A few children were running around on the Meagher Courtyard waiting to enter the theater to see the 1st grade play on Thursday morning. I cautioned them yet again about how it feels when you fall down on the hard patio. The child seated next to me looked up and said, “It’s just like when something glass broke at home and Daddy said, ‘Are you kidding me?'” Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out with your kids, there’s the sound of breaking glass. “Are you kidding me?”
I’ve seen the looks on some of your faces these past few weeks as you drop off and pick up your children. You know this feeling. Christine A’Hearn and I looked at two boys at play just yesterday and exchanged an Amy Poehler “Really?” as we watched them begin to face off with two tree limbs three times their height. “Are you kidding me?” It’s April, surely we can relax a little bit, confident that our children have gotten the hang of it. The frustration we feel as adults is often expressed in our culture that for every step we take forward, we take two backward. What if we looked at it a little differently? When I lived in Colorado, we all used a popular saying to describe the dramatic ups and downs of weather on the high plains and foothills: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.” The currents keep shifting and it’s when you expect them NOT to shift that you set yourself up for frustration. We’re taking a lot of deep breaths lately. I’m reaching for my recorder to ‘Pied Piper’ our way out of situations in the classroom. The children are constantly shifting. They sing beautifully and they shove to be first at the door. They build amazing bridges with arches and they cry if they don’t have all four rescue vehicles. They draw and chat about a book we’ve been reading and they refuse to come to the snack table because they are cautious about the visitors in the room. They are this and they are that. They grow, they change, and I’m thinking perhaps it will always be this AND that. Might it be true for us all?
