I feel like life with my three boys swings back and forth from the highly serious, to the hilarious quickly and often. Also, I feel that my boys zoom from emotion to emotion without looking back. They go from very sad or very angry to very happy and very content in a matter of moments. And maybe this is true for girls too. I don't know. But I remember feeling emotions pretty deeply, and taking some time to move from one to the next. Maybe I'm remembering things wrong. Even today, I have to have time to process and work things out in my mind before I can transition to the next thing or next feeling.
The past two days offer dozens of examples of this rapid, happy roller-coaster ride-- in which my boys rarely look back to see where they were a few moments ago.
William called me from school today to say he was feeling sick. He had a headache. He had mentioned having a headache before school, and I had told him to take a warm bath, eat some breakfast and see how he was feeling. He was feeling better, and went to school happily, but after a long five hours with a substitute teacher and a very noisy classroom his headache was back, apparently, and he was ready to come home. It was not the greatest, most convenient time to come get him, but it was doable.
I loaded up James who had been busy passing levels in Lexia-- his school online reading program, and we headed back to Greenwood. When we got there I overheard William laughing in the sick room with a fellow classmate. The secretaries both told me he seemed to be feeling better. He definitely did. But I had come all the way to get him, and I told him if he was sick I would take him home. I have much less of a problem with kids missing school than most mothers do, I think. I warned him though, that if he came home early, he might not be able to go to Clara's birthday party that night. He still wanted to come home. And he probably knew I would not make him miss his darling cousin's 2nd birthday party.
I loaded him up, we picked up some happy meals on the way home (they have the new Lego Batman movie toys) and as he was happily munching his chicken nuggets he asked me, "Why do people have to pay to live in houses?"
A wonderful question. I explained that home materials cost money, and that having a nice place to live in a nice neighborhood is worth a lot to people. He then followed up with multiple "what if"questions--trying to figure out a way to live in the forest, or on an island--away from people--without having to pay for a house. He asked questions about what would happen if he went into nature, and just built his own home out of wood he found, and ate the food he grew himself, and didn't use electricity, and found his own water.
As a former English teacher I had to take advantage of this teaching moment. "You know, William, there was a man almost two hundred years ago who asked the same questions. His name was Henry David Thoreau and he decided he wanted to really "live" and he made his own house with his own hands out in the woods by a pond called Walden Pond. And he grew his own food, and tried to really do things on his own. And he learned so much from it. He stayed there for almost two years, I think, and..."
"Mom?"
"Yes, William?"
"Why do they call them Otter Pops?"
"Ummmmmm. I don't know, buddy."
He was done with the philosopher and on to new questions that I really can't answer. I'll have to do some research.
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