End Pieces
The second term report card came home last week with the grade of A- for the exposé that Short-pants and her schoolmates prepared, with a little help from the mothers. (Back-story on the assignment here and here.) Her part of the oral presentation, I’m told, was fairly smooth. She went first, because she’s a girl (a suggestion by one of the boys). Apparently the class had a lot of questions, though the only one she could remember is “Why are the buildings in Paris so old?” One slight glitch in the overall presentation: the end-of-the-day bell went off in the middle of the second part of the three-part presentation, so the report we worked so hard to choreograph together ended up happening in separate chunks. Short-pants said she did her very best to support the boys when they had to start again the next day.
The morning malaise that plagued Buddy-roo for several weeks in a row seems to have subsided. Or perhaps our absence (De-facto was also away on business while I was in Italy) made her heart grow fonder. This last week she’s been either quiet or cheerful as she slides into our bed for that first cuddle of the day. This morning, we even got a song: “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…” This makes the mornings much easier to take. Touch wood.
Short-pants had anything but a lonely lunch last week, as the mother-in-love and I met her outside of school at noon on Wednesday, went to a nearby café for lunch and delivered her back in time for theater class. She was thrilled. In a rare moment of lucidity, it occurred to me Buddy-roo might feel left out so I invited her to lunch the next day, just the two of us. I picked her up at school and we went for sandwiches at our favorite café, where her preferred drink (Grenadine and water, on the rocks) is served up automatically whenever she makes an entrance. Sitting on the bar stool next to me, eating her baguette and sausisson, she beamed. After lunch, when I let her loose in the courtyard at school, her friends circled around her and I heard her say, “it was my day to have lunch with my mother.”
Yet another school vacation brings us back to the country house, where the air is fresh, wood burns fast, children are wild and the internet is sporadic.
