guest blogger rebecca goes to the prom

here is a guest post from my friend rebecca. she is a very fun and energetic person with that midwesterner's sense of hospitality. she has kind of stumbled in to being a teacher in a high school special day class for "severely impaired" (the district's lovely term) students. last week she helped out with the special olympics AND volunteered to chaperone two of her students whose prom was the first date for both of them. sorry i am posting it a bit late.

thanks rebecca!!!!

p.s. she also sent a link to some cool photos

Happy Memorial Day to you all. Thanks Jamie for giving me a chance to post on her amazing blog. Here’s SF Weekend Wrap-Up – take #1.

Things were hoppin’ in San Francisco this weekend among the under 21 crowd.

Friday was the inaugural SFUSD Special Olympics Track and Field Day at Kezar Stadium. The stadium was filled with over 350 elementary, middle and high school special-ed students from 26 schools plus parents, teachers, paras and therapists of all sorts- speech, physical, occupational, and more. The students competed in a variety of running/rolling events, turbo-jav, ball toss, and long jump.

Emily’s school, FS Key, brought 5 general-ed classrooms of kids along to cheer on the inclusion kids from their rooms. They cheered their own cheers at top volume. Totally adorable.

And my own group of rambunctious high schoolers gave it their all. One threw a softball 92 feet – about the distance from 2^nd base to the catchers box. Way to get SF’s special-ed population on the map!

The weather was glum on Saturday, so Em and I tidied the house, or at least I did, while Emily danced her own version of the entire Nutcracker.

Then, it was off to the next big event of the weekend: Balboa High School’s PROM.

Two of my students had wanted to go with each other. So, I met N. (chaperoned by his mom) and K. (chaperoned by her 19 year old sis) at the In-N-Out Burger joint on Jefferson for some viddles and to shake off everyone’s nerves. They were dressed to the nines – N in a black tux with white tie and K with a lovely cantaloupe colored floor length knit frock and a pretty black jacket zipped and tied modestly to the tippy-top. When we finally made our way into the ballroom’s entrance the mom, sis, and I kept our distance of about 20 feet or so while the young coupled made their way to a table right in front of the dance floor. It was a memorable night for them I think – awkward at first but then eventually doing all the prom things dancing, nibbling appetizers, mingling with other students and teachers, dancing some more. But when the first whiff of smoke from the soon to be smoldering dance-floor hit the consciousness of the family chaperones our young pair was quickly escorted OUT OF THERE and back to their pumpkin, I mean car and sent back home around 9:40.

I had to stay a bit longer just to soak in the ambience. The students looked great. All of them! The young men now dress to match the colors of their dates’ dresses – with some combo of shirt, vest, tie, armband, and boutonniere the same color. So I was seeing guys with the de rigueur black pants with shocking pink or lime green or lemon yellow on top. Really looking sharp. As for the young ladies: strappy floor length dresses of every possible design were all the rage. Along with up-do’s of every possible creation. Sexy and elegant. A fun evening and my first prom in over 20 years. Next year I’ll have to bring a date!

Sunday in San Francisco’s hippest event had to be the annual Capsule Design Fair in Hayes Valley. The rare sunny weather beat down on shoppers, vendors, and French Bulldogs.

Tomorrow’s back to work but here’s hoping you all had an unbelievably lazy Monday.

whole mess of photos

here are some random photos from the last week or so. match the photo to caption:
A."stop attacking your baby sister my big crazy boy cousin, that is too dangerous. somebody might get hurt. what is wrong with you?"
B."mmm, poisonous treat on a stick from mexico, thanks for being weak mommy." C."hmm, is someone going to call the pants police soon?" D. "look, look, daddy, special ladies, pink, music, pink, pink,look!" E. beautiful colombian dancers
F. "my friend and i here don't know each other well and we are males, so we will take turns beating at each other with a hatchet to the drum beats at carnaval. it's fun. now we are closer buddies and want a playdate so we can beat each other some more." G. "see, sometimes we like to be near each other. sometimes." H. "brother, let's smack each other with swords. iyou are teaching me to be tough. don't listen to our smart little pacifist cousin urging us to lay down our arms."

very silly, i know. things have felt a little too serious lately. what the heck.

bye

cloudy

this
makes me feel very frustrated.

backyarding

either the world is changing fast or my view of my place in it is. about 7 years ago i started working on the yard, and went crazy digging things up and planting flowering trees and flowers, flowers, flowers. i still love flowering trees and flowers. but new people have just bought the bottom apartment and in preparation for a meeting with them i made a list of what i envision for the back yard.

(in no particular order)
--a place for kids to play, mess around, dig, make rivers, make stick structures, explore and discover
--a bird, bee, and butterfly haven
--a place to grow fruit, herbs, and vegetables, maybe with a little portable greenhouse
--a place for some environmental education, about plants, soil, compost, sustainability
--a place with sensory pleasures
--pet chickens that lay eggs for us??
--a pet turtle to roam around?
--and if it was possible a play structure of some sort for climbing, swinging, pretending

this is quite a list but wouldn't it be cool?

when i was little we lived in a suburb with a big park behind us and a tiny stream ( a storm sewer, actually) next to us. i remember hours of making dams in the stream, finding forts in the woods, picking tiny watery tasting strawberries and juicy mulberries, finding strings of frog eggs and then hundreds of tiny frogs. we moved from this house when i was about 8, so all these adventures took place before then, without my parents. were they just innocent about the wierdos and creeps in the world or were there less wierdos and creeps then? was it safer there because there are less people per square mile than in the city? i remember once finding porno photos stabbed onto tree branches in the woods. if i lived in newark delaware with miles and maya would i let them wander around alone now? right now, it is hard for me to imagine them being out of my sight. yet i want them to have some time to explore and build in nature, on their own.

so far i see that city kids spend more time with their parents. i like this. maybe we will just have to find ways to do the exploring and building in nature together. i just hope the kids don't rebel against the lack of freedom, from their parents, in their lives...maybe this is all part of the nature of our rapidly shrinking world. we need to be able to have freedom and experience nature, but also to live close to and in harmony with others.

rambling on, again. like an old hippie this time. but i'm not an old hippie, really.

goodnight,
love,
me

no title, really

we crossed the golden gate bridge two times this weekend, to sonoma through the golden hills and back. sonoma always the same, sun, trees, a pool, the horses at the farm down the road. on our early morning park trip i overhear several people discussing money and real estate. there are new ducklings in the pond.

can't help feeling a little overwhelmed by bad news. there was an article in the paper about miles' teacher. her body was found in the water and there are questions about her death, a suicide or foul play. i don't want miles to ever find out about this, so i suppose when he gets old enough to read my blog i will erase this post. while looking for the article i found a link to a photo book this teacher's friend posted. it was so surreal and awful to see pictures of her being a happy silly young person, and reading about the mystery of her death, when not long ago she had just been the friendly new teacher at miles' school making sure he and his friends were good to each other while they played basketball.

the news is just too much. the earthquake in china has me eyeing our own old walls. we drove by a house burning down. there was a six year old with a gun in his backpack in sf. oh yeah, and the world is running out of food.

driving home over the bridge i shut down a little, even after our nice weekend of swimming and playing in the sun. maya was whining and crying and the fog was all around and i gave up for a bit on cheering her up and stared out into the fog thinking about loneliness. feeling sorry for myself in a crossing the bridge mood, and it popped out, in a not good mom way, that i felt lonely. and miles said right away, "but we're here. you have us."

the people i have to keep me from being lonely are all sleeping now. it is too late to call my best friend whose call i missed again, whose son and daughter's little voices are on my answering machine. the heat wave is over. i am going to stop listening to the news for a while.

water park

it is freaking hot today. like, walk around the house in your underwear hot, compulsively buy bottles of gatorade hot, little old ladies carrying around umbrellas hot, let the kids have all the ice cream and popsicles they beg for hot. i picked the kids up and was driving home thinking i wished i lived in the suburbs right now, feeling desperate for a pool to jump in, or a river to wade into. we parked on hellish sunny potrero and went straight to the water park, where we ended up staying for over three hours. there were all kinds of folks there, naked little brown boys sticking their hands into the fountain, girls running and shrieking through the water in their bathing suits. the ice cream pusher sold out of spongebob squarepants ice cream. four preschool friends showed up and miles was in heaven making insane noises and moves in the fountains with them, pushing the giant swing, riding the giant swing, and staring at a boy with an awful plastic gun toy for a full 15 minutes. maya was a little less content,and tired from waking up at 5:30 and launching into 12 hours of whining for the last few days, but she finally relaxed and chilled out on my lap, feeding me bits of dry cereal and watching and listening as the spanish, english, and spray from the fountains washed over us. i pushed them back together almost naked in the stroller and was happy to hear a bling bling covered woman at the bus stop tell me that i had two beautiful babies.

it's so so so so hot.

just stuff

i'm writing this in the trundle bed while miles cuddles for "one more minute" by my side. he has been all over the map recently, cuddly, mature, polite, rude, aggressive, gentle. he has been asking so many questions about what happened to his teacher, and i feel so lost trying to answer them. trying to explain death and its possible causes to a young five-year-old can make an atheist wish she was a born-again christian. listening to him speak his thoughts aloud, rambling on "maybe she cut her finger and her blood all came out. maybe when you die it's like your body stops working and your bones stop working so you can't move and then you can't eat anything for a long time and then you are dead. maybe she ate a poisonous mushroom. let's stop talking about this." i feel helpless. if i say the right thing will i help my child live his life with a less crippling fear of death. what exactly is the right thing to say? we will never know what happened to his teacher, only that she died...so the questions will keep coming and i will have to try and answer them.

today a haze of travel and spending cash up and down the 24th street corridor.
first--miles and i walk to st francis where he eats an evil face pancake and we listen to sun ra and cat power
second--all of us drive up potrero hill to check out the new park at the potrero rec center. this used to be a scary sketchy place, rusty playground equipment and cat poo in the sand, overgrown trees and weeds everywhere. today we play on a beautiful new playground with views of potrero hill backyards with terraced gardens and the bay through eucalyptus trees. a little boy is holding his first birthday party there. the smell of smoky bbq. well-dressed families speaking spanish and english. we see a little friend from miles' school and he follows her around being obnoxious but she loves it.
third-the kids scream out to stop when he drive by miles' school-to-be on the way home. there is a health fair with booths promoting healthy things,a bookmobile, volunteer clown who painted a perfect ninja turtle on miles' face, a dj blasting kmel jams, boys riding bikes around an obstacle course, lots of people from the huge potrero hill projects. miles scores a man's xl t-shirt he is presently sleeping in.
fourth--we cruise up to noe valley to check out a garden on the garden tour that our friend john created. he and andy made the garden for a man they befriended who is blind. john called it a sensory garden. he is a rock sculptor and landscaper. our party crowd friends are there mixed in with the noe valley garden tour people. there is a groundcover that smells like mint when you walk on it. an amazing little stream with rocks in it to move and change currents falling onto a pond. a bridge that rocks slightly when you cross it. one of our rocker friends is due to have a baby in october...
fifth--we eat lunch at barney's and are disappointed with the hyped-up burgers and curly fries
sixth--this marathon goes on. we walk up the block to the little noe valley 24th street park. maya talks about the terrible easter bunny we saw there. miles climbs a tree and impresses a little german boy. maya shoves miles in the back and he shoves her back. time to go
seventh--rich is craving mitchell's ice cream. we get there and there are about 40 people waiting but the kids are ready to freak out so we wait. there are rainbow sprinkles all over the car.
eighth--we go home and watch our first mandarin video, with bao bei the panda. i feel like my ears are clogged. yikes.

and now the kids and rich are asleep. i'm writing all this down, why? i'm not sure. maybe this day to day minutiae will somehow counteract this heaviness that won't leave us alone lately--teachers being mysteriously dead, scary headlines about environment, politics, economics.

maybe if i write this down and someone reads it it will make me feel closer to them. knowing all these dumb little details. i don't know. too tired to make sense.

buenos noches

more experts

(read post while pinching nose shut to get true effect)

i have been dealing with over a month now of very bad sinus congestion. it's really hard to sleep, say my "m", "n" and "ng" sounds, and i am exhausted. it's hard not breathing through your nose. i've been taking claritin and sudafed which have worked in the past, but things are not getting better.

i finally went to the doctor today. she talked to me for about one minute and then said i needed to try a different allergy medicine, like zyrtec. i should stop taking sudafed, as i have been taking it for too long. then see if things improve in a few weeks. she starts to bolt out the door but i get teary eyed and say i don't think it is just allergies, and i really am having trouble functioning, so she quickly prescribes antibiotics and suggests claritin-d instead of the zyrtec. rich just went out and got the medicine--it's claritin and sudafed combined. so what the heck is this dr thinking????? help!!

on another note i am home with 2 sleeping kiddos and my stuffy sinuses. rich is at band practice and i am missing the meeting at miles' preschool with a child psychologist who is there to talk about the effects of the teacher's death. miles is asking about her a lot. as soon as we left school today he said "no one knows what happened to teacher b yet." i asked if he talked ot someone about it but he said no, no one did. he is back to wanting to fall asleep with me next to him, and i am saying sure and hoping it is okay.

the maker faire

well, we passed up a birthday party (gasp!) and went to the maker faire in san mateo. rich was wise and drove down 280 so we missed the traffic jam and breezed through the gates with our free tickets. wow! a huge giraffe robot, make your own marshmallow gun, isolate strawberry dna, see the tesla coils make lightning inside, make your own pet robot, watch battling big robots, see the devilettes and burst into tears thinking about tedd, ride a carousel or bus powered by bicyclists. listen to a musical saw. see a beautiful fountain display created by mentos and diet coke. get inspired by engineers without borders or grey water exhibits. watch your kids get confused by the steam punks. there was much to do, make, see, and hear. unfortunately we could only stay a few hours but we will be going next year. a little taste of burning man without the dust and the distance.

on another note, through park, word of mouth, and the sfkfiles blog, about 10 families of kindergarteners going to starr king mandarin have already connected and are starting to talk about playdates before schools starts and even pta meetings. i can see there is going to be some real community there if we want it. i'm also feeling intimidated by what i perceive as a group of very intelligent parents. i hope miles can keep up there and is not intimidated like his mama.

this photo of a dinosaur stomping on pretty flowers is for those of you who love cute and evil. you know who you are.

adios amigos

lady bugs and worms

it was a garden and party day. this am miles and i cruised down to flowercraft and deliberated for a while but came home with a lemon tree, a blueberry bush, some basil, strawberries, some alyssum miles picked out,a container of worms and a container of ladybugs. then off to cousin natalie's fabulous 3rd birthday, complete with a deluxe spread of food, a multi-colored ice cream cake, a real live princess who put on a show (believe it or not the boys couldn't take their eyes off her, yikes, it is starting), balloon animals and weapons, face painting with sparkles, a craft activity that engrossed the adults for hours, and a chaotic degeneration into mike hurling chocolate into the yard and kids growling and throwing balls and other objects at the adult males at the party. when we came home it was nearing dusk and time to do some planting, as well as release our critters. miles banged on our neighbor's back door and she finally came out to help us place the hundreds of ladybugs around the yard, one by one. i hope they like it here and stick around for a while

gone and gon

so sad and tragic. a young teacher at miles' school has died. how she died is a mystery, the kids were just told that she had died and that the teachers didn't know how yet, they would have to find out from the family. i don't want to speculate on what happened but miles certainly is. maybe octopus crime killed her. maybe she got burned in a fire. was she with her family when she died? where is her family? do you know how she died yet? and then, "let's stop talking about this, it's making ME feel dead."

when i talk to someone on the phone he is whispering in my ear to tell the person at the other end that his teacher died. this type of mystery is not good for anyone, especially my son. all day he just seemed wild, laughing too hard, running too fast.

we also discovered gon at the library. a wordless japanese graphic chapter book for kids. about a tiny dinosaur who lives in the present, in nature, and is in different chapters a member of an eagle family protecting the baby eagles from a bobcat, a member of a tundra wolf family happily nursing and playing with his fellow cubs until a terrible tiger comes along, at which time he must avenge the death of his mama wolf. then he is chomping down trees trying to build a mansion of wood in a stream next to an irritated beaver. amazing art, lots of biting and tail-swacking and anger and oh so therapeutic for a little boy overwhelmed by the world of humans.

what this all has to do with shall we flee the city i don't know.

goodbye