So, I made this sort of handy thing– a pouch for my wallet and phone while I’m walking which has the earbuds stitched into it so I can stop losing them and they don’t get tangled. Trust me, this is all a big deal for me, because I’m a dork.
Squish wants one.
Now, you need to picture my entire house is full of yarn.
FULL. OF YARN.
“Mommy! Can I pick the yarn for my phone pouch?”
“Yeah, sure. But it’s coming last–I’m making a few for BLC.”
“Okay– what yarn can I pick?”
“Well, the stuff in that one bag is okay, and the stuff over in that box, or–“
“How about this?”
She pulls out one skein of four–four skeins for a completely planned sweater I have been thinking about for her sister.
My brain breaks.
“Uh… okay… I mean… anything else there–“
Picture the saddest most depressed face you’ve ever seen.
“No, no,” I say. “That yarn is fine. Excellent choice. I’ll do zig-zags.”
She lights up. “Thank you Mom!”
And I’m calling that a parenting win.
And also…
Squish was working on a school project today during TV time. She kept asking us things like, “What’s a synonym? What’s an idiom? What’s a metaphor?”
I’d paused TV to answer her and her brother said, “So… tell me about MacBeth.”
Now, Macbeth is a sore point with me and ZoomBoy’s school– Chicken’s teacher taught this play, and I’d taught it for something like eighteen years.
Chicken’s teacher did a particularly shitty job of it.
I don’t care how much hot shit you think you are as an AP teacher, you don’t spend a week on Macbeth in high school. If you do, you’re doing it wrong.
So, I start telling ZoomBoy about Macbeth, while Squish waits for the pauses to say things like, “Is dastardly deeds an idiom? Or is it alliteration? Can you give me a metaphor that will fit with a ladies finishing school for spies? I’m doing this as a report on Gail Carriger’s series. What about an idiom?”
I pause in the middle of explaining how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane to tell Squish, “If you want your daughter to triumph in a dog eat dog world, enroll her in our finishing school and she will bloom into the stoutest of roses, with thorns dipped in blood.”
I finished Macbeth and both kids looked at me.
“How was the idiom and the metaphor?” I asked.
She gave me a smile and a thumbs up.
“It’s like you’re a writer,” she said, batting her big blue eyes.
“Or taught English for twenty years,” ZoomBoy added.
“You know, like storytelling is your jam.”
I bowed.
When Chicken was in fourth grade she asked me, “What’s chlorophyll? What’s photosynthesis?” and I gave her the answers off the top of her head.
When I was done, she said, “How do you know that.”
“I’m an English teacher,” I said, because words, definitions, natch, right?
“But this is science, Mother!” and then she proceeded to check my answers against the back of the book which is where she should have been looking shit up in the first place.
I have to say, this evening did a lot to take away the sting of that moment. True story.
