Noahisms

Noah and I were eating lunch, and I offered him a clementine.  I said, "Clementine, my darling?"  He took it and looked at me funny, and that's when I realized that he's way too young to know the song.  I said, "There's a song called 'My Darling Clementine'.  It's really old.  You probably don't know it." He said he didn't, and then I remembered that he does know a version of it, so I said, "You probably know it as 'Found a Peanut'." He said, "Oh yeah, I know 'Found a Peanut'!  You mean that's not an original song?  My whole life is a lie."

After lunch, we went for a long walk, and to distract us from the monotony (and since it was fresh on our minds), we sang "Found a Peanut" with all the verses I could remember.  That got us down the street, but there was still a long way to go, so we played a game that I used to play with the kids when they were learning the alphabet and working on focus and memorization.  We also played it whenever we were waiting in line, since there were no cell phones or other electronic time-killers back then.  I call the game "Going on vacation", and it involves 26 characters going on a vacation, each bringing an alphabetically appropriate item in addition to the previous characters' items.  So today it went like this:
Amy is going on vacation, and she is bringing an apple.
Bob is going on vacation and he is bringing an apple and a banana.
Carrie is going on vacation, and she is bringing an apple, a banana, and a cantaloupe.
Etc.
By the time we got to Zoe, she was bringing an apple, a banana, a cantaloupe, a donut, an eggplant, a frankfurter, some goldfish, a hamburger, ice cream, jelly, a kiwi, a lime, a mango, nutritional yeast (because who goes on vacation without that?), an orange, popcorn, a quince, a radish, a sandwich, tofu, unseasoned ramen, vanilla, a watermelon, Xanax, yams, and some zinc.
Noah said, "I bet Amy felt pretty under-prepared bringing her one little apple when she saw all that Zoe brought."

Noah's view of women: mad, mucousy sharks

Noah: Are you mad at me?
Me: Not at all. Why?
Noah: I don't know.  I don't understand women.  They always seem mad.


A couple minutes later, I'm teaching about sharks.
M: If a shark loses a tooth, one of the teeth from a row further back in the mouth advances to replace it, and another grows in place of that one.  The back rows of shark teeth are backup teeth.
N: Just like Sarah!

Later I'm teaching about lamprey eel larvae in biology.
M: They feed by producing strands of mucus that trap food particles floating in the water.
N: Just like Sarah!

Chinese Korean

Mike: Please clean your room this morning before you start playing video games.
Noah: It got messy yesterday, because I couldn't clean because it was Chinese New Year.
M: What??
N: We learned in school that it's bad luck to clean on Chinese New Year because you might sweep out the good luck.
M: Ok, but you're not Chinese. You're Korean.
Janel: Yesterday we decided to be Chinese for the day.
N:  It's good to have cultural empathy.

Warm Winter Walk

It was foggy and fifty degrees this morning, and it's supposed to turn cold and rainy this afternoon, so I felt obligated to go for a walk.  Noah was up for it, so we took off in the fog.

 We didn't get far before I had to stop to take a picture of water droplets on tree buds.

 We thought we saw a body in the street from far away, but as we got closer, we found out it was a dead snowman.  We debated taking him home but finally decided not to.

 All the sudden we noticed two dog heads on this fence.  We were pretty sure they were fake, because they didn't make a sound and didn't move. Just stared at us.  I had to go closer to investigate, and when I did, these dogs (which were quite real) got so excited that they flung mud all over me. 

I thought these frozen footprints were interesting. 

Fun with fennel

I admit it.  Before today, I had never eaten fennel.  When I saw this beauty last night at Kroger next to a sign that said, "SALE: Organic Fennel 99cents", I couldn't resist.

 It sat on the counter all night while I pondered what to do with it.  This morning, I sliced up the root with some other vegetables and roasted them. 

There's Noah's hand grabbing the roasted vegetables.  They were a delicious breakfast.
Next, I tackled the stalks.  They looked like celery, so I cut them up and put them with our salad for lunch. They added a nice licorice-ish crunch. 

But what to do with those beautiful feathery fronds?  I took one in each hand like a pompom and danced around the kitchen, waving them.  The cats were very interested in that and decided that fennel fronds look like cat toys, so I used them as such.

They all loved playing with the fennel fronds, but when Shadow started gobbling one, I stopped to find out if they're harmful for cats.  It turns out that fennel has no harmful effects on cats.  In fact, it freshens their breath!  So I encouraged all three of them to snack on it.  They all did, but Shadow enjoyed it the most passionately.

I also saved some of the little green feathers to use as a garnish on our salad and roasted vegetables.  In the end, I really enjoyed discovering a new vegetable and used every bit of it.  Definitely 99 cents well spent.

Ravings

Last month, in the few days before my period started, I hated everyone.  Every little thing made me angry.  I knew I was wrong, but I couldn't get control over my feelings.  My period is overdue again this month, and I'm crazed again.  Not as much anger (but still too much), but overly emotional over inconsequential things.  Yesterday, for example, was a terrible day with poor Noah, who is the only student of a teacher who may or may not become a lunatic once a month.  His faults seemed magnified out of proportion, and I was feeling despondent about his future.  I cried.  I'm also confused and easily overwhelmed.  Sometimes I can't follow what the teenagers are talking about.  I feel old.

After the difficulty of the day, I still had to pick up Sarah from school and make dinner.  Sitting there outside the school waiting for Sarah, I was overcome with love for her and excited to see her.  Fifteen minutes later when she still hadn't come out and my feet were numb, those good feelings had evaporated, and when she finally came out chattering with her friends, I was annoyed.

I made a stir fry for dinner.  While chopping vegetables for a good thirty minutes, I angrily thought, "Mike and Sarah aren't even going to eat this.  If either one of them says one negative thing about it, I'm just going to walk out the door and not come back."  Mike came home.  I offered him some stir fry.  He looked at it and said, "Uh, no thanks."  I begged him to try one little tiny bird-sized portion.  He did, and he said something like, "This is actually pretty good."  I started crying right there at the table.  Relief and thankfulness and hormones I guess.

At 10:30 p.m., I ate half a bag of potato chips and too much chocolate.  I couldn't stop.

This morning I read something on facebook that started the waterworks.  I cried and cried and cried.  Pulled myself together and taught biology, Korean, and history like a normal person.  Now taking a lunch break, typing this, and crying.  Noah just came over and said, "Why are you crying?  Is it about me?"  I assured that it wasn't, and he rubbed my back and said, "Don't cry. You're depressing me."   Am I ruining him? Is this menopause?  Is it supposed to be like this? 

Family dinner

Sadly, family dinners are pretty rare anymore.  It's almost impossible to find something that everyone will eat.  Here's tonight's attempt:

 That's Sarah's plate.  Chicken cordon bleu, roasted broccoli, and a tiny dab of quinoa/kale. She at least tried the quinoa/kale but refused to eat her bird-sized portion.  She did eat the broccoli. Mike's plate looked just like hers but included more quinoa/kale, which he ate. 

 Noah's plate.  He ate roasted broccoli and so much raw broccoli and cucumbers (not pictured, because he already ate them) with hummus that he was too full to finish his quinoa and kale.

There's mine.  It was good. 

At least we were all at the table at the same time, so I guess it was a success.

Sarah's bee

 Yesterday was the big spelling bee. 

 There's Sarah, looking as nervous as I felt.

 Practice round. Easy word: "nice". 

Round 1. "Thrilling".  I was worried, because she's always had troubling remembering when to double the consonant.  She remembered the rule I taught her and spelled it correctly.

Round 2. The word was "superb". She got it. 

Round 3. The word is "tete a tete".  I think I scoffed out loud.  How is she supposed to know a French word?!  She listened to the definition, asked for a sentence, took a reasonable guess, and got dinged.  At least she went out on an impossible word instead of one that would haunt her for the rest of her days. I'm proud of her.