Friday Report

(An admittedly not-great picture of the quilt top I finally finished--I should have moved the chair and the lamp, I know, and if I weren't so lazy, I'd go take another picture, this time without the chair and the lamp, but I'm pretty dang lazy. Anyway, I'm glad to finally have this done, and hope it doesn't take me a year to actually finish it. Fingers crossed!)


Yesterday the first graders at Our Fine School gave a lovely music performance entitled "Welcome to Our Garden," in which they performed such lovely ditties as "Oats and Beans and Barley Grow" and "Dirt Made My Lunch." There was some modern dance thrown in, just because everyone loves to see seven-years running around in gossamer butterfly wings and surreptitiously trying to kick each others shins.

Parents were instructed to send their children to school in bright, solid-color shirts and pants--NOT jeans. And, dear reader, I did just that. I didn't forget. I didn't mess up and send Will in a brightly-colored striped shirt. I didn't send him to school in Levi's. I did as instructed. I am a Good Mother.

But a good person? Not so much. Because I spent the first five minutes of the performance checking out all the other kids on stage to see whose mom was not a Good Mom and sent her beloved to school in jeans and a Mario Kart tee shirt. I wanted to see who hadn't read the multiple memos sent home in homework folders, which slacker moms had ignored the e-mails and RSS feeds. Who, I wondered, had messed up big time?

Because for once it wasn't me.

As it turns out, all the first grade moms at Our Fine School are Good Moms. Everyone was in non-denim pants or skirts; no one wore stripes. What a disappointment!

So after I'd ascertained that no one was wearing jeans, I indulged in one of my favorite spectator sports: figuring out who the queen bees were and who they weren't. If anyone thinks that the whole Mean Girl thing doesn't start until middle school, they are mis-remembering elementary school. Forty years later, I can tell you who my first grade mean girl was: Janet. She borrowed my pencil, then claimed it was hers even though it had my brother's name inscribed on it in little gold letters. She suggested in a wordless sort of way that if I made a big deal about it, I'd be sleeping with the fishes.

Janet was pretty, but in the early elementary years, not all the queen bees are. In fact, there are some beautiful children who are very much on the outside of the in-crowd. Maybe they smell funny or pick their noses or just give off a weird vibe. They'll get their revenge later, but in first grade, they're out of luck.

I picked out two queen bees yesterday. One of them was pretty, in a sharp-featured, tiny sort of way. She had dark gold, long wavy hair, and she looked really, really mad. That's how you pick out the first grade queen bees. They're ticked off about something, and it's probably the fact that other people exist.

The other queen bee was plain, but she also looked ticked off. The girls around her simpered. They clearly didn't want to get on her bad side. Heck, I was sitting safely in the audience, and I didn't want to get on her bad side.

I spent the rest of the show gazing at my sweet Will and thinking about how cute and funny he is and how I did such a good job of combing his hair before we left for school, so why was there a piece sticking straight out in back?

***

The boys didn't have school on Monday or Tuesday. Now it's Friday, with the weekend in my sights. Usually I'm very excited about the weekend. I get to sleep in til 7:30! I'll only drive to fun places, like the library and the yarn store! But I don't feel like I've earned this weekend. I just slept in a couple of days ago. I've hardly suffered at all.

Well, we're going to a Superbowl party on Sunday. There'll be plenty of suffering then.

If you any ideas for an appetizer I could bring, let me know.