To Dream the Impossible Dream

Beauty in the day: the kindies were on a field trip today. At the Aquarium. This meant that they were not in the lunchroom, because they were in Seattle. At the Aquarium. This meant no kindies for 1st lunch in the lunchroom. Just 1st grade. This meant that the kindergarten class who was the Clean-up Crew this week – was gone – in Seattle. This meant that a 1st grade class (the first grade has already had their turns) would have to fill in. Well, the best way to approach this was head-on. “So, first grade class that has already had their turn, I will need you to be Clean-up Crew today, because the kindies are on a field trip.” They cheered. It was the best news they’d heard all day.
Lunch was teriyaki, and the kids were having a lot of fun reading their fortunes from their fortune cookies. One girl yelled out in excitement, “My fortune came TRUE!!” I asked her what her fortune was, and she let me read it. It read, “An exciting message will soon be delivered to you.” She was super-happy. “Wow!” I joined in enthusiastically. “What was the message?”
“We get to be Clean-Up Crew!” she exclaimed, causing the class to erupt in a new bout of cheering. Yep. True story. Tag line courtesy of the 1st grade teacher:
#kellynordstrommakingdreamscometrueeveryday

Bootylicious

Beauty in the day: it’s that recurring article that keeps showing up on FB about women with abundantly proportioned behinds and the correlation they have to the intelligence of the children that they produce. I knew, I just KNEW that someday I would find affirmation for this, and better yet, it’s apparently TRUE. I say this because I have hecka-smart kids. Not sure what the scientific correlation is to their great beauty as I don’t have an article for that, so going with my gut: it’s a God-thing.

Beauty Masks and Chivalry

Beauty in the day: he came in with a somber look, this little makes-you-think-of-the-kid-in-Jerry Maguire. He laid his glasses on the counter in pieces. “Can you fix these?” he asked with a tremulous voice. I looked.
“Actually, I believe I can,” I said encouragingly, and opened my Office Manager Drawer with a flourish. “I know it’s around here somewhere,” I mused, wondering to myself where that might be. He picked up on my musing, and said, “I really hope you can, because if you can’t, my mom is going to be so mad.”
“Nah, she won’t,” I said. “Maybe she would be if you sat at your desk and took out a little screwdriver, and purposely unscrewed your glasses, but she won’t be mad at you for this,” I explained, with the knowledge of one who knows that he couldn’t possibly have done that.
I found my kit, a tiny box that measured 1 1/2 X 1 inch, and took out the teeny, tiny screwdriver. He showed me rather triumphantly that I would not need one of the spare screws inside, since he had so deftly managed to salvage his own.
While I worked on his glasses (a feat that required patience and precision – and a tiny smear of a glue stick to hold the screw to the screwdriver), the lad took a look at a Rugrats book he had found, and we chatted about the characters. He suddenly came to a page that shocked him. “Is this,” he pointed, ” is THIS the MOM?” It was, indeed, and she had the green goo of a beauty mask all over her face. “Yes, but that’s not what she really looks like. She is wearing a beauty product on her face. Sometimes they are green. When she washes it off, her skin will look good. A lot of women do this from time to time,” I told him, reassuringly.
He looked at me then, rather quizzically, and asked the obvious: “Do YOU do this?”
“I have. It wasn’t green, but it’s still the same thing. Look! Here are your glasses – good as new!” He put them on, quite pleased. Now he regarded me thoughtfully, peering through the lenses. “You look good. You don’t need to use the mask stuff.”
– And they say chivalry is dead.

Mommy is the Best Medicine

Beauty in the day: little first-grader came to the office and said that his teacher wanted us to check on him because he was very sick. “Well, I’m coughing, and my eyes are hurting. My mom says I need to eat some bananas, and my head is getting hot like it’s going to explode.” Poor kid. I’m not sure how the bananas played into everything, but I took his temperature. 99.3. Very low-grade. Still, I had a “feeling”. I told him he could rest, and that I would call his mother. “No,” he said. “I feel good and so my mom said if I feel good I can stay in class, and I feel good (apparently despite the whole ‘hot head gonna explode thing’), so that means I can go back to my Teacher.” He continued in this vein, and so I sent him back with a note saying that he claimed to feel fine, and that he didn’t have a temperature, but that he should be sent back if he seems to take a downward turn. Then I went off to the lunchroom. When I got back, he was in the clinic, and was fast asleep, his mother on the way. When mom arrived, I told her where to sign him out, and I went to go and awaken him. It wasn’t all that easy – he had fallen into a deep sleep. “Hey sweetie, time to wake up. Mommie’s here. Let’s put your coat on,” and I began to help him with his coat. In his sleep-drunken state he turned to me and said, “I love you Mommie.”

Awwww. I love you too, Mr. 101.3 degrees. Hope you feel better in the morning.

And if that wasn’t enough, I was gifted with a Girl Scout cookie in the lunchroom. The mint kind. I’m just sayin’…

#andnowitisFriday

POTUS? Perhaps Someday

Beauty in the day: so, the soccer coach never showed for the after-school soccer fun. He didn’t show. And one 3rd grade girl was not having any of it. But this was a different kind of mutiny than I am used to. “Excuse me, Ms Nordstrom? The soccer coach has not shown, and so if you could please look up his phone number and give it to me, I’ll just be giving him a call. I need to hurry, because I have been trying to stand guard over the kids who are in the gym, and there is no supervision, so I really should get back in there.” I’m here to say that I did NOT give the coach’s number to her, but instead called the coach myself, and then proceeded to call each parent to come and pick up their child. She was now in the office with the rest of the soccer-waiters, and made timely announcements as she saw fit: “Okay, your mother and your mother, and YOUR mother have been called, and MY mother had been called TWICE. We just need to wait this out.” I wondered aloud to a parent in the office: “Why AM I doing the lunchroom? This kid could totally do it!”
#talentisallaroundus

Give Me A Break

Beauty in the day: Monday. And it felt like one, partially due to the installation of the ever-popular Daylight Savings Time. I had stacks (STACKS) on my desk – things that NEEDED to get done. But now it was time for the……..LUNCHROOM (insert a very mournful, yet sturdy rendition of the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony). On top of everything else, I wore boots, because, let’s face it, it WAS cold this morning. 36 degrees when I left home, FYI. And when one wears boots, one generally wears an appropriate outfit. Bottom line, I was hot. No, not “omigish, she’s so hot”, but, “omigish, I’m perspiring in this LUNCHROOM (cue Beethoven). It was FINALLY 3rd lunch, and I was completing a demonstration of the very fine and minuscule difference between SITTING and STANDING (these nuances can be tricky). One little girl raised her hand as I waved everyone to go back to their “#1job in the lunchroom” (eating your lunch), and I walked over. “Did you have a question?” I asked her above the din. “Yes. Do you ever get to have a break?”

“A break?” I queried, clearly confused by the question.

“Yes. Do you get to go and have lunch too? And eat something? Or do you just have to work all day?” (The kid was good. She had clearly been paying attention.)

It was either that, or a few priceless comments made by Nurse Sonja Reid as she taught a First Aid CPR course this afternoon. Totally deadpan face. She is such a pro.

To Be or Not To Be – Allergic

Beauty in the day: he came in at 7:42 am. “I’m sorry that I’m late,” he said breathlessly. I assured him that since school doesn’t start until 8:05, he was not late at all.
“Oh, I know,” (okay?) “but I just wanted to tell you that my eyes are very allergic to fog. They can’t be in the fog. They CAN be in the fog, but they are very allergic, so they can only be in the fog for a very little time. I mean, they can be in the fog even for a longer time, but they are very allergic to it, so then I stay out of the fog, because of how they are so allergic. And that’s why today,” he gestured nattily at his baseball cap, “I am wearing this hat, so that I can pull it close to my eyes to help with the allergies from the fog.” It was both a genuine get-to-know-me conversation, and a well-crafted commercial for the benefits of letting a kid wear a hat to school, at least on his part. He’s a new 1st grader from another school, so it’s understandable that he has to get us up-to-speed on these colorful little bits of “trivia” about him.