the moral of the story? don't mess with susanna mann

wednesdays might just be my favorite afternoon of the week.  for one, we're not racing out the door to get to an activity like tennis or baseball or soccer.  (we do have choir, but that's not until 6 pm.  which makes dinner a little tricky, but that's another issue entirely.)  and it's a day that i don't volunteer at the kids' school, so it always has been at least seven hours since i've last seen them.

but the biggest reason i love wednesdays is that susanna comes home with her backpack stuffed with all the goodies she's worked on from the previous week.  we'll sit side-by-side on the family room couch and go through each and every item.  she even helps me sort them into two piles: the wow-isn't-that-great-now-let's-chuck-it pile, and the this-really-is-awesome-so-let's-keep-it pile.  (the former almost always doubles the latter in volume.)

in that latter pile are her "stories".  several times a week, her teacher gives the students a writing prompt of some sort, and susanna gets to wax poetic on the subject at hand.  there's space at the top of the paper for a drawing, and the kids are expected to do the best they can at stretching out the words to spell them themselves.  i've loved to see the progression of her "stories" from the beginning of the year until now.  i honestly have difficulty wrapping my mind around how much she has learned and grown in this relatively short amount of time. in august, she could barely write her full name.  and now she's stapling pages together because she has so  much she wants to share.

she takes great pride in reading these to me and liam (and then again to chris when he gets home), and we ooh and  aah at the appropriate times to let her know how impressive her literary talents are.  i'm thinking of making a book of some sort in june when we close the door on her kindergarten year.  the stories are often excellent documentation of what has been going on in our lives, from holidays to sleepovers to random events that she deems worth describing.

but today's was a first.  asked to write a story about the cat and the hat in honor of dr.seuss's birthday, she sort of went off on a tangent.  a surprisingly violent tangent.  is it bad to say that i laughed outloud?

click on the picture to launch the video

madness

this whole NCAA basketball pool thing was a bad, bad idea.

for years, chris and i have participated in a pool with my extended family.  there are around 30 participants, and at $5 and winner-takes-all, it can be a nice chunk of change if you're the victor.  (not that i would know anything about that.)

with liam being such an avid reader of the sports section each morning and an absolute sports freak, it seemed only natural that he would join the family pool.  add the fact that he's a numbers guy (and the bracket is chock-full of numbers), i just knew he'd be ecstatic to participate.

i should have known better.

"no thank you," he replied when i first suggested the idea.  "i don't know who will win."

"that's the whole point," i explained.  "you DON'T know.  it's incredibly hard to predict.  but that's the fun of it -- getting lucky!"

he shook his head.  "i don't think so.  i like to be right.  and i'm not sure i'll be right."

i looked at him, incredulously.  and it all sort of started to click.  he took a series of tests last month at school for academic placement, and the area where he faltered consisted of problems that challenged him to think outside the box.  when we met with the psychologist to go over the results, she told us that he had explained to her that he would rather not answer at all than to answer and be wrong.

i won't go into the long conversation we had about THAT, but apparently it had fallen on deaf ears, because here he was, presented with the opportunity to win $150 just by being lucky, and he was flat-out refusing.

so what does a mom do?  i forced him to play, of course.  i thought it would be a good experience to persuade my young son to get into gambling see what can happen when you take a chance and do something for fun. 

so he studied his blank bracket.  he made a lot of smart choices based on seeds, and he made a few emotional ones (namely, picking davidson, chris's alma mater, to go to the sweet sixteen.)  and then he made a fatal decision.  he chose missouri to win the entire thing.

and, as anyone in the world knows who follows one iota of sports, missouri became only the fifth team in the history of the NCAA tournament to go out in the first round as a #2 seed.  (interesting fact:  the first #15 seed to ever win was none other than my beloved richmond spiders, in 1991 against syracuse.  U of R is also the only team who can say that they've won as a 15th, 14th, 13th, AND 12th seed.  and i am hereby redeeming myself for my total airheaded post about football, thank you very much.)

but back to the story at hand.  after submitting his entry online, liam became a bit obsessed on the first day of the tournament, asking constantly if he could get on the website and track the standings.  he'd periodically report his ranking, excited to see his bracket in the top three at one point.  he started to ponder what he was going to do with all his winnings, despite my warnings that things can change quickly.

and then the world came to an end.  chris and i were at the club on friday night and happened to see the final minutes of the missouri game, both of us ecstatic to witness such an upset. you've always got to root for the underdog, right?  until it hit us what this meant for liam. when we picked him up from the kids room, we decided not to say anything, but somehow he already knew.  and all the way home, he wailed from the back seat, inconsolable.  (think of a three-year old temper tantrum, but in a seven-year old body.  NOT FUN.)

as we finished brushing his teeth that night, he looked up at me with bloodshot eyes with one more thought.  "maybe when i wake up tomorrow morning," he said, "the paper will say that norfolk state got charged with violations and they'll put missouri back into the tournament.  think that can happen?"

when i told him not to get his hopes up, he muttered something about this being the dumbest idea ever and how he's never going to enter a pool again, before stomping off to bed. 

sort of gives the term march MADNESS a whole new meaning.

harry

it can be funny what sticks with you over the years.  there are entire trips i don't remember taking (a side effect of my epilepsy medication, my neurologist theorizes), but then there are simple statements from a decade ago that i remember as clearly as if they were uttered yesterday.  even though some of them might seem less than earth-shattering, i figure that there's got to be some reason why they continue to occupy residence in the depths of my mind.

one of them came hurtling forth this evening as i sat with liam on the couch in the family room.  all of a sudden, i could hear my cousin allison during our annual family beach reunion probably five years ago, saying something that at the time didn't resonate with me whatsoever.  there were probably ten or so of us sitting in a circle on the beach, ranging in age from an infant susanna all the way up to my eighty-year old grandfather.  and at least half of the crowd were hunched over tomes in their laps, tuning out everything around them as they focused singularly on the same text:  the final book in the harry potter series that had just come out at midnight the day before.

and this is what my much-younger cousin alli said:  "i think i want to have kids, just so i can read harry potter with them."

for whatever reason, that statement -- as funny as it was -- has stuck with me.  i didn't really get it at the time.  but tonight, it made total sense.
 
liam and i started reading the first of the harry potter series right around the beginning of january.  and it's kind of become our thing.  chris and susanna have star wars as their mutual love; liam and i now have harry potter.  we read it every night that i'm home, and on the evenings when i'm out, liam has promised that he won't pick it up without me.  (the first few times i actually hid it from him, but by now i actually think he can't imagine reading it by himself.)

fantasy and science fiction is totally not my thing -- but it's not really liam's either.  he would much rather read an encyclopedia or almanac than most fiction, to be honest with you. but we have both become immersed in the world of wizards and witches and hogwarts.  liam will scramble to do his evening chores while i scramble to clean the kitchen after dinner, all to leave us more time for harry.  and we'll curl up either in my bed or on the couch, progressing through each chapter and plot twist before i force myself to stop.

and tonight, we neared the end.  with maybe a dozen pages left, harry defeats the evil voldemort -- the same wizard who killed harry's mother as she tried to protect him -- with a power he didn't know he had and didn't understand how he had it.  he later asks his mentor to explain.

"your mother died to save you," dumbledore replied.  "if there is one thing voldemort cannot understand, it is love.  he didn't understand that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark.  not a scar, no visible sign; to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.  it is in your very skin."

i got through the first few words before the lines began to swim on the page.  i paused, swallowed, and tried again.  liam looked up at me, startled.  "what's wrong?"

"it's just that ... well, harry's mommy loved him as much as i love you," i tried to explain through my tears.  "and you'll carry my love with you forever, just like harry does ... " i trailed off.  and then my sweet, sensitive little boy began to cry himself, before nestling even closer to me and kissing my cheek.

and i thought of my cousin's offhand comment all those years ago -- about how she couldn't wait to be a mother just so she could read harry potter her children -- and i smiled at my teary son cuddled up against me.

because now i understand.

timing is everything

"i bit into something crunchy at breakfast and it really hurt my wiggly tooth," susanna wailed as she entered our bedroom friday morning.  "i think we need to pull it out."

of course, she was talking to chris, because she knows very well by now that the word "we" and anything to do with loose teeth certainly does not involve me.

so i steered clear of the conversation ... until it occurred to me that chris was heading out of town that evening for a guys' trip to watch davidson play in their conference tournament, and wouldn't be back until tuesday.  and suddenly, panic set in.  and now it was i who wailed. 

"you have GOT to get that dadgum tooth out!"  i told him.  "i cannot deal with that while you're gone.  you know i'll wind up at the mental hospital and i don't think you want to be coming back down I-40 before the championship game to pick me up."

he muttered something about perhaps just leaving me there, but i'd exited the room by that time in order to distance myself from what was about to take place.  sure enough, the daughter-and-daddy dynamic dental duo shuffled off to the kids' bathroom, armed with a bit of dental floss.  and a few minutes later, the sounds of success could be heard.

whew.  

he shoots, he scores

i am drowning in a sea of work ... so my time at the computer these days is limited.  (HA!  what i mean to say is that i am now in front of my computer upwards of 8 hours a day helping to write the new north carolina algebra I curriculum ... so my time to spend on our blog is limited.  time on math-related websites?  no problem there.  pun intended.) 

but posts like this one are easy: upload a video from the ipad of liam playing some basketball, and i'm done.  one of susanna as cheerleader (and i use that term loosely) will surely be coming soon.

my favorite part of each clip is his reaction afterwards.  it's not just a smile; his whole body lights up with JOY.  i'm so glad i have it recorded, because this is the essence of who liam is.