Week 19

I think it must be week 19 by now. Or maybe 20. I don't know what happened to Week 18. It is the end of the 1st semester, this I know. But just barely. Mac and I are walking home from school on Thursday afternoon. “What do you have for homework?” I ask him, handing back his granola bar, which I have taken a bite of to stave off my sudden starvation. “No homework, tonight,” he informs me. Wonderful planning, I think. Tonight is open house and I have been wondering how we might get homework done and spend two hours at school and be in bed reasonably on time. But then he finishes with, “No school tomorrow.”
“No school??” What are you talking about, Kid?
“Nope.”
“Really?” How do I not know this? I am the most on-top-of-things Mom in the school. I know more than the room parents usually know. And I am the editor of the school’s monthly newsletter. Besides, I am all about days off. I am incredulous.

So we have a surprise day off on Friday. This after Martin Luther King Day on Monday and Mac’s stay-at-home day on Tuesday due to fever. Lucky us! It has been incredibly cold this week. Hovering near 0 degrees every day. By the time we get home from school on Thursday afternoon, after picking up Sailor, I have been out in the elements for over an hour. My face feels as if it has been dipped into an ice cube. When we get home we have just enough time to thaw our toes before heading down for an early dinner and leaving for school again to the open house. At the last minute Sailor realizes he will have to re-bundle to join us and opts to stay at home with my parents affording me a nice, leisurely "date" with Mac.

We check out the book fair in the gym and spend our $30 down to just $0.65 in change. We visit his classroom where he proudly shows me around the room I hardly recognize for its sudden neatness (I wonder where Mrs. S has stashed the monstrous pile of papers that usually teeters atop the block of 4 unused desks.) We eat cookies outside the lunchroom. We return to Mac’s classroom. We make a stop in kindergarten, which Mac resists, but then he finds a stash of Legos and I can’t get him to leave. Just for fun we make a foray into the classroom of the teacher I had hoped Mac would get this year. The desks in this classroom are smaller and it looks more like 1st grade than Mac’s classroom, which more resembles 5th grade. The teacher greets me by name. I have never so much as said hello to her and I have no idea how she knows me. I am bold. I ask her. She says she knows I am a mom who is around a lot and the kindergarten teacher showed her my own kindergarten photo last year. I think it is very odd when you find out someone knows you. You know then that this person has an opinion of you. We have a nice chat and I enjoy her classroom. Only one thing disturbs me. Our children have recently completed an alphabet book. Mac has done his using the photo holiday cards we received in December. A thru Z! Most of the children have done their books on animals. But one little girl, a child who was in Mac’s circle time class when they were both 2, has done hers on fashion. Fashion! She has used words such as Haute couture, Hérmes, diamonds, Prada, and my all-time fave: B, Black, “Women like to wear black because it is slimming.” SERIOUSLY! Her illustrations are pictures cut from trendy fashion magazines and feature such young starlets as the Olson twins (one of them, anyway), Hayden Panatierre, and the like. Perhaps this alphabet book ought to be turned in to the principal for evaluation. The child is SIX!

We hustle home in the cold and dark. Mac is not used to being out after dark and he professes not to like it much. Knowing we have nothing to get up for in the morning I give the boys some much-needed play time and we push bedtime off for awhile.

I am now on my last week of being 39. One week from today I will turn 40. I had planned to write about this for a year but it’s been too hectic. And all I really have to show for myself being almost 40 is that none of my friends (except the closest ones, of course) realized I would be 40 this year and only learned it when they received the party invitations my sister sent out a few weeks ago. Otherwise I have recently succumbed to the Mom Look and it is clear that I have other things to worry about these days than whether or not I am wearing a great sweater or the right boots or that I have styled my hair just so. No, right now I am becoming one with my furry Crocs, the shoes I not long ago proclaimed only appropriate on health care workers, gardeners, and children. Well, 39, 40, mom, whatever. It’s all the same. I will grow old this next coming decade and before we know it we will be celebrating 50 and I know I won’t look as good as Oprah or Ellen or any one of a hundred fab stars!