You know It’s going to be a long day when you hear your children talking about coveting and then accusing each other of breaking the ten commandments. While Rebecca and Jonathan were cleaning their room Eli was doing his usual routine of messing it up, taking their toys and generally getting in the way. This devolved into “Eli do you covet?” Eli rightly looked at them like they were nuts and they proceeded to say “yes you do covet you do not follow the Ten Commandments we’re talking about the cove one. And by the way you are not so good on the honor thy father and mother either.” I’m all for honoring the parents and I’d like to see more of it but I’m not especially comfortable with throwing biblical morality around before breakfast. The day got even more delightful when Manuel informed me that the hot water heater was out again. Once again I pranced across the street in my bathrobe to my neighbor’s house to take a hot shower all the way feeling like a cross between a wife on madmen and a UVa undergrad living on the lawn. (for non UVa folks that’s a big honor here which involves living in a Jeffersonian room without indoor plumbing. Not my kind of honor). The trailer shares that lack of plumbing and I always love getting soaked by the water falling off the metal roof on the way to the bathroom.
The pinnacle of the day was of course the call in my office from the principle, the school nurse and Jonathan’s teacher. Thing two had somehow forgotten his lunch and we had failed to check. Apparently no food in the school would do. He told me this on the phone as I was sitting in the trailer at UVA with no car and Manuel was teaching also with no car so there was nothing we could do. As I understand it Rebecca, Marietta and Ian all tried to give him food and reason with him including the girls telling him that “sometimes change is hard.” Ms Keiser and Nurse Brown are for the most part fairly unflappable so I’m sure this was a dramatic J food meltdown. This is a kid who had feeding therapy for years and about whose eating habits I lost many nights sleeping. But once he got on the growth charts and started to read I figured he could be as short and skinny as he wanted and it would some day be someone else’s problem. Meanwhile his first grade teacher happened to be in the office and asked if I cared if he ate crackers and cheese. My response was basically you are a saint and I don’t give a hoot what he eats at this point or if he eats at all……” The other irony is that I’m currently coordinating the donation of side dishes and prizes for the school sponsored Thanksgiving dinner in the low income housing neighborhood.
Now it’s time to go back to recommendations. I think we just call November national recommendation month.
No comments:
Post a Comment