Sunday, October 1, 2017

Rembemberize

Hello.

It’s been a while.

G is now 14 a freshmen in High school. HIGH SCHOOL! It’s beyond comprehension, really.  She loves soccer and TV, and is smart and kid and gets my humor.  Her hair has gone from soft blonde waves to sandy blond right curls, and she looks like a powerful goddess when she releases it from its ever present ponytail.  She is mostly kind with a perfect streak of spiky running through her, which makes her unafraid to stand up for herself. She practices this with me often, and I am trying to coach her on how to use it to advocate for herself and others.  I think it is working, because last week I got cc’d on an email from Little Guy’s English teacher telling her to provide the link to his google doc for the paper he needed to turn in, and as I read down, I saw that he had gone to her for help since our printer wasn’t working, and she took the initiative to find the teacher’s contact information, compose an email introducing herself and explaining that they could find the online submittal instructions, and the printer issue, and asking that teacher how to proceed.  I was thoroughly impressed.  I had no idea any of this had gone on at all, and contacting a teacher directly to resolve an issue takes nerve st this age.

Speaking of Little Guy, he is 11.  He stays in his room a lot, watching videos about Minecraft on his computer.  He loves Minecraft.  He plays soccer, too, but doesn’t super love it.  I always think he’s not doing his homework, but apparently he does it without my knowledge (see above).  He is smart and funny, and has a strong sense of justice and fairness, which makes teamwork challenging for him. He hates when other kids don’t work hard, or are mean to each other or him. I imagine it’s hard to be a boy of 11 when you feel so strongly.  He uses words as his charming tools, twisting them and making me laugh; his sparkly dark brown eyes give away his impishness when he face
remains straight.  He has stopped sibling fighting with G almost entirely, which is nice, but he and L still have a mostly love/occasional hate relationship even though he and L are very close.  He is in 6th grade now, and is going to the same relatively small  K-7 STEM charter school as L, which was a good reintroduction to public school for him.  I hope he likes it... he keeps his cards close to his chest, like his dad.

Little L is sunshine in a person.  She has the best laugh, and the most hilarious guffaw that suddenly will make you think you are sitting across from an 70 year old retired Bubbe from update who has relocated to Coral Springs. She is sweet and respectful, messy and creative. She is the baby through and through, happy to give of herself and happy to take from her siblings without asking.  She loves to tell jokes.  The friendliest of my 3, she finds new friends wherever she goes.  She is also very  sentimental, a collector of things and memories.  She likes to keep in touch with people from preschool, and babysitting, and camps, and down the road. She holds my memories for me,
which is good, because I seriously have a hard time accessing them.

Which takes me to remeberizing.  It’s a word that Little Guy came up with one day a few years back, when he was trying to use a $5 word in a $2 sentence, and smashed remember and memorize together      instead.  Some people can remember the smell of thier 4 year old’s hair, or the sound of thier baby’s laugh, or the way thier 9 year old used to set thier jaw JUST SO when she was mad. I have trouble with this.  I don’t know why, as I think I’m pretty smart, and can remember a treasure trove of trivial facts from random sources, so why can’t I access the memories of my kids?  I would love some help with this, a book or an article, a psychologist or a psychic,  whatever works.  I preserve my memories with photographs, which freeze time for me, which helps, but I would like to be able to relive things in my brain sometimes, too.  It makes me unbelievably sad that I can’t. So, if you have any suggestions let me know!

thanks!

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