daffodils

Kodaly and how taunting helps kids sightread.

Over the long weekend I took a couple kids to the library’s used book sale. This is the first I’ve attempted, and I went for two reasons: I could get as many books as I wanted with my teaching ID and the middle boys are getting ready for a knowledge bowl tournament. It was a long, cold, dreary weather weekend and we had nothing better to do than study up. (Postscript: the kids each snagged medals, gold and silver. A success!)

Whenever I get weary of public school ways, I am consoled by the fact we read incessantly. I hope it covers a multitude. Our street smarts are definitely tuned up at public school but our k-bowl chops are home nursing books. Lu has been obsessed with Robinson Crusoe lately so I’ve had my eye out for other old goodies. He is strong where Jubal is not. They are really two halves to the same coin. Jubal memorizes the necessary trivia words (Pequod—Queequeg—Melville) but Lu internalizes the story. If you ask Lu for a brief synopsis of any book he will drone on about details till you politely distract him with a bag of potato chips. If anyone doubts, just mention the gae bolga or how he feels about Swiss Family Robinson novel versus the movie.
(Foy’s expertise is more in the mental math department and general war trivia. This doesn’t make for as good of a story.)

Anyway, I came across a Kodaly book and nabbed it because, though my music teaching days are short, I still am only sprinkle-immersed in this Hungarian-born approach to learning music.
I have tooled around on the Holy Names university folk song list but I didn’t completely understand where it came from or why it applies to anything elementary.

But the idea overall came, as I learned, from the pre-kinder work in Hungary in the early to mid 1900s. If educators could give children a brain inventory of hundreds of familiar folk tunes, they would be able to more easily transition to reading and sight reading music. Solfège—the idea of assigning a tone to a note (movable or non movable) would be accessible to kids who already chanted sing-song on the playground or jumped and clapped to rhythms.

The example that stuck out to me from this book was this:
Johnny is a sis-sy!

Ha! Right up my Kod-“alley” (can’t and won’t apologize). The method behind this music teaching madness is so basic, but the foundation relies on the simplest of refrains.
I’m not sure if the next music teacher will continue on with this sight reading training, but it’s been fun to watch the kiddos at school go from begrudgingly singing anything to playing solfège copycat games and singing in rounds. My first graders are especially great at it and are pretty good at hand signals, too.

March flowers: daffodils and grape hyacinth. There isn’t a happier pair.

I pulled out my big tub of dahlia tubers to see how they overwintered in the basement. Half had rotted; the other half were dry and peachy. I’d covered them with dry oak leaves and newspaper. I was pleasantly surprised they did ok overall. I’ve stuck the good tubers in some soil to see if I can get them to sprout early.

Some choppy thoughts—I look forward to the day when my brain isn’t overbooked and can wander more freely. We have a short Easter spring break and then one month left till school is out!

like a big puppy.

The worms are still alive.

I can’t believe they made it through another rough weather patch in the garage, but it’s true. I’m a vermiculture hero of sorts. The Rhodes’ Colossus of red wrigglers, a giant astride my bin of tiny, silent workers. Perhaps I should’ve set out to be a worm farmer.

Tomatoes, marigolds, and broccoli reaching for the sky.

Nothing has died yet in my Spring-in-the-Midwest experiment; nothing except the cress attraxa I wrongfully seeded in trays. Cress attraxa is a fancy word for grass/weeds. They were the first to sprout in my basement and the first to die there. I fancy myself a grow-florist of sorts, but now I’m convinced that bouquet “filler” is ridiculous. “Filler” is for the worry wart who needs reliability in her life. Give me spontaneity. All one really needs is a five-year-old with a mason jar.

Gretty and I are in wonderment at the surprising earliness of Spring. Two mornings ago when she popped out of bed her first question was, “Did any flowers come up?”
I assured her that flowers would eventually come up, but not necessarily on the first day of spring.

Was I wrong! Spring faithfully opened her generous arms and gave us our first daffodil bouquet. We have never felt so lucky. Our neighbor has a thousand daffodils growing in his ditch already, but we didn’t know we had our own patch.

I have a tallied list going in my mind, weighing the pros and cons of Colorado mountains versus Ozark hills and I can’t quite measure stark beauty against liveliness. Dry-and-arid is a different glory than bursting-with-life. Are terrible allergies worth a rainbow of colors and fragrances? Was hiking in canyon ruins in January and a backyard full of goatheads better than backyard tulips and ticks in March? Maybe, just maybe. And maybe not.

Always in my mind is My Antonia by Willa Cather–
There was only–spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind–rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.

Speaking of that warm, high wind: Do NOT burn around the pond on such puppy dog days of Spring. (Is a picture worth a thousand words? We’re all fine and the barn is still standing.)

a story of twins and re-bulbing.

It was one of those weeks where something bad happened, and something wonderful happened, and then an ice storm and days off school. It was life, to be exact.

One time I was at the local library with my three littlest and encountered a new mom I hadn’t seen before. She was majorly pregnant and had a pair of twins who weren’t two years old. I made conversation (because out of compassion you do so for a mother who cannot bend over to retrieve Legos, or dolls, or balls, or whatever thing that makes a two-year-old scream). It turned out she was pregnant with a second set of twins, due any moment. She was new to town. Her husband was the new manager at the CVS. I asked her if she needed anything.
Or maybe I didn’t ask–I could just tell.
She laughed when she said it, but it wasn’t a laughing matter. They’d moved into a rental home and arrived with little furniture. The only chair to speak of was a kitchen chair. She pointed to her swollen ankles,
“I’d give my left arm to have a chair where I could put up my feet,” she chuckled.
So that evening, I sent over my swivel-rock recliner and some tacos to her house.

We were friends for the temporary. She came over to my place one afternoon and we looked up labor-inducing pressure points. I rubbed her feet while the kids destroyed the play kitchen. She delivered her babies (many days hence–I am no labor whisperer) and I brought her supper when she got home from the hospital. She opened the door and joked that her husband Brian was the only one in the house not wearing diapers.
He called me after the second twins were born. He was on dad duty and one of the older twins had fallen and maybe broken her arm. Could I come watch the others while he took her to the ER? Mama was out of town picking a friend up at the airport.
I took my five-month-old baby over to their house and watched the newborn twins and the older twin for several hours. We made it past bedtime and it occurred to me how impossible it was to wash even one dish in the sink.

I think about that situation sometimes when I feel my life is in any way hard. Two sets of twins under the age of two and a half. Being pregnant with no way to rest your feet. There is so much to be grateful for in this life, the least (but not little) of which is having a place to prop your feet up after standing on them.

Which brings me to my dumb dog, the dumbest, most aggravating dog ever. Well, the problem is she is not dumb as a dog ought to be–no, she’s too smart. But calling her dumb is the meanest and most satisfying thing to call her in this situation. A real stupid head.

When it warmed back up after the snow day and the ground was thaw-ish, we pulled out the last tulip and daffodil bulbs and put them in the ground, around thirty or so remained from what I’d bought back in September.
(The least we can do is plant a few hundred flowers and hope some of them do their duty.)
Gretty’s and my dream has always been to see a flower in every direction. Colorado on the front range was exceedingly rude to tulips and bulb-flowers. It was dry and scorching as the desert.
I had the best luck with lupine and poppies in the southwest part of Colorado, but I think it was because of snowmelt dripping off the roof right into my raised bed.
A lucky, unintentional xeriscaping of sorts.

I thought we’d made it to the Shangri-La of gardening here in the midwest. I mean, any climate that has purple redbuds and sunny daffodils exploding in April is mostly a miracle to me.

The problem is, we didn’t take into consideration that our dog, Minnie, was watching our every move like we were hiding Easter eggs for her to find later when she got bored. Between the time we put them in the ground and the next morning when we went outside, Minnie dug up every bulb we planted.

What a horrid foiler of plans.
Still not on the level as no-recliner-when-pregnant-with-twins, but I’m still mad about it.
Our best hope is that she planted them in an even better spot. But I draw the line thinking she is that smart.