It was getting late in the summer and I hadn't heard anything more about it. I wanted to know the rules before I got my story all polished. Was there a word limit? Did it have to be in a certain format? Did I e-mail it somewhere or print it out and hand it in? So I asked. And I was told to ask my librarian for "the form." The form?...Oh no.
The parent reflection is a single page form with two and a half lines to describe an activity I did with my child, two lines to say what we learned from that activity, and two lines to say what our favorite part was. It's also a raffle, not a contest.
I was disappointed, and felt stupid for jumping the gun so much, and also for what was now almost a complete misfire of summer reading activities (as you will see.)
At least I can post it here! Enjoy!
-----
They
call the library summer reading program “Rahm's Little Readers,”
which feels like Rahm is starting them early, building up his army of
preschoolers who will later in life hand out parking tickets. Rahm
likes to put his name on stuff, like when they tore down my son’s
favorite play lot overnight and put up a sign that said, “Mayor
Rahm Emanuel's Chicago Plays!” Despite its name, the summer
reading program is supposed to be fantastic, building several aspects
of literacy and preparing kids for kindergarten.
The
librarian hands me our workbook. In addition to the requirement of
spending 500 minutes reading, the workbook is filled with
transportation themed activities. Singing, playing, talking, writing.
The
writing one has me worried, because my son is nine-months-old. At
this point, he's really into putting the alphabet refrigerator
magnets in his mouth and knocking over towers I make out of alphabet
blocks. He's still a couple developmental steps away from knowing
that letters exist.
The
librarian assures me that even little bitty babies can participate in
the summer reading program. I should just read out-loud to him
instead of him reading to himself, and we'll be all good!
My
son falls off the little kid library chair he'd climbed while I was
talking to the librarian.
He's
okay.
***
Every
other page in our workbook is a coloring page, black line art of
jungle animals going on adventures involving both literature and
transportation. There’s a page of a bird ascending to godhood while
its family looks on and sings for joy. There’s a page of elephants
reading on a boat crewed by dogs. The elephants are on the port side,
so they must be headed out—or back, since they’re elephants and
probably from India and therefore taking a reverse holiday. Then
there’s a page of a pair of monkeys in a hot air balloon with a
giraffe that may or may not try to fit in with them.
Our
first activity will be to color the balloon.
To
make things easier for my
son,
I tape the workbook to the top of a diaper box to make a flat
surface. To show how much he appreciates this and how excited he is
for this activity, he puts the uncapped pink marker in his mouth and
makes a mark across his lips and cheek that makes him look like the
Joker. He then drops the marker in favor of playing with the marker
box. I scoot the diaper
box
closer to him and put the green marker in his hand. He screams and
squirms away. I demonstrate for him, coloring the spots on the
giraffe and singing, “I’m coloring with my yellow marker!
Coloring is so much fun!” From across the room, he gives me a
look. He’s picked up my phone so he can drool
on it.
Since
he’s not interested, I fill in our reading times for the last few
days using the handy
red
marker. He suddenly develops an interest in coloring and takes the
red marker away, drawing a scribble across our time sheet.
“Do
you want to color?” I flip back to the hot air balloon page,
hopeful that I can flip faster than he can lose interest.
He
picks up the orange marker.
“You
can draw in orange.” I take off the cap and hold the marker out for
him to grab. He doesn’t take it, instead staring at my other hand,
which holds the cap. I offer it to him. He takes it, puts it in his
mouth and climbs inside the diaper box.
Later
he tears through the tape holding our workbook in place, ripping it
from the box to crumple it and slap it on the floor. By the end of
the summer, our workbook is in a state of disrepair so impressive
that I want to flash it at the other moms. “Oh, this old thing?
Yes, we read a
lot.”
***
“Pretend
to be an airplane,” the book says. “Put your arms out and fly
around!”
Okay.
“Hold your arms out like this,” I say.
He
does not want to hold his arms out.
“Out
like an airplane.”
He
presses his elbows tighter to his sides.
“See?
Mama’s an airplane.” I bounce off the sofa, and circle the room
with my arms out, making a noise more like a motor boat than a plane
engine.
He
does not want to hold his arms out like an airplane and judges my
sound effects.
I
pick him up so he’s tucked under my arm and spin around the room.
I change his altitude. His pitch. His
roll.
“Whoo! You’re an airplane!”
His
laugh is a shriek of delight.
“Oh
no, turbulence!
Chunka-chunka-chunka.”
He
giggles, his arms still folded tight against his little body.
***
“Make
paper airplanes,” the book says.
I
fold a pair of airplanes, one of red construction paper and one of
yellow.
With every fold I explain what I’ve done and that there are
different ways to fold paper airplanes, but I only remember the one.
I offer to look up some different styles for him if he really likes
it, so we can compare and contrast.
I
tell him all this even though he’s not listening. He’s found the
ream of construction paper, a rainbow of thick pages that flip with
ease. He’s thrilled. He turns a page, babbles in delight, then
adjusts himself, scooting forward to plop down closer. Closer.
Closer. Until he’s sitting on the pages.
I
tell him the names of the colors. Red, orange, purple, green, black,
blue, another purple. He’s in awe.
He
likes to watch me throw the airplanes. But not as much as he likes
the construction paper. And when I say that he likes to watch me
throw, what I mean is that he watches the movement of my arm rather
than tracking the swerve and arc of the plane in flight. He smiles
at me.
I
throw the airplane at him, which is difficult because my aim is
terrible. He smiles again when it lands next to him. He brushes it
with his fingers.
He
turns back to the construction paper.
***
Dr
Seuss’ Alphabet Book is on its last legs. It’s a board book that
lives in the living room, where it’s read and read and dropped and
read and thrown and read some more. The spine is two layers of
cardboard and one is already shredded, flapping loose from the back
cover. The stegosaurus book has already met the same fate, the
dinosaur shaped pages gathered up every night and stacked back in a
pile next to his toy box.
The
alphabet book is open, face down on the floor when he crawls to it.
He either doesn’t realize it’s upside down or doesn’t care,
because he turns the page, pressing the front cover to the back cover
with an ominous creak. It doesn’t stay open as well as it usually
does, and he frowns at it before turning a few more pages, folding
the book back like it’s a paperback at the beach.
The
spine snaps between H—“Hungry horse. Hen in hat”—and
I—“Itchy Itchy Ichabod.”
He
considers the remains. Now he has two books, which he decides is
better than one. He grabs the first half and crawls off to play with
it in the empty diaper box that he’s been using like a walker since
our first coloring attempt.
I’m
now concerned he won’t learn the alphabet.
When
he goes to bed, I fix the book's spine with packing tape.
***
The
workbook says to talk about how boats move. Given some thought, I’m
not convinced he knows what a boat is. I consider and then reject a
trip to Navy Pier. I’m not willing to take him out on the water if
we can’t turn right back around to shore when he decides he knows
enough about boats.
A
trip to 57th Street Beach, on a
day when I deem it way too hot to go to the park, solves our boat
problem. We’re not dressed for the beach. I kick off my shoes,
roll up my jeans, pull off his shorts, and he holds my fingers as we
walk towards the waves.
He pauses on the damp sand just above the water
and gives the lake a look of firm disapproval. It takes convincing
to get him to keep walking, but as soon as the first wave brushes
over his toes, he squeals, smiling a big, toothless grin that
wrinkles his nose.
It’s
hot, but the water cools the soles of our feet, and a breeze ruffles
our hair—we are the exact same shade of brunette, which grows
lighter at the same rate the longer the sun beats against it. He
sits in the shallows and lets the water rush up to his chest and
back, up and back, surprised and delighted every time. He grabs
handfuls of broken seashell and carries them as he crawls. Still and
alert, he watches a seagull like it might dart forward and attack.
He might be right about that. We’re both covered in sand and I
have to keep him from eating three different cigarette butts.
It’s
perfect.
We
move close to the rowboats that the lifeguards have ready on the
shore. There’s one already out, bobbing in the waves. I point out
to it, explaining about boats and lifeguards and
saving people.
He watches the seagull. It has gray spots.
I
decide that he now knows what a boat is.
The
next day we walk around the Point, stopping to look at the rowboats,
a motorboat, and a sailboat. His attention is stolen by a man trying
to cram too much into a trashcan. He leans out of his stroller to
watch a group that sits in a circle around an unlit campfire, three
unopened pallets of bottled water next to them, one woman talking
about prejudice, citing research and gesturing to a pamphlet. A man
sits on a bench and watches us as I talk about the motorboat. My son
stares right back at him, hardly glancing at the motorboat.
***
“He’s
doing much better turning pages,” my husband says. “He’s
gentle with the paper pages when we read in the morning.”
When
we sit together to read in the afternoon, I let him turn the pages.
He’s doing better, but he still grabs and crumples.
We’ve
just learned that llama wool is called fiber and you can knit with
it, when I see a bright red streak on the bottom of the page.
It
can’t be blood,
I
think.
But
it’s blood and it’s fresh, and I look down to see it covering my
son’s hand.
There’s
blood everywhere.
In
a panic, I wipe him up with tissue to find a paper-cut
on his thumb. It’s gushing. He protests as I hold the tissue hard
against the cut, and after counting to thirty, I pull the tissue back
to see that it’s still bleeding.
We
don’t have baby band-aids. We only have adult band-aids to wrap
around his tiny baby thumb. He protests as I wrap it, then looks at
it in dismay when I’m done. His wrapped thumb is now twice as
thick as it’s supposed to be. It’s also his left thumb, which is
the one he sucks. He tries to put it in his mouth, but can’t
figure out how.
He
protests for a half hour, sitting on the bathroom floor not sucking
his thumb while I carefully blot the pages of the book with a cotton
ball dipped in hydrogen-peroxide. When the book’s clean, I remove
the band-aid. The bleeding has stopped.
He
puts his thumb in his mouth.
***
I’m
not convinced he knows what an airplane is.
I
find a video of the Blue Angels on my phone and we watch, enraptured,
for a good long while until he makes a grab for the screen and then
bangs it against the arm of the chair.
I
decide he now knows what an airplane is.
***
At
story time, the librarian leads the toddlers in song, the mothers
singing along as the babies sit in their laps, looking confused. I
don’t understand how other babies sit in their mamas’ laps for
things like this. I checked the internet once: “Is my baby
hyperactive?” It said no. He’s a baby. Maybe there’s
something wrong with these other babies.
The
librarian sings, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your
hands.”
The
mothers sing, “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”
We’ve
been working on clapping. He does it every morning as he eats
breakfast, and he does it every afternoon as I sing along to the
radio. He has bizarrely good rhythm.
Maybe
he likes the radio better than the selection of child-appropriate
songs at story time, or maybe he just isn’t happy and refuses to
pretend that he is for other’s convenience. Either way, instead of
clapping, he shrieks, arches his back to squirm out of my lap, and
makes a B-line for the shelf behind us. He spends the rest of the
song pulling free picture books. I spend the rest of the song
re-shelving them and asking him in a whisper if he’d like me to
read one of them to him.
He
does not.
***
“We’re
not so great at the summer reading activities,” I tell my husband.
“Rahm
will be disappointed in you,” he says.
***
My
son holds the cover page of Curious
George and the Rocket
in
one of his fists and crawls across the living room to where I’m
perched on the sofa. Curious George smacks against the floor with
every forward motion. SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. Using a combination of
the sofa and my knee, he pulls up to standing. He then bends down to
retrieve Curious George, stands back up, and drops it in my lap,
upside-down and opened to the halfway point.
It’s
quite the process.
He
slaps the cover a few times and beams at me.
“Book,”
he says.
I
stare at him.
“Did
you just say ‘book’?”
He
looks down and pats the cover, muttering more to himself now than
talking to me. “Book.”
I
explode.
“That’s
great, baby! That's so good! You're so smart! You said,
“book!” I’m so proud of you! Come give me a hug! Do you want
me to read it to you?”
I
scoop him into my lap. He grins
and claps
his hands.
Love this!!
ReplyDelete