This afternoon’s theme was “stress.”
The password was “stress.”
Today’s secret word started with the letter “s” ended with the letter “s” and had “tres” in the middle but not in the good way as in ‘tres bien’. In the stressful way like ‘tres stress’.
It started with my swimming class, with a focus on breast stroke which I now refer to as “stationary stroke” and went downhill from there.
I thought I would save myself a trip out of town to deliver the girl’s passport renewal forms in person and decided instead to mail them. It was $11 per envelope. I can still smell the savings.
After the girls arrived home from school, we decided to hit the books on Hanna’s math pretest in preparation for tomorrow’s actual test.
Hanna ran her finger over the first five questions and put a check mark beside each, never attempting to fill in the answers, just signalling to me, the hovering parent that she knew what to do and was confident she could answer those types of questions correctly.
This turned out to be false.
Hanna became fatigued after about 20 minutes of my grilling her under an interrogation lamp reflecting a series of number patterns and trapezoids while Ellie shouted out the answers and then insisted I make her up a test of her own with the same kinds of questions but totally different so she would really have to think about them. Exactly what I was hoping for, more work.
Chloe looked up from her craft and said, “Mommy are you just being nice to me and Ellie but not to Hanna?”
That turned out to be true.
I had to take a deep breath and try my luck at being patient.
Then as if possessed, Ellie started waving her fingers in the air like she was motioning for rain, inching closer and closer into my personal space and chanting, “Waterfall, waterfall, waterfall, waterfall” like some sort of coping mechanism she had learned in her grade 1 therapy group. I have no doubt she would have joined this group. Anything to get in another yearbook picture.
She told me she had to “waterfall” her teacher (yep, she verbed the word waterfall) when she was about to “lose it.” I can’t imagine anything more soothing for a teacher at her wits end than to have a seven year old dangling loose fingers in her face and chanting.
Somehow, it lightened the mood.
