Pie: We went for the Terry Fox Walk today!
Hubby: Do you know who Terry Fox is?
Pie: He runned and runned and runned and runned, but then his neck started hurting, and he had to take medicine ... and then he died.
Bub: I think it was from drinking the medicine!
Pie: Or maybe it was because of all that running he did.
Bub: But wait. He was running so that other people wouldn't have to get sick. That's why he's a hero.
Pie: Yeah. He's our hero.
...A bit too long for a tweet, not quite long enough for a post.
I am acutely aware, sometimes, of just how much mental real estate is taken up by worry and anxiety over Bub. Before his first day of Grade One last week, I was counting down the days with equal parts excitement and dread. Pie's first day of junior kindergarten, on the other hand, snuck up on me, lost in the shuffle of her first days in her new day-care situation and my first day of classes. I actually had to remind myself last night that she would be going to kindergarten today, and I would have completely forgotten about her special apple dress if she hadn't remembered for me.
It's not entirely my fault. Friday is a silly day for a first day of school, and with Pie's first day falling a full ten days after Bub's, I just haven't been able to sustain the excitement. Those factors aside, though, the real issue here is that I know Pie is going to be fine. She's a shy girl, and in a new situation she is inclined to appear silent and morose. But she's not anxious or unhappy while in that state: she just prefers to keep a careful eye on things from the sidelines. I've never had a single complaint about her behaviour from other caregivers - she reserves her angry, controlling, bossy, and tantrum-throwing behaviour for me. She has had a year to watch her brother go off to kindergarten and she knows the drill. She is ready for this. She will be fine.
So it was almost an afterthought this morning when I snapped these few photos: 
Portrait of a four-year-old who is TOTALLY READY for junior kindergarten.
Who is that matronly woman between a concerned Bub and a momentarily clingy Pie?
Portrait of a four-year-old who has located her best friend and is TOTALLY GOING TO BE FINE.
I don't have a portrait of that matronly woman SOBBING all the way home while singing along with Madonna's "Like a Prayer" on the radio. But I'm pretty sure she was crying because she's just so happy and proud.
With university classes set to begin next week, I visited my new classroom yesterday, a soaring cathedral-like space with stained-glass windows and a balcony. For the first time in almost ten years, I will be teaching in a large lecture theatre, so I wanted to scope out the space ahead of time. I had Pie run to the back of the room to test out the acoustics, which were perfect: a four-year-old's murmur carries effortlessly. I'm hoping that will allow me to speak without a microphone - I hate using microphones almost as much as I hate PowerPoint, overhead projectors, and even whiteboards. My classroom, I noted with pleasure, comes equipped with a good old-fashioned chalkboard.
I have sound pedagogical reasons for avoiding technology in the classroom: the darkness alone has a soporific effect and although my students would love more movie clips, I have found that five minutes of video footage have the power to erase whatever impression the students' reading may have made on them. Even if the whole point of the movie clip is to show the profound alteration of meaning produced by a few apparently superficial changes, in the end, students always write about the movie on the exam, thinking they're writing about the book.
My defense of low-tech teaching is well worked-out, but the truth is, I avoid technology in the classroom because I'm afraid of it. I like the security of knowing that everything I need for my lecture is printed out in black and white, securely fastened to my clipboard. The idea of fumbling about with rewind buttons and remote controls in front of an impatient audience of 200 students is enough to make me panic. I got an email a few minutes ago letting me know that my classroom has a video-data projector and a USB port, and it's enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.
Luckily for Bub, his Grade One teacher is a bit less technophobic. On the way home from his first day of school yesterday he actually volunteered the information that the board in his class is a computer board, and when you touch it, the pictures move, and when the teacher types into the computer, the words go up on the board! Bub is enchanted. They had math class yesterday with numbers floating down the screen and the kids had to decide whether they were even or odd. When quizzed, Bub demonstrated no ability whatsoever to distinguish between even and odd numbers (and how do you even explain that concept to children who don't yet know how to multiply or divide?), but he is more excited about school than I had dreamed possible based on my own recollection of Grade One as a lot of sitting around in desks and doing work. If there is one way to get Bub interested in school, it is turning the whole thing into a giant computer.
This boy loves to learn.
I have been imagining the first day of school for months now, picturing a cool, sunny September morning, with children and parents crowded around the class lists posted in the schoolyard and Bub kitted out in his running shoes and backpack, ready for his first day. For once, it all played out exactly as I had pictured it. Bub stood at the front of the line, following his new teacher into the school without hesitation or a backward glance. After the students filed in and the doors closed behind them, Pie and I stood there for a minute in the sudden quiet, as if waiting for something else to happen. Next week, it will be Pie's turn, but for now, the two of us are rattling around the house on our own, enjoying these last few days of relaxation, but asking every so often, in a burst of curiosity, "I wonder what Bub is doing?" He has stepped into a world that is his now. I can peek into his classroom and do my best to figure out what goes on in there, but from now on, most of what I know about his world will be what he chooses to tell me.
The children stayed with their grandparents at the beach last night so that hubby and I could go out for a date. (Italian sausage ravioli followed by Inglourious Basterds, if you're interested. I recommend both.) When we returned home from the movie, almost everything felt just a little bit weird. Instead of getting an update from the babysitter and then tiptoeing to bed, we found the house in darkness. We turned on all the lights, and I kept catching myself whispering unnecessarily, the absence of sleeping children an alienating, strange condition, something that made my house just a little bit odd, almost like the Other Mother's world in Coraline. It was weird being able to talk about the movie in normal, audible tones before turning out the light. It felt strange to wake up to find curtains open in every room, beds already made.
It was not always so. When I brought Bub home from the hospital as a baby, one of the most daunting thoughts in my wound-up, sleep-deprived state was that he just wasn't ever going to go away. Day and night, the baby was always there, and I knew that even when he was old enough to sleep through the night he would still be there, breathing in the next room. I would never get a good night's sleep again. The kind of deep, unthinking sleep that had characterized my pre-baby life was gone forever, and gone with it was a certain feeling of home as a refuge from disturbance and stress. My home had turned into the epicentre of stress.
I slept well last night. But to sleep in a childless house no longer felt comfortable and safe the way it did before I had my babies. Part of me can remember a time when I was free to turn on any light in the house at eleven o'clock, when I could watch TV as loud as I wanted and sleep in late. But that's no longer a norm my children are disturbing - that seems like a weird, alien way of life. I actually set the alarm last night, but I didn't need it - I woke up to a sun-filled room at 6:56, and the deep stillness of the house felt not peaceful but empty.
Wanna hear about the dream I had last night? (That has to be the worst opening for a conversation ever. The answer is universally "no," and yet people are usually too polite to say so.)
I was out shopping when I suddenly noticed that I was about to have a baby. How lucky! I thought. I haven't had a single contraction, and the baby is crowning already! The store clerks were somewhat alarmed when I pulled off my shorts, right there in the store, and announced that the baby was coming NOW, but I was as cool as a cucumber, confident that I could deliver this baby without complications, with or without medical assistance. Some panicked person called 911 while I relaxed on the carpeted floor, wondering how many pushes it would take.
I'm all done having babies, and that is a decision I made easily, happily, with virtually no trauma or conflict. I have no desire to be pregnant again; I don't miss the baby stage. But all day today, as I've been settling fights and picking up toys, I've flashed back to the intensity of that body memory. The pain of childbirth I can't recall, but the sensation of a baby's head pressing down urgently on my cervix ... My body remembers that.
"I have to win!" Pie panted as we ran along the beach last weekend in an impromptu game of tag. "I have to win, or else I might ... lose!"
Winning and losing is a concept that dawns gradually for preschoolers, I find. Pie's first exposure to it was in our games of Dora Uno last summer. At first she was thrilled just to be playing with me, but gradually her expression started to turn sour whenever I happened to win. From there we built up some strategies - if you lose, I explained, just play again. Maybe you'll win next time. In recent months, Pie has become simultaneously more competitive and a slightly better loser: instead of sulking or refusing to play, she dives into the next round with a renewed determination to beat me.
Sore losing is like an allergic response - it doesn't flare up on one's first exposure, and each additional exposure prompts a more intense response. There is a stage in toddlerhood where games are pure activity; children are too young to understand the rules or even the object of the game, so instead of taking turns catching fish and then counting their catch to see who wins, they simply cooperate, arranging the fish into families and then taking everyone on a picnic.
Once children are able to play organized games, competitiveness begins to emerge, but it's still focused on process rather than the end result. Three-year-old soccer is a perfect demonstration of this principle. Not all the kids have grasped the concept yet: many of them are still wandering off to pick dandelions or enthusiastically kicking the ball into their own net. But even among the most competitive, the ones who consistently and skilfully score all the goals, there is no urge to keep score, no need to find out who won at the end of the game. By age five, though, the scorekeeping urge has begun to take over. "You guys are really good!" one of the parents said at Bub's last soccer game.
"Yeah," the goalie replied modestly, "the green team has all the best players."
One of the things I enjoy about Bub is his excellent sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is, perhaps, the wrong word, since it implies someone who is actually willing to participate rather than lying down in the middle of the field or gathering kids from the opposing team to show them the workings of his Ben Ten Omnitrix. But Bub has a genuine and disarming ability to rejoice in others' success. "You won!" he'll exclaim excitedly at the end of a game, adding as an afterthought, "I guess that means I lose!"
I was thus a bit surprised the other day when he was playing a game of roll-the-dice with Pie. It was Balderdash, actually, but without the cards or definitions, a simple game of moving pieces around the board to see who would reach the letter Z first. Bub won the first round and Pie, a veteran of numerous rounds of Dora Uno, cheerfully proposed a second game. When Pie won the second round, however, Bub melted down with startling rapidity and abandon.
Bub is a less experienced game-player than Pie, having until recently resisted activities that involve being told and/or shown what to do. He has yet to acquire the strategies that Pie has developed to cope with the agony of defeat. This was by no means his first experience of losing a game, however. I think what is new is his realization that the alternative to winning is losing, and that the person who loses is the loser.
All of this is developmentally normal and no cause for concern, but what I am struck by is the evidence of my own maternal naivete. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the autistic narrator explains, "I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can't tell lies."
It's a comical moment in the novel because Christopher's mother is such a cliche, crediting her son with virtues he does not really possess. This passage takes an attribute that sets Christopher apart from the norm and combines it with a maternal response that is nearly universal. What is more, readers almost universally share Christopher's mother's naivete. It doesn't matter how clearly Christopher explains his condition - readers are still willing to credit his innocence to him as righteousness.
It's something we do with our children as well, a biological imperative perhaps, an interpretive error with direct ties to the continuation of the species. We are charmed by the honesty of toddlers, even when technically we realize that they are not yet old enough to engage in deliberate deception. We delight in a two-year-old's capacity for living in the moment even though it merely reflects her inability to anticipate or conceptualize the future.
Bub has in some ways remained innocent longer than other children his age - longer, even, than Pie whose social awareness is acute. He hasn't learned yet to be jealous, to compare his possessions with those of his neighbour. He hasn't learned yet to temper his enthusiasm, to crack jokes at others' expense. He will learn these things, I know, just as he has already begun to learn the power of the words "I hate you" or "I don't want to be your friend." Like all other children, he has to learn to be worse before he can learn to be better. But in the meantime there is something shining and irresistible about his excitement when someone gives him candy - Bub hates candy, but he loves giving it to his sister. "Do you think Pie will like this?" he'll ask excitedly as he hurries over to give it to her, and I can't help admiring in him the purity of heart that so few adults are able to achieve.
