So True

 Stocking gifts from my sister-in-law:

On to the Next Thing!

We needed to make a quick Target run today, and boy was it depressing. 

The place was a mess: the holiday wrapping and decoration department ransacked, empty refrigerators where once there was egg nog, cookie dough, and peppermint mocha, and a traffic jam of carts full of items to be reshelved.

No one was making any effort to remedy the disarray. Instead all available employees seemed to be making room for the storage and organization push that follows the winter holidays, as well as preparing the Valentines Day displays. On Christmas Eve, Christmas was already over.

Until next October.

Team Player

I try to be go-along-get-along, but there are some times where it’s really hard. “You’re father and I never had to wait for a table when we went with the silver-hairs,” Heidi’s mom told us as we were trying to figure out how best to avoid the Friday night fish-fry crowd.

“What’s time was that?” Heidi asked.

“Three, three-thirty,” her mom replied.

“That’s a little too early for me,” I blurted out. “I don’t think I’ll be ready for dinner then.”

“Well I don’t want to wait in line for forty-five minutes,” Heidi’s brother said, which was fair, and we ended up pushing the fish fry to tonight.

Which has unfortunately turned into another story of inflexibility and compromise, but I’ll set it aside and get ready for my early-bird special.

Just Plain Old

“I never really went in for antiques,” Heidi’s mom told us tonight at dinner. We were making plans for tomorrow, and Heidi and I were telling her about a local craft store that had an antique place connected to it.

“I’m not really interested in true antiques or even furniture,” I explained. “To be honest, at this point, I just love seeing stuff from my childhood.”

“I don’t think of that as antique at all,” Louise shrugged.

I raised my 61-year-old eyebrows at my 77-year-old mother-in-law. “Can we agree on vintage?”

Neverending Story

Our conversation on the eight-hour road trip to Buffalo today was fun and far-ranging, as always. We talked about music, books, kids at school, politics, history, Christmas, dogs, and more, waxing both practical and philosophical. 

We were playing name that tune somewhere in Pennsylvania and Brittany Spears was singing about the only thing she wanted for Christmas (this year), when I turned to Heidi.

"You know what I think?" I asked. Without waiting for her reply, I continued. "All Hallmark Christmas movies have kind of sad endings."

"How so?" she asked in return.

"They're all about the build-up to Christmas," I explained, "but Christmas is always over when they end. It's kind of sad."

She nodded.

"I do think they're aware of it, though," I added. "I've noticed that lately a few of them end with a little one-year later scene. I think they do that on purpose to remind you that Christmas comes every year, and it will be here again before you know it."

"Could be," she agreed.

"I'm sure of it," I said, and hit scan on both the radio and the conversation. 

All I Want for Christmas

With the holiday season upon us, I asked the sixth graders this week if they would rather choose their gifts or be surprised.  In this age of fancy electronic gift lists with convenient links to the gifts of choice, I expected my concrete operationalists to be all about the choice, but I got a surprise of my own when the numbers came in 3 to 1 for being surprised.

And even though Heidi told me the research shows that people almost always imagine a good surprise and that in reality, surprises are more satisfying for the gift giver than the gift receiver, the data warmed my heart.

One for You and You and You

"Every step of this writing piece is a mini-lesson!" my co-teacher sighed this afternoon. We had just spent an hour and a half repeating a unit's worth of class instruction to the 21 individual students in the class, and we were tired and a little aggravated. Generally, it seems like that is where these sixth graders are. They were second graders when schools shut down for COVID and third graders when we started virtually the next fall, and so they were on the verge of independent learning in school but required a lot of hand-holding and supervision at home.

And so here we are: many of these kids have learned that there is no need to listen to whole-class instruction, because before too long an adult will come and explain it to them personally. And that is pretty much what we did.

So now the question is, how to break the cycle?

Stay tuned.