ceiling, C. fetched himself a cigar and Tony Soprano came through the door!...
C. has a little flame, E.
It is so heart-warming to see her little face light up when she sees him in the morning and he gets all goofy...
"Shu, mom, shu... go away" (I am standing at the bottom of the jungle gym after school, cramping his style!)
"What?!?"
"Shu, please?"
...hit me and C. yesterday without preparation: the first home work!
I was panicking -- no work space was set up, no markers and pencils at hand, no eraser... How the ***** am I going to do this?
I mean I come from a culture where a desk is put into a kid's room as soon as the changing table is out... 3-year olds have ergonomically designed work spaces that many office professionals could only wish for...
So I improvised - as usual.
-- I welcomed C. to our dinner/work table... T's and my "office" ever since C. was a baby. (So he gets the feeling that he is now part of the working world)
-- I rummaged for some markers and put them in a little bag for him (You gotta have the right tools to do serious work!)
-- I set the timer for 30 minutes and told him that we only work that amount of time, not longer
-- We talked about checking your work after doing (am I too anal-retentive???)
It worked out fine, but I got really impatient with his hand writing... think I need to learn to be more patient...
I overheard C and his buddy CS in the front of my bakfiets:
CS:"God is really busy, he has a lot of paperwork to do!"
C:"Why?"
CS:"Because he has to keep track of everybody!"
They have a nice maze in Breitenbush - C. loves mazes. While we were there, there was also a workshop for vision quest taken place... you know, with the drums and the animal furs and the crystals...
C. and I wanted to walk the maze since we discovered it last time and I told him about the idea that a maze helps you to concentrate (besides helping you untangling thoughts etc.)...after a nice hike it seemed time for us and so we went... and there was a Shaman (in his earthly form of a 50-year old guy) with his drum etc.
We, ok I, decided to give the guy some lead time and hunkered C. to remind him about concentrating etc...
...and while I was trying really hard to remember why I walked the maze myself, it was funny to see C. reacting to a guy drumming and kneeling on all fours at the end of the maze...
I guess, everything sounded much better in the vision quest handbook without a very interested 5-year old trailing behind you!
C. put his backpack in the wrong locker this morning and I told him -- he got more and more angry with me over the next 10 minutes and repeated over and over again that he put it in the right locker. He was close to tears and insisted that I had to say that I was wrong. Hearing the tardy bell and seeing him so upset, I gave in.
I know that he is very fragile under his swagger and his sunny personality. I can only imagine what it takes to keep his head up when another child called a loser and slow poke, but C. seemed to have solved that problem quite well. On the other side the episode this morning also shows how stubborn he can be...
Well, next time I let him figure it out by himself...
Martha Grimes: Belle Ruin
After a diet of slasher/pathology sleuthes, this is a much lighter meal. ...and also I didn't "get" the mystery, it was a fun book to read.
Alexander Mccall Smith: The Sunday Philosophy Club (Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries)
Ok, so I am in a philosophical state of mind... really nice read though
Joe Mackall: Plain Secrets: An outsider among the Amish
Pain stacking description life with the Swarzentruber Amish. Mackall only describes the daily life with his Amish friends... very quiet and peaceful... a little more anthropology would have been nice.
