Montessori Daycare For Hoo

 

Hoo started to attend a Montessori daycare program.

Can you say “Baby Yoga”?

It’s a step up from his earlier daycare to be sure.

Great facility, well run with trained staff.

Could we ask for more? Uh uh.

His late afternoon caregiver is a very serious Russian woman who takes her responsibilities very seriously.

Each day I get a “poop-report”.

How Hoo napped, what and with whom he played with and his general disposition.

Today when I picked him up she gravely intoned in her deep Russian accented voice,

“Hoo deed not eet hees lunch. Hoo only eht hees rahzohns.”

She somberly shook her head.

He only ate his raisins?

(Yikes!)

I’m not quite sure what to do with this information,

but it sounds like Hoo is off to the gulag if he doesn’t get his noon chow down.

 

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong. Charles Wadsworth

When China was a little bug, (my daughter not the country), her sleeve caught fire. We were lighting Hannukah candles when she reached over the burning flames. I slapped the burning sleeve out. Husband and I examined her burned sleeve and her arm amazed that the flames never touched her skin.

Something similar happened to Egg, (my second daughter not chicken fetus). We do a lot of candle lighting in our religion. She wanted to blow out the Sabbath candles when her hair caught on fire. My mother standing nearby and I brushed the fire out as fast as it started. Egg was fine.

She turned her 3-year-old self around and smiled at us wondering why we were patting her head. She never knew how close she came to setting herself on fire.

If you are a parent then you know what I’m talking about.

You’ve swept food out of little mouths before they choked. You’ve caught your child mid-fall in the playground and set them on their feet to run and play.

For older kids. We fill the gas tank when we know they are going out. We check the tires. Twice.

The 17-year-old boy that comes to pick up your 14-year-old daughter for a date!?

That boy never makes it in the house! You know what I’m saying?

We watch out for the foreseeable problems our children are headed toward and run interference.

Kids, they are like the quarterbacks running with the ball. They may not see their teammates (parents) behind them tackling the opposing players, but they are there.

Funny. If a touchdown is made they dance around like monkeys. If an opposing team member takes them down they are just as likely to look around at their own team(again,it’s us,parents)  and say, “Where were you guys?”

It’s often a thankless job parenting. Until our kids have children of their own they may never understand why we do what we do.

“I’d catch a grenade for ya, put my hand on a blade for ya..”.  Heard that song?  It shouldn’t be a boyfriend singing to a girl.

It should be the parent’s anthem.

This is gmom.

peace out.

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Norway. Now What. Gmom’s Thought’s From Baltimore

For those following my blog.

Husband is home.

Mission accomplished.

I may be able to loan him out to FEMA. He is good.

It’s quiet in Baltimore tonight. Warm and sweet. Cujo and I are doing our usual patrolling of the grounds. Heat lightning is firing every few minutes.

Unless you live under a rock you have heard about the atrocity that happened in Norway on Friday. A lunatic planting bombs in Oslo then went on a killing spree at a youth camp.

Security is not tight in a country unused to such violence and better known for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize and mediating in conflicts, including the Middle East and Sri Lanka.

Breaks gmom’s heart.

Man dresses up like a police officer to gain access to the summer camp than mows down the kids with an automatic weapon.

In Boro Park, New York a few weeks ago, 8-year-old Leiby Kletsky walking home from day camp was picked up by a man who murdered and dismembered him. He put the boy’s body part’s in a red suitcase and kept the child’s feet in his freezer for himself.

In the search for Leiby, 3000 people hit the streets. A store’s surveillance camera caught the boy going with the man in to his car leading the police to resolution of the case. The boy was an orthodox Jew, the man he went with wore a yarmulke and looked liked an orthodox Jew.

Here in Baltimore recently there were 3 cases of men banging on residents doors saying, “Baltimore City Police,open up.” And the people did. People were tied up, men were shot, homes ransacked.

Use to be you could tell children if you are lost go to a woman.

(Now we have Casey Anthony on the street)

Use to be you could tell children if you are lost go to someone in a uniform.

It’s a different world.

What do we tell our children now?

This is gmom,

peace out.

My Sister:Getting Out Of Town

1979

I had just graduated high school.

I was spending an  inordinate amount of time weeping in the office of a compassionate guidance counselor. At 17 I couldn’t see my way out of the city I grew up in.

I would start college in a few weeks,  and nothing would change.

“I have to go to college, I have to support myself or I’ll never get out of here!” I wept.

He suddenly sat down and quietly spoke to me, as though he were about to share a secret.

“You can go now, you should go now.”

“I can??? But how??”

I didn’t know how.

Late that night after everyone was asleep and the house was dark and silent, I took the phone into the bathroom stretching the curly cord and squeezing the door shut on it.

I dialed my sister who was in school overseas.

“Please be there…please be there….”

A foreign voice answered. I asked for my sister. She came on the line. I immediately broke down in sobs, “Please can I come stay with you.”

“Of course! Yes!”

Not only was my sister willing for me to come to her she flew back to the states and took me with her.

I promised my parents I would be back in a year and go to school.

I packed everything that had any meaning to me in 2 suitcases.

I had $400 after paying for the airline ticket.

My sister held my hand in the cab to the airport.

The sun was shining.

I stopped crying then and there.

I turned to my sister, “I’m never going back.”

She hugged me. The sun was so bright. I couldn’t remember it ever shining so brightly as it did that day… and the sky was huge.