last day

another last day of the year. at times the year seemed interminable, but overall my little students made amazing progress and i am proud of them and will miss them. one little boy said goodbye and then, as his dad tried to drag him out of the room, launched into a detailed explanation of all the different kinds of explosions that will take place at his backyard explosion party that i will be invited to. mentos and diet coke. baking soda and vinegar. some chemical i have never heard of. the explosions will go THIS HIGH. like mount saint helens up to the SKY. this little guy entered school having daily 45 minute tantrums if he did not get the BLUE THING and is now able to say, "it's ok, i like blue a lot but sometimes i have to have other colored (fill in the blanks)." he used to avoid other kids but will now sit next to his little buddy making playdough volcanos together and say "awesome" and mean it if his friend shows him a playdough island with a tunnel through it. if i get the invitation to the explosion party for sure i will be there.

reality is hitting about my daughter going to mandarin immersion kindergarten in the near future and i am in obsessive worry overload, especially as she is going through an especially "out of her body" phase and seems pretty out of whack and disregulated. hey, maybe she is having a hard time because her mom is overly worried...could it be? i just read her brother's report card and instead of feeling proud of his second grade achievements, which include speaking, reading, and writing in mandarin, i worry about my daughter not being able to hack it.

sometimes i feel like a terrible mom.

anyway, maya has been asking me lots of questions about what is important lately:

what is more important, a house or food?

what is more important, your house or a big building?

what is more important, your kids or your car?

what is more important, how a bandaid looks or if it covers your boo-boo?

what is more important, your kids or watching tv?

what is more important, going to work or your kids?

what is more important, your pet or someone crying?

what is more important, love or eating bednight snack?

my son asks different questions: (this is yu-gi-oh talk)

who would win, explosive magician or battle fader?

who would win, volcanic doomfire or cyberdark dragon?

who would win, voltanis the adjudicator or mystic swordsman?

who would win, guardian sphinx or injection fairy lily?

there are people on the radio talking about ascending and declining civilizations. republicans fighting democrats. here in our city there is a battle going on over what kids should go to school where and why.

it takes all kinds to try and figure out this world. what is most important? how do we decide? is it getting the color blue all the time? winning the yu-gi-oh game? i like how maya is thinking and i want her in a school which encourages the search for this kind of wisdom. it feels like too much to ask lately but i want to know we are moving forward towards determining what is important for all of on our big blue marble. otherwise, what??

secret garden

friday night we went and saw bossy dudes and rainbow moods, short plays by short people, performed at the DeYoung museum, which was once again wonderful and heartwarming and amazing. i laughed, i cried. there are people out there, and they come to MY KID'S SCHOOL who are teaching narrative skills through playmaking and we are all lucky to have them. go stagewrite.

saturday we hiked up potrero hill for our tree-watering team orientation. friends of the urban forest planted nine trees along the sidewalk on coral road by starr king and they will need lots of tlc this summer to survive. so we learned about the bucket and plastic bag method of irrigation, found out where the water could be turned on, and were teamed with a partner family who will join us once every five weeks or so in our quest to keep these slender guys alive. yet another commitment but how can you say no to watering baby trees?

the kids got a peek at the learning garden which is only accessed by 3rd grade at starr king for some mysterious reason. maya and a few kindergarteners were very busy pumping water from the rainwater catchment barrel and pouring it on the plants while miles and his buddies hunched over a table in the bungalow playing yu-gi-oh. it was a beautiful day with blue sky and wind. on the way up maya picked up a dead baby bird she found on the sidewalk by the parking garage. it was very sad, but she decided that if we took care of the trees the birds could make nests in them and the babies would be safer. we are seeing desperate nests all over the place lately, eggs on stone ledges, nests on parking garages. many little birds are flying in and out of the overgrown jasmine in our backyard. one nest of eggs was savaged by a big old raccoon.

then a preschool alumni reunion in glen park followed by the fireballs' last soccer game of the season which...they won. woo hoo.

summer is almost here and i am feeling the call of rivers and big trees and even a faint call for a child-free getaway to a hot springs somewhere up north. i have been obsessively worrying about how my daughter will fare in kindergarten, and trying not to. i think she is feeling it, or feeling the end of preschool,because it has been a time of much yelling and crying and "you don't love me anymore." she is a mess and i assume it is my fault. we need some quality time in nature, or at least i do, getting away from all the arbitrariness of weekdays and weekends and school years.

heard a guy on NPR today talking about how kids who grew up in the 80s were taught that government was incompetent and or bad by watching shows such as the a-team, dukes of hazzard, and even ghostbusters. it was scary how much sense his argument made.

and today in my garden i harvested a bunch of greens, carrots, onions. i planted some tomato plants just as a big wind kicked into the afternoon. whoosh whoosh. miles was picked up and taken to the house of air. maya acted out a story where a sculpey horse and a sculpey snail were cruel to a sculpey sheep. he was perfect and they were either broken or overcooked and they would not be kind to the sheep unless he broke off his ear. which he did not. i put her to bed early and then miles returned from his party. he lay in bed next to me, this often rude little dude, and rocket cuddled between us as i read him two chapters from his surprising new book of interest, the secret garden. i have held on to this copy since childhood. miles may be growing up, and may not want to water trees, or even come play in our own backyard garden often, but i can see that this book holds him in the same way it held me a long long time ago. and that is nice.

nonsense post

c'mon, people, can't we do better than this? seeing this litter and weed infested tree pit makes me think of how there is so much potential in humans. we can all throw our trash in the street, or we can walk one more block and throw it in a trash can.

see what these nice elderly people on 23rd street have done with their house? they keep up their garden and plant pretty flowers and staple and glue tacky little plastic toys all over everything to create an effect that is actually quite lovely and entrancing for the little ones.

sorry, i am a little off tonight. my car got hit during the night a few days ago and it is getting appraised tomorrow. who knows if we will be carless soon, i do not trust the insurance folks to do the right thing, whatever the commercials say. the person who hit me left a note with their number and my insurance has taken over. i am counting down the days until summer vacation starts as work has been very meeting-heavy with some administrative shenanigans i have been unwillingly dragged into.

summer! i will emabark upon a serious exercise routine. write my speculative fiction novel. enrich all the soil in my backyard garden. find an awesome planter to put on our sidewalk to combat the trash and general blightiness of our block. spend quality time with my wonderful children, enjoying each other and not yelling "i'm going to kill you!" (yes, i actually said this the other day. maya: "kill me?..." (breaks into sobs). overcome or accept my phobias. develp myself professionally as i have no time to do this during the school year. make plans to be super-volunteer at my kids' school and try not to panic about maya entering mandarin immersion kindergarten with all of its demands and who knows who for a kindergarten teacher. catch up with my far away friends, some of whom are only 30 minutes away.

take some deep breaths. stop watching netflix. figure out some s*(^%.

nighty night. mom, enjoy the on-deck hot tub for me.

xo

slightly apocalyptic

a year ago i wrote about the day of action march to the civic center to protest budget cuts to education. it was a very high energy hopeful kind of day.

perhaps it is just my mood but the day of action today felt a little more apocalyptic. i dragged miles and maya down to the civic center. exiting bart we heard drums--there was some kind of crazy sculpture made of a bunch of huge plastic drums attached to each other in a blob shape big enough for about ten people to walk around hitting the drums. which they were doing. nearby was a super intense looking young man with no shirt, sitting on a backpack in the windy sun with his eyes squeezed shut, all his muscles clenched. i was feeling a little like i was at a grateful dead show (yes, i mistakenly did that a long time ago). as we got closer to the civic center i felt a falling sensation, a swift decrease in optimism as i realized it was a very small, quiet crowd, not the energetic swarm of thousands and thousands who seemed to represent a sure route to raising awareness of the school budget crisis last year. this was a few hundred teachers and a few kids and parents. we made our way to the front and heard some loud and impassioned speeches which i had to explain to miles. basically, can't we just keep what we have in place with the tax extensions? "tax the rich" chanted a teacher organizer from berkeley. the chief firefighter in san francisco got up and spoke about republicans who were making our world less safe, empty firehouses and slow response times to crime. as he spoke a fire blazed away in the mission district. an angry sounding older woman asked repeatedly "if not us, who? if not now, when?" it all sounded true but felt more desperate than last year. are people going to give up and let it be this way? there does not seem to be any easy way to solve the financial problems, but i guess i just don't buy that keeping taxes low to keep businesses happy and in our state is going to make things better. what is the next level of protest and rally? do we rally the teachers to strike? do we storm the state legislators? are we going to have a revolution? or do we just make do and think about fleeing to finland. i really don't know but today seemed sad.

the kids had an awful soccer practice with lots of anger and out of control boy-ness. rock throwing and sand throwing and pushing and fighting and not listening. it felt very edge of the world up there at the potrero rec center. kind of crumbling and crazy. and on the bus ride home from the civic center on the 9 little miles squeezed into the middle back seat, maya and i a few rows up. it was crowded and then some aggressive sfmta guys got on asking for transfers and passes. soon the man next to me, with a big pizza box and two kids in strollers was furious, mf, mf, what the f you asking me for, on and on and he finally flashed two fast passes at the guys. a woman near him had passed him the fast passes, miles saw it all and was confused. so the guy had snuck on with his wife and babies, outraged as he seemed that he would be asked for proof. some dudes in the front of the bus started commenting about how he should have shown them the passes in the first place and soon there was arguing and ugliness and i really had the impulse to grab my kids and get the h.e. double toothpick out of there.

anyway, i did not, and we made it home just fine. miles is at his friend's house, staying up too late watching a kung fu movie. rich is playing apocalyptic space rock in the other room. maya is dreaming about...what? in the other room. fashion. mommy and baby creatures. things that all makes sense and have patterns and logic. she tries hard to find order and meaning in her world. i need to try and do more of that. right now it seems like a lot of messed up chaos that i can't do much about.

sunday streets again

mother's day. we were lucky to catch sunday streets and were out for almost the entire day, walking from our house to 18th and valencia with rocket dog. i saw a student i had when he was four who is now a junior in high school. his mom recognized me and i felt old. he told me about some mech droids they were building in japan and was very into rock the bike (music powered by pedaling bicyclists). later another student sped by on her scooter. when she left our pre-k program at 4 she was barely speaking, today she politely introduced my to her brother and looked like a beautiful about to be 2nd grader. of course we saw many friends from the neighborhood. there were a bunch of kids from miles and maya's preschool checking out these amazing dancers (imagine video of amazing dancers here, i can't seem to post the video right now) but my favorite was a little boy who was just learning how to walk when he was in preschool, and usually used crutches to get around--breakdancing!! he was inspiring.

painting part of a mural outside the brava theater.
we saw this before sunday streets really got going. it is conceptual art? did someone just throw their recycling bin through a glass door in a rage? did someone break a glass door and someone else push the bin through to make a statement of some sort? hmm...trippy...confusing. watch out for the broken glass.
also at the beginning of sunday streets miles and maya enjoyed lying on the asphalt in the sun, until a cranky cop suggested they get up because it might scare other people to think they had been hurt. c'mon.

been a while

i got out of the blogging habit there for a while, sorry. lots going on for you and me.

here are my kids and two others we picked up walking to school yesterday. you can almost feel the cool wind and smell that dry starr king openspace grass, can't you? not bad.

i went to walgreen's today to pick up some allergy medicine, allergies are killing me lately. as soon as i walked in the door i saw this woman whose name i can never remember but who i have known for years. we worked together at cadillac head start in the tenderloin almost ten years ago, and now i see her around my son's school, where she picks up kids from the preschool and brings them to her daycare. she is an african-american woman, about 65, very nice. at cadillac there was a boy with autism who was very smart but just learning to communicate, and he would only listen to her and had to hold her hand on all the field trips. she was shaking and her eyes were bugging out and told me that the security guard had stopped her and searched her bags because he thought she stole something. her daughter was there with her and calling some head honchos at walgreen's to complain. she told me the security guard didn't like black people and she was the only black person in the store. trying to make her feel better i went up and told the guard i had known this woman for years, she took care of kids, and she was very upset. he said he had apologized ten times, but she was still mad. happy day before mother's day at 24th and potrero. at least they were making sure he would be more careful with accusations in the future.

last night my friend with the beautiful mansion hosted a teacher appreciation party for all the starr king staff. i was on the wait staff and helped bring out and clean up the amazing donated food and drink parents made. sangria, ceviche, paella, lemon squares, grilled chicken, donuts. a dad and his two friends played music and the teachers seemed pretty happy and mellow sipping sangria in the dusk looking over the city. i bonded a little with the special education teachers and once again offered up my offspring for integrated playgroups and any reverse mainstreaming which might happen. i stayed late drinking manhattans and laughing with the funny parents after the teachers had gone home and we had cleaned up. there was not much talk about the drastic budget cuts and crazy state of education funding. more about that later.

i got to talk to my best friend far away today. she called while maya and i walked home from dance class on 24th street. it was some kind of communion day with girl after girl walking by in beautiful white dresses, juxtaposed with the hipsters and tourists checking out murals. while we chatted maya took at least four pieces of gum from my pocket, removed her shoes, and tortured the dog on some concrete steps.

we are all hanging in there together in this random world.