It was Open House night at our children’s school. We all look forward to this night, a chance to check out our kids’ classrooms, see some fine examples of all of their hard work, and for them to walk us through the projects that their classes have worked on during the first half of the year. I think it’s just as much fun for us as it is for them to spend this time together in their classroom.
At our school, there are various projects that are traditions for each grade. The First Grade tradition is a project called “Towns”. The students bring in cardboard boxes and containers, and over the course of a couple of weeks, transform them into “towns” using masking tape, paint, paper, and markers. They use their engineering and creative skills to create them, literally from nothing, and we always look forward to popping into the first grade class to check them out, even if we don’t have a first grader that year.
This year, with two boys in first grade, we were especially excited to see the towns in person. I had spent some time in the classroom helping the boys with the project, but had yet to see the finished product. It was amazing to see what each table of children had come up with, including streets, bodies of water, playgrounds, parks, banks, zoos, schools, skate parks, hospitals, and – of course – homes. Brady was quick to walk us over to his immediately upon entering the classroom door, zeroing in on a couple of structures that he had created. The first was a house, clearly with a number of drawn people standing outside.
At first glance, I could tell there were six figures outside the house. Brady was quick to grab my arm, saying, “Mom, I just realized that I forgot to include you.”
Shrugging it off and glancing closer, I responded, “But, B, there are six people outside, the same as in our family.”
“Oh, one of those is Andrew,” Brady retorted. “I just realized that I forgot to put you in there.”
“That’s okay, B,” I responded, clearly not wanting to make it about me, and knowing how hard he had worked on this project and how proud he was of the effort.
Brady must have been feeling a little guilty afterward though, because he followed up again with additional justification for my absence. “Mom, I think you’re just actually inside the house, so you really can’t see you from the outside.”
“What a great way to rationalize it”, I thought to myself, smiling back at him to reassure him that I wasn’t taking offense.
Then his face lit up, as if the final thread he was waiting for to pull it all together popped into his head. “You know – you’re probably inside doing laundry or something!”
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT.
