Poetic Interlude

I'm back to work getting all fired up about how Montessori philosophy and pedagogy can cure all educational and social ills -- and I'm still enjoying my commutes kid-free. This experience of hanging out at bus stops is bringing back memories of such a wonderful time in my life--my two plus years in Taiwan.

Two years with great friends, lots of stimulation and no car. I always learned so much hanging out at bus stops. Most of the Chinese that I can read I learned from street signs. I felt so good when I knew how to read all of my major bus stop names so that I could stop and any bus stop, check out the sign, and know that I could figure out the bus to take me where I needed to go.

Of course, traveling by bus requires a certain amount of patience, a lack of urgency really. If I had to regularly do it with my children I would most likely have to sell my soul for a car because hanging out with a two year old by the side of the road just would not be soothing.

Today I found myself as I once was--reading poetry by the side of a busy road. I have dilapidated copies of Buddhist sutras and Taoist philosophy that I used to carry around in my pockets because I knew that at some point in the day I would find myself with a small chunk of time on my hands.

Those days are past now. I've been traveling around recently listening to Sesame Street's All Platinum Hits. (It's not Emily Dickinson, but those songs are classics.)

So here's my bus stop poem:

Such Different Wants

The board floats on the river.

The board wants nothing

but it pulled from beneath

on into deeper waters.

And the elephant dwelling

on the mountain wants

a trumpet so its dying cry

can be heard by the stars.

The wakeful heron striding

through reeds at dawn wants

the god of sun and moon

to see his long skinny neck.

You must say what you want.

I want to be the man

and I am who will love you

when your hair is white.

Robert Bly

I stepped onto the bus thinking: Do I say what I want? Do I know what I want?

That'll Be Small Fries for Me

So I've been back to work for one week. This is part of two transition weeks. My kids haven't started school yet so we have worked out a patchwork of care options for them--6 days at my husband's workplace childcare center, two days with Montessori Papa, and two days with their grandmother.

As I transition from stay-at-home motherhood to earning-a-paycheck motherhood, from teaching to working more administratively, my kids are transitioning, too. It's a bit confusing right now for them. Where will they be going today? Then when they are totally discombobulated, they both will transition into their respective schools and our "normal" life will begin.

It's an uncomfortable transition. I know that I will miss teaching. I don't have a work station or computer yet (and I'm a bit of a nester). I don't like several aspects of my husband's workplace childcare (I mean really they can't get through the day without TV, gummi bears and computer games? I resort to those things with I need a break. If I'm paying someone to take care of my children, I expect them to be more resourceful.). I'm in that interesting, yet uncomfortable place, where I'm learning all the names and stories of dozens of coworkers. I miss having fun with my kids and the wiggle room that being a SAHM provides. I miss my mommy friends. And yet in all of this, I am enjoying having a bit of space. It's coming out in the weirdest way.

My workplace is near a McDonald's. I'm not a big fan of McDonald's. The food doesn't taste that great going down, for the most part, and it doesn't make me feel fine afterwards either. I try to avoid fast food restaurants on principal. However, I have stopped there for a snack everyday that I have taken the bus to work (which is most days because my husband has been using the car to take the kids to his office). I get some fries to eat on the way to the bus stop.

I know that I am doing this because it is something I would avoid in my normal mommy life, so I'm taking advantage of these two weeks of relative liberation to gorge myself on junk food. Bizarre, but still enjoyable.

Toddler Rehab

Thumper has developed some really bad habits this summer. I'm embarrassed to admit that she is asking for TV and sweets all the time. Well, not all the time, but it seems like it to me. I want her to understand that she has a Montessori Mommy and, therefore, is not going to be allowed to watch TV in large quantities--or consume ice cream for breakfast, cookies for snacks and chocolate chips. She just isn't buying it, and boy is she persistent.

Unfortunately, she is often asking for TV as soon as we walk through the family room each morning on out way to kitchen where she asks for ice cream for breakfast. During the day, when she asks for TV, I usually swoop her out to the yard where we are now being consumed almost whole by the mosquitos. That strategy is not so pleasant anymore. It's so hard when I am preparing good, nutritious food, and she repeatedly demands a cookie. It's such a contrast between my seven year old who has understood for what seems like forever that these are things that we indulge in in small quantities. I don't remember her asking for these items so frequently so I'm wondering what I've done wrong the second time around.

So, I am really looking forward to Thumper's entry into school. She will be attending a Montessori toddler program this fall. I am delighted. In my head I have started calling it "toddler rehab" because she will enter this new environment that she doesn't associate with ice cream cones or Mr. Rogers. Not only that, but her classroom will be full of activities selected just for her age group, her stage of development. The countdown has begun.

A New School

So now that the decision has been made, now comes the anxiety of the decided unknown. I am nervous because I don't know much about the school, its pedagogy or any of its staff beyond the blurbs available here and there. With both of my daughter's other schools, I had previous affiliations and/or knowledge of the schools. I knew people. I knew of people. It was reassuring. Given my training and my network, I knew that I would learn more, discern more as time passed.

Here I feel like I'm going into this nearly blind, and I don't like it. I don't like it when Montessori Papa has anxieties similar to mine because that means that they must be valid. Eeks.

Then I see my daughter handling this with such grace. I am reassured and so proud of her. She has told us all summer that she did not want to leave her friends at her Montessori school. We have reassured her that this aversion was totally normal and that, of course, she would make new friends at her new school. She has been talking to me about various aspects of the public school and asking me questions. I've been pleased to be able to talk to her about the details and to answer her questions. I was most pleased, however, to hear her talk to my mother the other day on the phone while I was driving.

My mother asked her if she was excited about her new school. Inside I cringed a bit because I was thinking that maybe "excited" was a bit too much to ask of a seven year old who is leaving the most significant friends that she has known at her young age. She responded quickly and surely, "One. I am excited but a little bit nervous because I don't know what the school will be like. And two, I don't want to leave my friends at my old school, my best friends. Also, I like that in the Montessori school that the grades are together so that you can see the second grade work and the third grade work." Well, I thought, that is just about perfect. That's about everything that she should be feeling AND she can articulate it quite clearly.

In all of my fears about testing, lack of individualization, lack of peer interaction, and on and on. I am putting my trust in her.

The Decider

Finally, finally Montessori Papa and I have come to a decision about Booster's schooling for next year--it will be public school for her. It's come down to a combination of logistics and finances. I was wavering and wavering until the last minute. I would talk myself into one school and then immediately talk myself into the other. Both schools had benefits, and both schools had huge drawbacks. Thank God I am not the President of the United States because in these kinds of tough spots I am NOT a Decider.

The need to make this decision has been around for months and months. It has been driving me--the woman who loves to organize and plan, who does these things for the fun of it--absolutely insane. Montessori Papa is much more comfortable in the land of uncertainty than I am. I've been wanting to buy school supplies for heaven sakes. Let's make the decision and get cracking.

After we had talked our options over for probably the 117th time, I finally said, "That's it. I am going to pray about this really hard tonight, and hope for divine guidance." I am pleasantly surprised to say that I think I actually received some. That night, I woke up many time, sometimes because of my toddler's night terrors and sometime thanks to who-knows-what. I would wake up at those times and the thought of one of the schools would pop into my head. When the name of our neighborhood school popped into my head, I felt very calm. When the name of our Montessori school popped into my head, I felt very anxious. Sometimes I would think about the public school, and my inner voice would whine, "But I want the Montessori school." In spite of this, I still felt calm about the public school option.

The next day, Montessori Papa was still raring to go for the Montessori option. He was ready to get up at 5:30 every morning and take Booster to school. He was ready to have no financial wiggles room for yet another year. He was ready to test our mettle in running our household like boot camp in order to make sure that the children adhered every night to an early bed time. God bless him. I love him for his willingness to do this, but I just couldn't support it.

He was, well, I think he was shocked because I had been the one who had once said that I would sell my soul to give my children a Montessori education. It turns out that that is not true. Montessori Papa was not delighted with my new point of view. After all, how could he argue with divine guidance? He would argue his points, and I would concede that each one had value and merit. We just had been over each one so many times this spring and summer, I knew them all.

I am nervous about public school. Of course, I am worried about everything that I hear in the media about public education and No Child Left Behind. I am worried about the emphasis on test scores, because when I was in grad school the public school teachers talked A LOT about them. I am nervous that she is going from a school of about 100 kids to a school of around 800 kids. I am nervous because there is so much that I just don't know. In any Montessori school, I would know the basic pedagogy and curriculum.

So I am in a place now where I just need to trust, I just need to have faith that everything will work out for the best, that my daughter's education at school will be good, but more than that that I need to trust that the life education that she receives from her family life will be more than enough to fill in any blanks.

It's a Three Day Weekend so It's Time for DIY

As I post I'm listening to Montessori Papa work on his impromptu DIY project--refinishing one of our entrance doors. He was so excited by his purchase of a sander, that he had to jump right into the project right as we returned home yesterday at around 4 p.m. What he didn't calculate into his project estimations is two very curious little girls who want to know how to do everything.

He is a true Montessori Papa, so he was trying to show Booster how to do various parts of thereal work of the project and make Thumper feel somewhat included. He did lament last night how much time it took to incorporate both of them into the task, but here he is with Booster and Thumper at his side again this morning. Alas, that's the task of parents.

I'm always so pleased when he does this, as a mother of two little girls who had to learn about doing this kind of stuff as an adult. I know that my daughters will grow up to be such confident women because they will have a host of skills from being able to make a luscious guacamole to being able to refinish a door all taught to them by their very own father.

The Cost of a Good Education

My older daughter Booster finished first grade this year, and I have already spent more on her education than I spent on getting an undergraduate degree. It's shocking for me, a frugal midwesterner, to say this, to know that, in fact, it is true.

I'm a teacher, well, a Montessori guide, as some like to call what we do, and since I took the Montessori training, I dreamed, I expected, that my children would receive a Montessori education until at least fifth or sixth grade, hopefully longer. I take early childhood education very, very seriously, telling myself and my husband that we will invest in our kids while they are young and then trust that they will have the skills necessary to make a college education happen for themselves. I do not stress about how to pay for their college education and have spent more time worrying about the color to paint my daughter's bedroom than looking into college savings plans.

So when we decided that I would take a couple of years off for daughter number two, leaving behind a good job with tuition remission benefits, we decided to keep Booster in a Montessori program, a very reasonably priced program with a great reputation and beautiful campus. At the end of two years, I am not unhappy with this decision. I feel that she has benefited tremendously from the time she has spent at her school.

Fortunately, I have accepted a teaching position for next fall at a school with an intriguing program that begins at 3 months of age. Unfortunately, the school does not offer an elementary program. It might some day, but that day is a long, long time away. (I did receive an offer from a school with an elementary program this year. Unfortunately, while I was waiting for my interview, an assistant was screaming at the primary kids to shut up in the room next door. There were some other things about the school that did not mesh with my pedagogical views but I would have been more amenable to being flexible had it not been for the screaming assistant.)

So that now leaves us with a big question to answer. How much should we invest in Booster's education given the fact that we make a humble living doing what we both do? We live in an area where the schools are considered to be good ones. We just have a strong preference for the Montessori curriculum in a general sense, and now, Booster's teacher in a specific sense.

We mull over the pros and cons every few days trying to decide which course to take. Right now we have decided to take a break from the near constant discussion of this topic (while I consider to look for sign from the divine that will point us in the right direction).