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George Lucas, are you listening?  This one is for you.

Six-year-old “Jack” was regaling my husband and me with the tale of Star Wars the other day.  I found this phenomenon fascinating, as he’s had no exposure to this or any other violent tale in our house.  Upon questioning, however, he revealed the classmate who had relayed the plot to him.  “And I’ll tell you something else about it, too,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s true.  It really happened.”

Time for one of those fact versus fantasy lessons.

“Actually, no, Jack, it’s not,” I replied, a little regretful at having to break the illusion.  “It’s a fun story, I agree with that, but it’s a story from someone’s head.  It’s pretend.  It didn’t really happen.”

“Yes, yes it did,” he insisted with conviction.  “You just don’t know because it was a long time ago, even before the dinosaurs.  And it wasn’t here.  It happened a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.  That’s why you don’t know about it.” 

It’s hard to argue with that conclusion.  After all, I remember reading those very words on the big screen when I was a little kid. 

And hey, how do I know?  Maybe he and George Lucas are right after all.  Who knows what happened so long ago and so far away?

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and have fun removing all of the packaging from those toys!

And please click here to read my latest essay at InterfaithFamily.com, Giving Up My Jewish Christmas.

“Jack” recently celebrated his sixth birthday.  Somehow, I succeeded in convincing him that he didn’t need a standard birthday party this year.  (Yes, I am becoming the birthday-party grinch; see my post from “Emmie’s” anti-party birthday party earlier in the year.)  Instead, he picked a friend and a destination-activity, and we spent a day at the Boston Museum of Science doing exactly what he wanted to do.  Then I let him pick out any present he wanted in the museum’s gift shop.  Other relatives gave him exactly what he was hoping for in the way of gifts, so I now have, I think, a six-year-old child who will remember his birthday with fondness and play with his toys for months, if not longer.  In other words, his birthday had meaning.

The most touching moment of Jack’s birthday, however, came a few days prior to the actual event when he received a birthday card in the mail from one of his aunts.  He read the card out loud:

Chase some balloons,
follow some rainbows           
and make your Birthday           
extra-special! 

He then turned to me with an earnest face.  “Okay,” he said.  “How do I make that happen?”

Hmm, Jack, what do you think?  Did it work?

It’s just going to be that kind of week, I guess.  (See my post from yesterday about things you don’t want to hear from the playroom.)  This one isn’t really about parenting, but hey, it’s Christmas-related, and I just couldn’t resist sharing.

I and two-and-a-half year old “Emmie” waited for half-an-hour at the local UPS store this morning to mail two Christmas packages.  (And don’t all you parents of two-year-olds envy me already?)  My items required packaging, so after agreeing to pay an obscene amount of money to have everything boxed up and shipped, I wanted to clarify one point with the man behind the counter.

“You’ve noted that those packages should be marked ‘fragile,’ right?” 

“Ma’am,” the clerk replied in a serious tone, “marking those packages ‘fragile’ is just an invitation for people to take out their frustrations on them.” 

Alrighty then.  Glad to see the Christmas spirit is in full swing.  And to my relatives about to receive those packages, just remember: if they rattle when you get them, it’s not my fault.

As a parent, periodically a sentence or phrase wafts into your ears from the playroom that fills you with dread or flat-out fear.  Sometimes, you make the conscious decision that it’s best not to inquire at all about what you’ve heard.

Here’s a stray comment I caught as I sat in our living room yesterday:

“Okay, the fire’s out.”

Yup, sometimes it’s just better not to ask.

I’ve always been a big proponent of K-12 public education.  I attended public schools, I want my kids to go to public schools; I even spent part of my career defending public schools and working on policies to improve them.

Next year, “Jack” will be in first grade.  Though Jack now attends private kindergarten (the two-and-a-half hour day offered by our town’s public kindergarten seemed inadequate for Jack and completely useless for my purposes), my husband and I are planning for Jack to attend our local public school for first grade.  We’re lucky: our town’s schools have an excellent reputation, and our initial contact with school officials last year indicated that the elementary school might be able to work with us to accommodate Jack’s need for academic rigor above his grade level while permitting him to develop socially with his peers.

We’ve been a bit nervous about the switch, however.  Jack’s private kindergarten program centers on small classes and his teachers have been very willing to be flexible on curriculum and other matters.  This combination has suited Jack, and my husband and I have wondered if public school would work as well for him.  Will he get lost in a larger classroom where his sometimes inclination to be shy and reticent will go unnoticed by his teachers?  Will his teachers be so focused on assisting children who need extra academic help to master the basics that a child like Jack, who is already, today, reading and doing math at a second or third-grade level will simply slide through the system and be left to his own, possibly less-than-productive devices?  (While Jack’s cognitive abilities and academic potential are impressive, he has consistently demonstrated a lack of self-motivation and initiative as well as a strong antipathy for doing anything he can’t master in five minutes, leaving his overly worrisome mother to fret that he will someday use his intellect to get into really ingenious trouble.)  Jack already spends considerable time at school working on his own and away from his peers; my thought at an observation of his morning about a month ago was that while he was being intellectually challenged, he appeared very lonely (although when I asked him, he said he didn’t mind it at all).  Will this isolation be magnified in public school next year?

As it turns out, Jack needs some help now with his speech articulation.  Such assistance is coordinated here with the public-school system, and so I and my husband found ourselves meeting with a team of educators from our local elementary school earlier this week to discuss Jack.  Excellent, I thought.  We’ll get the speech issue out of the way, and then I can introduce the greater topic of what might happen to Jack in public school next year.

Despite all of my advocacy for public education over the years, I was wary about this meeting.  First, I thought, these people are going to think I’m just “blowing smoke” about my kid’s intellect.  Second, they’re going to tell me that there are too many kids in the class to treat each kid individually.  Third, though they may not say this to me, the upshot of Jack entering public school is that he’s just going to have to fit in socially on his own, and if he gets a little lost, well, it will be up to us as his parents to find a way to deal with that.

None of that was true.

Despite the busyness of their day, a team of educators sat with us for nearly an hour, discussing our son, their system and anything else we wanted to talk about.  They dismissed neither our own assessment of our son’s needs nor our position that he might require some individual attention.  Best of all, in my view, they had a ready answer for where and how Jack might fit into their school.

“Reading at the third-grade level, huh?”  They examined copies of Jack’s last report card, which we had brought with us.  “Sure, we’ve got at least several kids every year who are doing that.  We can ‘cross-group’ within grade kids who are reading or doing math that far ahead of grade-level; he’ll have a group of his peers he can work with.”

I was surprised—and thrilled.  A group of his peers?  You mean Jack won’t have to work at a table by himself while the rest of the class does something else together?  He’ll actually be able to get the academic challenge he needs while hanging out with kids his own age?

This dynamic is one my husband and I have craved for Jack, and it looks like the place to find it is in public school.

As I mentioned before, of course, we are fortunate that we live in a town where the school system has sufficient resources and is already working to address the needs of many different types of kids.  Not everyone is so lucky, and that is why as a country we need to work to improve our public schools so that every child can have this opportunity.

For these reasons, I will, as I always have, keep advocating for the improvement of public schools nationwide.

It’s comforting when reality seems to confirm one’s ideals; when the thing one has touted for years actually seems like it might live up to its promise on an individual level.  I know it’s early yet—the first day of first grade is nearly nine months away, and that’s a long time in a child’s development—and that there’s always a chance that public school won’t always be the right place for Jack (and if that’s the case, I’ll just have to hope that we have resources to do something about it).  But for right now, I’m excited for Jack’s transfer from his private-school kindergarten class to first grade in public school.

Yesterday I enjoyed one of the most hedonistic moments—thirty of them, actually—that I have experienced since I became a parent nearly six years ago.

What did I do?  In what activity did I take part?  Did it involve chocolate?  Extravagant expense?  Erotic fantasy?  No, no and no.

I read.  In a book.  A book that had no pictures and didn’t teach me about colors, numbers, shapes or anything else I knew by kindergarten.  And I did it in the middle of the day, while my daughter was home and there was no one here to take care of her but me.

Here’s how it went down: my two-and-half year old was napping, and I worked through her naptime as I usually do: laundry, dishes, emails, pick up toys and unidentifiable small objects littering the floor on which I have twisted my ankle, return phone calls (usually related to the kids), etc.  Then something weird happened: I was done.

I looked up at the clock; surely something was amiss.  Hadn’t I let “Emmie” oversleep?  But no, the clock told me that she had a half-hour left before I needed to wake her up.  (Letting Emmie oversleep at naptime will not, as in many children, keep her up until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.  It will, however, guarantee that I or my husband will be rising with her around 5:00 a.m. the next morning.) 

So I considered my options.  I could write, but thirty minutes was too small a block of time in which to accomplish anything substantive on any of the projects I’ve got going right now.  Every other necessary task I could come up with fell victim to the same analysis.  Then I thought that maybe I could rest, but that idea just seemed silly.

And then it hit me: I could read! 

As it turns out, I’ve recently determined that one way or another, I’ve got to find time to read more in order to write better.  I’ve got at least thirty books on and around my nightstand right now, so finding material is no problem.  And for a bibliophile such as myself, there is no better treat.

So I went up to my bedroom, grabbed a book, sat in a chair and read fifty-one pages.  Just like that, and just because I wanted to.  It was like riding a bicycle: I still remember how to do it. 

Now my only problem is that I want to do it again.

Please click here to read my latest article, “Finding Jewish Meaning in the Holiday Season,” published at JewishFamily.com.

That’s it: I’m using my maternal authority to call a moratorium on tummy aches.

I’ve had enough of them; I’ve heard enough about them.  (And yes, I recognize the irony of this move by someone who suffers from a chronic gastrointestinal disease.)  They have now surfaced with sufficient repetition and inconvenience that I will no longer believe my children, ever, when they tell me they have a tummy ache, unless I see one of them actually throwing up.

Take a couple of nights ago, for example.  After I blogged last week about the plan to purchase a bed for two-and-a-half year old “Emmie” and transition her from her crib to a bed, I found myself kept from the mattress store by a series of events.  (These places just aren’t open between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., which was my only free time for nearly a week.)  Finally, on Monday evening, at the end of our snow day, I served dinner early and my husband and I decided we would all take a family trip to the local mattress store to buy Emmie her bed. 

We were no more than three miles from the house when the moaning began.  “I have a tummy ache,” groaned almost six-year-old “Jack.”  “It hurts sooooooo bad.  I need a snack.”

“You do not need a snack,” I snapped at him.  “You just ate dinner.  You’re fine.” 

“Nooooo, it hurts.  I need a snack.  I need canned pears.”  (Why this is a delicacy in Jack’s mind is a mystery to all of us.)

“No you don’t.  And if you do get a snack, later, when we get home, it won’t be canned pears.  That’s not tummy-ache food.  Try toast.  Or applesauce.  And it doesn’t matter, because we’re going to buy your sister’s bed right now.”

Jack and I continued in this vein until we reached the first mattress store.  Our stop there was brief as the prices were exorbitant, and we left.  I was prepared to press on to the next store, but Jack had other plans.

“My tummy really, really hurts,” he moaned.

I looked at my husband, and we both recognized that our trip would have to be aborted.  Bitter, I pointed the car towards home.  Jack continued to complain about his tummy throughout the whole ride.

Once home, Jack insisted he needed applesauce to soothe his pains.  Furious and defeated, I caved and gave him the applesauce, which he gobbled cheerily and then tossed the clean bowl into the sink on his way to the playroom.

“What happened to that tummy ache?”  I inquired.

“It’s better now!”  Jack exclaimed.

“That’s some powerful applesauce,” my husband observed.

Score: Jack 1; Mommy 0.

You would think I’d have known better.  After all, Emmie is a pro at the tummy-ache game.  Emmie has developed a tummy ache in every third car trip practically since she could talk.  She is also particularly prone to sudden stomach pains each night when it’s time to clean up the playroom, whenever her brother has a boo-boo of any kind or when other ploys at getting attention or avoiding unwanted activity have failed.  Despite her usual wiles, she is surprisingly unsubtle in her strategy, so you would think I’d have figured these games out by now.

But her brother doesn’t use this particular technique quite so often.  So I guess when he appealed to the mommy-can’t-bear-to-see-her-baby-in-pain side of me the other night, I suspected his treachery but couldn’t quite harden my heart enough to call him a liar outright.  What if I was wrong?  (I still experience guilt-ridden flashbacks from the time he was thirteen months old and cried nonstop all night.  I nearly screamed at him in frustration and exhaustion then, after crying and begging him to go to sleep.  As a last resort, I took him to the pediatrician only to be told he had a double ear infection.  And don’t even get me started about the time I reluctantly drove my husband to the hospital after he complained of severe abdominal pains.  I didn’t believe there was a thing wrong with him until the surgeon emerged from the operating room and told me, “Your husband did indeed have a very bad appendix.”)

Those days are over now.  I’ve learned my lesson.  So kids, listen up: if you need to have a tummy ache, you better have it on your own time.  Because if it seems too convenient, I’m not buying it.  The tummy-ache days are over.

I love these northern New England days.  (Okay, so I love them now, in December.  By April I will grit my teeth and spit at each, endless repetition in the cycle.)  Yesterday we had our first real snowfall of the season—just in time for a white Hanukkah; is that a thing?  Six to eight inches of sparkling white powder covered the ground, weighed down the trees and even solidified the sky just before it drifted to its landing place.  The New England architecture of my neighborhood—efficient capes and modest colonials—showed itself as it was meant to be: topped by what looked like confectioner’s sugar and playing host to hardy, red-cheeked neighbors walking their even hardier dogs.  Kids yesterday found new ways to immerse themselves in the fresh, unsullied snow, marking the ground with their shapes as their faces barely peeked out from behind the layers of L.L. Bean and Land’s End outerwear we moms forced them to don before they burst out of their houses to play.

On a December snow day, miracles can happen.  Thus my husband emerged yesterday morning from our “messy” room in the basement—the one place in the house where if the kids spill paint or itty-bitty meltable beads on the floor, I don’t care a whit.  It is a room that just became usable a few months ago but has seen little actual use; now that winter is here, however, I’m guessing we’ll spend a lot more time there.

It was late morning, and we were all still in our pajamas.  I was taking advantage of my husband’s unusual weekday presence to complete some of the 3,284 tiny, bothersome chores every mother has on her to-do list but never gets to complete.  He was supervising the kids and broke from their activity to approach me with a solemn pronouncement: “I’m voluntarily doing a craft.  I just want this noted for the record.”

My husband hates crafts more than I do and is less competent at them than I, which, in both cases, is really saying something.  So he was only seeking the recognition that was justifiably his at this wondrous occurrence.  I’m happy to give it to him; his efforts have been noted in the record.

On a snow day, anything can happen.