Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

I called the local kindergarten this morning and learned that registration is in March.  Okay, Katherine, here we go!

Erin

I’m gearing up for some massive reading alongside my students this spring.  First up is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which presents me with an interesting (and complex!) discussion opportunity: an Iowa native (with more than a whiff of the East Coast about her, and traces of an Oxford accent) lecturing a class full of Kentuckians on a novel in which a slave woman carries her child across the ice of the Ohio River in order to flee slavery (Kentucky) and run for freedom (Ohio).  Let’s hope we’re all entering into the discussion in a spirit of generosity and kindness . . .

Erin

“And the woman was crying, ‘Ugh!’ because the dinosaurs ate her.  No, she couldn’t get into the ark, so the shark ate her.”

This is what I heard through the door while I was working in the study this evening.  Katherine is apparently ‘reading’ a story to her dolls.

Erin

This week we began another Grand Experiment in the Penner household.  Sydney will be away at Ohio State to teach from Tuesday afternoon to Friday evening each week this spring.  In this, his first week on the job, he’s busy navigating the drive, new colleagues, and a massive university structure, but he made it through the first day without trouble, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about his experience as he settles in.  I’m also guessing he’ll soon find his way to the library on campus–and then it will be difficult to drag him back home.

The kids and I are easing into our new schedule, since I don’t start teaching until next week.  At the moment, I’m home with them in the mornings before they go to nursery at lunchtime; next week, they’ll have three full days of nursery each week, since I teach at 8 every weekday morning (Note to that student who requested on final evaluations this semester that I wear my hair down occasionally: not going to happen, lady!  I’m lucky if it’s washed and put up nicely!).

We’ve had a few bumps this week: both Katherine and Nathaniel had illnesses that sent me running to David and Lisa for help so that I could take the kids to the doctor, and then Nathaniel (ahh, such a  cuddler) very kindly passed his stomach bug on to me.  So I’m looking forward to a night without drama in the near future, and I’m currently subsisting off apples and graham crackers (while my rather elaborate salads from earlier in the week wait patiently in the fridge).  Meanwhile, the kids seem fine with having to walk everywhere we need to go; thank goodness they still remember our Oxford life, when everything required walking!  They also get a lot more interested in books when the weather turns cold, so we’ve had a great time piling up to read books before bedtime.  Nathaniel is slowly learning not to sit two inches in front of the book, with his head blocking the view of everyone else, so that’s made our reading time much more pleasant.

I’ve decided to double down on new things this spring: I have several writing projects due by mid-February, and I’m teaching some new, rather demanding, courses.  If I manage to pull it off, I’ll get to read Moby Dick and launch a new book project this spring.  If not, you’ll find me buried under a pile of doorstopper novels, desperately trying to keep up with my own reading assignments.

Erin

Although we don’t intend to make a habit of it, this seemed to be the year to give the kids big toys for Christmas.  We’d spent three years in England sticking to tiny forms of entertainment, always with an eye toward the size and weight of moving boxes, but Nathaniel has been desperate for a train for over a year now, and Katherine has expressed her desire for a dollhouse for almost as long.

Our little guy is now happily laying track through our living room, and Katherine is watching Sydney build her a house in the same place (it’s been our entertainment all December long).  We’re guessing that fixing up this dollhouse is going to occupy us for a long time, but Sydney’s hoping to get the basic structure done before he starts teaching in early January.  Currently, Katherine’s contenting herself with the dolls and dishes she got for Christmas.

Erin

We’d planned a major coup for Christmas: all of Sydney’s family was going to fly to Kentucky to spend the holidays with us.  We were hoping to skip the six days of driving that it would take for us to visit them and take advantage of Kentucky’s comparatively mild winters to let the Nova Scotians get outside a bit.  Unfortunately, health and weather intervened, and we found ourselves with Christmas on our own.  Although we weren’t exactly dismayed by the thought of some time at home after such a busy fall, we were very glad when David called us to say we were invited to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with his family in Ohio.

The drive up gave us the chance to visit Cincinnati’s Newport Aquarium, where we spent much of Christmas Eve.  The kids had a great time, as you can see:

After the aquarium, we finished up our drive to London, Ohio, where we were one of several families invited for supper.  Everyone was in the holiday mood, and our kids had a great time playing with familiar friends (Anna’s on the left in the picture below) and making new ones.  Given the way Nathaniel turned constantly to David’s parents when he needed something, we think he was trying to replace us, and he was very upset when it was time to go home, since it meant that he had to go with his parents and leave Anna’s grandparents behind.

Erin

Last Sunday, Katherine joined the other big kids in church in acting out the Christmas story.  She was a bit shy, but she practiced singing “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” in the car for over a week to prepare.  She also liked joining Anna in breaking out the flower-girl dresses so that they could look like angels (technically, Katherine was “Head Star”).  And she liked holding the star high so that Anna’s three brothers (the three wise men) could follow her to the stable.

Nathaniel was too wiggly to take part, but he surprised us all by regaling us with Christmas songs on our drive back from Ohio later in the week.  He’d apparently been paying attention during rehearsals!  He also wasn’t about to be out-dressed by his sister; he insisted on wearing his tuxedo (also from his uncle’s wedding this summer) to church.  Needless to say, Sydney and I were outclassed by our children, but nobody was looking at us anyway.

When the kids got home from church they played quietly by themselves for a long period of time.  It took us awhile to figure out that Nathaniel was carefully bringing Katherine every blanket in the house and she was sitting perfectly still: they were playing Mary and Joseph.  They apparently figured out that Mary’s job is to sit demurely and Joseph’s job is to take care of her.

Erin

Although we’ve had a few cold spells recently here in Kentucky, we are enjoying the fact that we can expect regular bursts of warmer weather throughout the winter, and a long, lovely fall.  These nice days have allowed Sydney to get out for some birdwatching and for the kids to visit a few new playgrounds and parks (I get out no matter what the weather may be).  The pictures below are from an outing early in November; by now even Nathaniel’s letting me put him in long pants and fuzzy sweaters, and Katherine has exhibited a love of warm tights and skirts that befuddles her too-lazy-for-skirts mother.

Sydney’s parents paid us a visit in early November, too, and we took the opportunity to take them out to Asbury’s Horse Park, which has some lovely hiking and great views of the Kentucky River Palisades.

Erin

This Thanksgiving finds us alone in our house, with Sydney and Erin taking turns lying down as we work through nasty colds.  Not quite the Thanksgiving we had been hoping for (which would be low-key family time with lots of fun cooking, holiday projects, and hikes).  Still, as we sat down to a last-minute supper of roasted sweet potato wedges with cilantro sour cream, we had things to be thankful for:

– This cold, which all four of us have had by now, is the first we’ve had all fall.  Given how frequently we were sick last year in England, we are thankful for this long stretch of good health.  We’re also thankful that it appeared when we don’t have to do a lot of teaching, since canceling class this late in the semester would cause a lot of headaches.

– We’re grateful for our new home.  Some unusually cold weather and illness have us inside a bit more, but the kids have been, overall, very good, digging out Legos and snagging spare wood pieces from Sydney’s home projects, and we’ve had space for all of this activity.  We’re going to be hosting my department’s Christmas party next week, and this house is a lot better suited to hospitality than was our little place in England!

– We’re grateful for work that we really enjoy and good childcare down the street.  I am certainly tired this late in the semester (as students have started tiring and not speaking up in class, I have to fill in the energy gap one way or another), but I am loving my work. In a recent department meeting I laughed so hard that I had tears in my eyes.  Needless to say, I work with great people.

– We’re grateful that we have lots of friends and family with whom we can spend our time.  David and Lisa are just down the street, Heidi’s within six hours, my parents are a day’s drive away, and we’ve mapped out a route to Sydney’s parents that would take us straight through our old haunts in Ithaca.  Given how many plane tickets we had to buy earlier this year, and how clear it was in England that we were On Our Own, we’re grateful for the relative proximity of family and friends now.

Erin

He’s a funny one.  When we’ve disciplined him recently he’s started attempting to retort; if you punish me, I’ll punish you, he seems to think.  His zingers have included:

“If you send me to my room . . . I’m, I’m not going to play with you.”

“If you don’t behave I’m not going to share my toys with you.”

Today he came to the kitchen to announce to me: “I’m not going to let you do any more dishes . . . and I’m going to put you on a high, high shelf.”  I think he confused me with his own toys, which get put up when he is too rough with them.

We’ve also had trouble keeping him in bed at night.  Every now and then he wants to visit us, whether shortly after we put him to bed or at 5 in the morning.  This evening he came down shortly after bedtime, and I heard, “Mom, can I come down?”  When I said no, he promptly trotted upstairs, closed the door to his room, and went to bed.

Sydney explained to me recently that, whether we’re disciplining, playing, or ignoring Nathaniel, our little guy’s always looking for a chance to strike up a chat or to negotiate–anything to catch you up in a conversation with him.  Nathaniel likes being able to interact and bargain and flirt and anything else he can get away with.  When he tries this with strangers he gets some interesting results.  Sometimes he simply announces a random fact about the surroundings: “There are balls over there to play with!” and other times he confesses that Katherine did something wrong and got in trouble for it.  We never really know what he’s going to decide is good conversation material on any given day.

Erin