Reflections and ramblings about life as an educator, writer, reader, knitter, and over-thinker. Trying to do the writing only I can do.
Today my mom and my sister visited my grandparents’ home in Philadelphia to go through and gather the final things we want to keep before saying goodbye to the apartment.
Tillie sent me some photos along with this letter my grandfather sent to my grandmother. It’s clearly from before they were married, and it makes my heart full. They married so young and were together for decades. Companions.
It’s a love you can only hope for in this life!
I love teaching, I really do, but it is certainly a draining career. The pandemic really shook things up for me in terms of realizing how the boundary between work and home was nonexistent. The past two years have been much better, but as someone with multiple interests, hobbies, and talents, I still find myself daydreaming sometimes about alternate careers…
Like copywriting. A side gig I started last spring, which I’m really quite good at and can be very lucrative. A job I could do remotely, allowing me to travel the world or live in a different time zone.
Or becoming a full-time fiber arts maker. I’ve been a knitter since middle school, and recently took up punch needle, which I love. My family friend, a fellow crafter, texted me yesterday, “We should start an Etsy shop!” And I let myself think about that possibility, too.
Or maybe I could open a bookshop/café/yarn shop with my best friend down here. Miami certainly needs one, and I loved working as a barista as a 22-year-old.
Or I could be a writer, if I finally got my act together and wrote every day.
Maybe I could go back to school and study psychiatry, become a therapist for children or young people.
What alternate careers do you daydream about?
Today I got to see my older sister, Tillie, for the first time since Thanksgiving! She’s here on a “moms getaway” weekend with 3 of her best friends, resting and relaxing by the poolside. We met for breakfast and when she told me a story about my nephew, John Henry, I knew it was perfect for today’s slice.
Apparently, my niece and nephew are obsessed with Rihanna’s halftime show (I mean, who isn’t?) and have requested for my sister and her husband to play it for them a million times.
“And he’s been drawing so much lately,” my sister told me. “Every holiday, he makes a new drawing for our front door. On Thanksgiving, it was a turkey. On Christmas, a tree. On Valentine’s Day, we cut up a bunch of hearts. And this weekend he even made a St. Patrick’s Day drawing of a leprechaun with the belt and the pot of gold and everything!”
Super cute, I know. He’s also been writing a ton, thanks to his amazing kindergarten teacher who teaches him writer’s workshop.
Recently, they’ve learned that writers label their drawings.
Here’s where Rihanna comes in.
“So he drew a picture of Rihanna in her halftime outfit,” Tillie said. “And—wait, I think I have the picture on my phone, hold on.”
And that’s when she showed me the detailed drawing — with labels! — of Rihanna in her halftime show outfit.
“He labeled her crotch!” Tillie exclaimed.
And he sure did.
“What does that say at the top?” I asked.
“Rihanna,” Tillie laughed. Ah yes — Reeona. Gotta love phonetic, inventive spelling.
“Wait — is that her baby?” I asked, pointing to the stick figure in a circle inside Rihanna’s tummy.
“Oh my god, I didn’t even notice that!”
Man, do I miss my nephew!
HOW-TO HAIKU
Taught kids to haiku
They tried traditional ones
And silly ones too
*
FUNNY KID
Reluctant writer
Manages to write the best,
Funniest haikus
*
SPRING BREAK
It’s finally break
School is out — Quick! Run away!
Ready to relax
*
SOCIAL MEDIA
Deleted TikTok
It is a total time suck
Now screen time is low.
*
HYDRATE
Remember to drink
It’s important to hydrate
Gotta love water
I have a student who tends to get sick a lot. Sometimes it’s his immune system, and sometimes it’s psychosomatic (like when I explained to the children a couple weeks ago that I was experiencing vertigo, and after recess he told me, “I think I’m having what you had!” with a hand to his head).
Today after PE, as we sat down for math, he told me he was feeling nauseous, and I could see how it was making him nervous. Thinking it was a combination of thirst from exerting himself in PE and hunger (lunch was 45 minutes away), I told him to drink some water, try going to the bathroom, and wait to see if he felt better after eating something.
On the lunch line, though, I could feel his anxiety radiating from him. I suddenly recognized myself in his fear — this weekend, overwhelmed with my own health crisis, I broke down to my therapist. Not only was I run down from the health issue itself, but I was exhausted by the anxiety I was having over it, losing actual sleep and making myself sicker with worry.
So I leaned into that.
As he waited for his food, I rubbed his back and told him how when I get sick, I feel just like him. I told him that what helped me was to talk back to my anxiety, to remind myself that yes, I didn’t feel well, but I was going to get past this. This wasn’t forever. I would feel unwell and then I would get better.
“Tell your brain, ‘I’m going to be okay. I’m safe,’” I told him.
I felt him sigh under my hand, the tension releasing.
“Do you feel like you can eat?” I asked.
“Yes,” he nodded, and made sure to get some pork in addition to the rice I had suggested.
He still felt sick afterward, and I called his mom to pick him up, but I hope I helped make that fear go away, at least.
Every month or so, on professional development Tuesdays, we have an “Ask the Expert” session with Lina Acosta Sandaal, a psychotherapist, child & adolescent development expert, and creator of Stop Parenting Alone. She is amazing and I always feel that I learn so much from a session with her.
Here are some notes I took from today’s session that really stuck with me, and which I want to keep in mind:
Note: Spoilers ahead! Do not read if you haven’t finished the season finale of “The Last of Us” or have never read Watchmen.
Tonight, my husband and I caught up with the final episode of the first season of “The Last of Us,” the excellent HBO series based on the post-apocalyptic video game of the same name. Joel and Ellie have finally reached their destination: a Fireflies-controlled hospital where doctors will attempt to create a vaccine using Ellie’s immunity. The problem? Ellie will have to be killed in order for them to attempt to produce this cure.
So Joel has a choice: potentially save all of humanity, or save Ellie, a girl he’s fallen in love with over the course of the season?
For Joel, it’s an easy choice: save Ellie, escape, lie to her about it later, even though she knows he’s lying and her heart will break for it. (Bringing us back to that moment in episode 6 when Ellie’s told it’s only the people we trust who can truly hurt us.)
But this question had me wondering. And it also reminded me of the end of the famous comic, Watchmen — Veidt plans to save humanity from nuclear war by faking an alien invasion in New York, which kills almost half of the city’s population. His plan works, but he ends up wondering if he did the right thing in the end.
I don’t have the answers, but it’s got me wondering on this Monday eve.
This morning, I told the students to gather quickly with their writer’s notebooks and a pen or pencil, because we were taking our workshop outside to the park.
“No way!” They shouted. “Yessss!”
We headed downstairs and out to the park that faces our school, congregating around one of the picnic tables so I could tell them the teaching point.
“Writers, today I want to teach you another strategy for generating ideas for poems,” I said. “Poets see the world with eyes that are alert to the smallest details.”
I pointed to the vines hanging from the tree branch above us.
“Look at how the sun is glinting off of the vines, making them look golden. Notice how they’re waving in the wind, swaying.”
“Almost like they’re dancing!” T chimed in.
“Exactly!” I smiled back. “I think I’ll write that down. I might be able to use it in a poem later.”
I pulled out a mini-anchor chart with steps for the teaching point.
“Poets, today you’ll look at the park with new eyes. You’ll write long in your notebooks about what you observe, what you notice, and what you think about what you see. All of this can be used as inspiration for later poems! Now, spread out and find a spot where you can really fine tune your poet’s eyes. Off you go!”
And they all dispersed.
For the next thirty minutes, pens scribbled in notebooks, eyes gazed around in wonder, and when we gathered again, almost everyone shared an excerpt from their writing.
On our way back to the school building, we brought back plenty of new ideas, as well as a moth and a tiny inchworm.
As the door closed behind us, one student asked, “Can we have writer’s workshop outside every day?”
If only!
I lived in Madrid for two years in my early twenties, working four days a week at an elementary school as an English language and culture assistant. That first year, I rented a room in an apartment with 5 other girls that became known to us as “el piso paraíso.”
The other girls were there on Erasmus, Europe’s study abroad program, completing a year of either their bachelor’s or master’s degrees. We were new to Madrid and excited to explore all it had to offer.
And Sundays were the best.
Usually nursing a resaca from a fun night out, we’d slowly greet the day in the kitchen with an espresso and some eggs or cereal. Then we’d shower, get dressed, and get ready for a slow walk through el Rastro, Madrid’s huge open-air flea market in the La Latina barrio.
We’d grab a tapa and a caña (a little hair of the dog always helped) from Calle Cava Baja, then stroll down the hill of the main street of the market. El Rastro had everything — from cheap sunglasses and leather belts, to vintage dresses and Levi’s jeans. We’d walk the side streets and find shops with antique trinkets and used books. A few times, we’d wander into Mercado San Fernando for lunch, some groceries, and a little bit of salsa. Other times we’d find a plaza and sit in the sun for a while.
Sun-kissed and tired after an afternoon of walking and shopping, we’d eventually meander home, where we would spend hours in the kitchen talking as we cooked and ate dinner, until finally it was time for us each to go to bed.
“Buenas noches, chicas,” my friend Giada would call out before she FaceTimed her mom and sister back home.
I’d fall into bed full and warm without a care in the world, catch the moon glinting off the window of my balcony, and drift swiftly off to sleep.
At recess on Thursday, one of my students was lingering by the jungle gym where I sat looking out at the group of boys playing soccer.
“So, _,” I asked, “what do you plan to do over your long weekend?”
He grabbed onto the bars above him and swayed a bit as he replied.
“Play basketball, probably.”
“Basketball? What happened to soccer?” He’d been newly into soccer for the past few months, so I was surprised to hear a new sport take the stage.
“Yeah, it’s all basketball now,” he said decidedly. “I mean, I’ll probably still play soccer at school and stuff, but my new focus is basketball.”
It reminded me of my own rotating carousel of hobbies, specifically with sports.
As a kid, I played soccer from 4 to about 16, when I developed a Haglund’s deformity in my right heel and couldn’t play anymore because of the pain.
After surgery and physical therapy, I was able to run, and I got into long distance running after graduating college. I ran four half marathons between 2014 and 2019, among a slew of other 5ks, 10ks, and other races. I love running, how it’s like meditation, but the high-impact of road running left me with shin splints and other aches and pains.
I have always done yoga on and off, but usually only about once or twice a week.
I love to bike.
Just before and during the pandemic, I started the Vertue Method, a 12-week, at-home, low-impact strength-training program, and was very committed to this until I’d seen each video enough times that I’d memorized all of Shona’s jokes and wanted something new.
Moving to Miami, I was inspired to pick up rollerblading again, an activity I hadn’t done since I was a kid. I took classes that helped me to feel more confident on the wheels, and which also incorporated extra fitness like squats. I was obsessed for a while.
But, some hip pain in the summer kept me from working out for many months this fall.
Finally, once I was feeling better, a friend introduced me to pilates reformer classes. I took it up with gusto.
This weekend will be a slow one, without any fast movements, as I recover from vertigo. But I smile thinking about all the sports I’ve done and can do, a variety of options I can choose from to keep my body active.
Writing With Abandon 