'Oh-kay'

The kids are lined up at tables in the hallway this afternoon—not because of a basketball game but because the gym is being used for election polling. (Ours is at a school a block away. I voted for Obama.) I walk up and down the rows before I see Chloe nestled like a bear cub among a den of teachers.

“Hi, sweetie!” I say. Seeing her with the teachers instead of her friends, I immediately fear she had relapsed over T.J. She turns around and melts instantly. “I feel sick, daddy,” she says. I scoop her up from the picnic table. She buries her face in my shoulder and begins weeping. She is indeed flush. I tell Mr. Jones he should never hesitate to call me, and tell Chloe she can always ask Mr. Jones to call me if she wants to come home early. And I instantly feel guilty for waiting until 5:00 to get her.

She gets so fragile! She does whatever you tell her. Buttons up. Puts on her matching hat and gloves. Holds your hand. Steps gingerly on the icy sidewalks and steps. “I don’t want to go to Scrabble today,” she says, climbing into the car. “I’m cold.” “I want to go home.” She bursts into tears again. “We can watch some TV when we get home,” I promise. “Oh-kay,” she sighs.

We get home. We carefully navigate the steps. She tries for a moment but can’t muster the strength even to open the front gate. She can’t untie her bright red Chuck Taylors. As I do it, I notice that her pant legs are wet. “Let’s go up and put on some dry pants,” I say. “I want new socks, too,” she replies. I suggest her red long johns under a pair of pants for warmth. She demurs. “I want to put on my fuzzy jammies with the dots.” Done. And a sweatshirt. “Oh-kay.”

She nestles under a blanket watching Max and Ruby. I leave her for a few minutes to finish work. I return and warm up leftover Thai noodles and 'wave some frozen peas. She turns off the TV herself, climbs into her chair, picks at her food, fingers the Valentine stickers I’d bought for her that afternoon. We talk about how healthy she’s always been. She reminds me that she hasn’t thrown up since she was 2, in her crib, when Imee was sitting for her one night. (She proceeded to projectile vomit twice more after we returned home.) I see the imprinting immediately: I tell her how healthy she’s been. She repeats it, and accepts it as an explanation for why she hasn’t thrown up in three years. She asks whether she'll throw up now. I tell her she won’t; she doesn’t have a tummy virus, I say, but a sore throat and slight fever. She doesn’t ask for dessert.

But she revives. She wants to make the Valentine’s cards for her class. (Last week we decorated a shoebox in pink and red construction paper, with cut-out and taped-on paper hearts. She was very proud to make a loop of Scotch tape.) She tests designs. She doesn’t fuss when she makes mistakes, in writing or drawing, and I just hand over a new rectangular piece of the red or white poster board I’d bought and cut up earlier so she can start anew.


The teachers get cards in the shape of hearts, the fronts decorated with faces. The students get the rectangles. Her style evolves from elaborate decoration with multiple stickers—tiny multicolored hearts and raised, glassy hearts and flowers in purple, red and blue—to a simple design. “To Max (Charles, Ryan, Ella Rose). Love, Chloe.” She adds the comma at my suggestion, and then does it every time. Then a heart drawn in purple or black, colored in with red marker, adorned with stickers. After completing a card for Simone, she goes back to add something: Jones Mister, she writes. “It's a joke that me and Simone and Jeremy have.” She adds a tiny yellow heart for a period. Then she has an idea and adds a straight line atop it: an exclamation point. When each card is done, she carefully places a check mark next to the name on list the teachers sent home, sometimes remarking on the quality of her check.

After creating a yeoman 16 cards—13 for her classmates, three for the teachers—Chloe realizes she’s spent. “I’ll finish the rest tomorrow,” she announces. We head upstairs. She changes into her jammy top. She pees. She washes. She chews three children’s Tylenol tablets—she approves the taste; grape—a new medicine. We brush. She doesn’t want to floss or use her pink bubble-gum mouthwash. She’s too tired. She climbs into our bed. She wants to know if she'll be better tomorrow. She doesn't want to miss Valentine's Day on Thursday. We read one chapter of On the Banks of Plum Creek—grasshoppers decimate the wheat crop; it's a bad story—and she is asleep in minutes.

Picabo Blasto

Saturday, February 9. Whitetail Resort, Pennsylvania.

Melissa takes Chloe on a ski outing with a bunch of her schoolmates and friends—Max and Grady, Sydney and Zack, Charles, Charlie, Logan. I get email updates to me in San Francisco:

Your daughter is at ski camp! You just drop em off and off they march!
Check your voicemail! She loves it!

The cutest thing ever! Having a ball!

Got cold and came inside. They walk up some carpet and ski down. She keeps trying to help this friend she made who seems to have a hard time-Chloe keeps reaching out her hand to help her along. She's laughing and laughing! Hasn't gone on magic carpet yet. I'll go out again for the last hour or so. I want to ski! I think. She'll want to come back.




She just had her first ski run!!!

I just extended - full day of ski for Blasto!



On the phone with me afterward, Chloe shares the big highlight: You get hot chocolate for snack!

Counselor's Helper

As parents, we think we’re pretty smart. Smarter, in fact, than the teachers and others to whom we hand over our children for eight or nine hours a day. Our course, we’re not. We think we can handle problems better than they can. We don’t even consider seeking their help. They’re our children, dammit! We know best. In truth, we don’t know much.

One of the afterschool teachers told me she thought Chloe should meet with the school counselor, Ms. Leventhal, about her playground anxiety. Gee, why hadn’t we thought of that? Melissa wrote a note with the details: second-grade boy, hiding behind the play shed, fearfully scanning the playground, stays to the side alone while watching the school basketball games. She related how, when she picked up Chloe at 3:00 one day last week and suggested going to the playground, Chloe hunched her shoulders and said insistently that she didn’t want to go. She noted that the behavior is unusual for our social, happy-in-school girl. She related how when we ask Chloe whey she is hiding and won’t play with friends, that she gets upset, says she doesn’t want to talk, or says, “I don’t know.”

We scheduled an appointment, and the next day, unbenknownst to us, Ms. Leventhal summoned Chloe to her office. I learned about it over dinner when, after she had recited much of the day’s activities, Chloe asked slyly. “Dad, don’t you want to know what else happened today?”

“Sure! What else happened today?”

“I went to see Miss Leventhal.”

Chloe said it as if she was revealing a secret. Then she eagerly related the highlights, to her, of the conversation. She was going to be Ms. Leventhal’s special helper! Ms. Leventhal had a project for her! She was going to clean up her office! T.J. was going to help, too!

The next morning, I left for San Francisco (Isaac Maycock bar mitzvah) and Melissa met with Ms. Leventhal. She had asked Chloe about her favorite thing to do in school (drawing) and in afterschool (drawing), and other questions to gauge her general comfort in school. Meeting with T.J. was designed to demystify him in Chloe’s mind. She could see him as just another kid, not someone worthy of fear, stress, or anxiety, for whatever likely-impossible-to-determine reasons.

Later that day, they met, they tidied. Chloe reported the events excitedly and matter-of-factly. One more day's adventure.

Never Enough

With just one delightful girl, we rarely feel overwhelmed. When the weekend comes, we’d rather just be with her than set up playdates or other activities that will take us to different places. Am I alone if feeling this way? Is she too great to want to share with others?

So when a weekend flies by with too much that takes her in other directions, or when a day flies by without enough adventure, I hate it. That’s what this weekend felt like. I went to the gym on Saturday morning. She hung out with her mom, just back from a weeklong reporting trip in California. They went shopping together. They read on the couch. Melissa taped her singing into NPR headphones and a mike. We played a game or two: Top It, the card game formerly known by its now-politically incorrect name War; Buggo, a memory card game; a cut-out maze game from the back of her magazine, Click. Yes, it’s parenting, and it’s fun, but in the world of the liberal guilted working mother and (sort of) working father, it feels like not enough. Like we should always be seeing, hearing, and trying things we’ve never seen, heard, or tried before.

For dinner, we made a pizza, which Chloe didn’t like. ``It doesn’t taste like the other pizza,’’ meaning the Amy’s frozen pizza, or the pizza from the place in Friendship Heights. In fact, pretty much every meal over the weekend was a struggle; all week, with mom away, she chowed down without complaint. But that’s been a regular dynamic: much more cooperative with one parent than with both. With dad, it’s all yes and thank you and okay, open to anything and everything, unfazed when it’s bed or bath time, eager to entertain all suggestions. When we’re both around, not so much. It’s not a given: Our hike to Great Falls two weekends ago was fabulous, and when we actually just get out of the house and go, it’s almost always fine. It’s staying home that’s the problem. She says no more—no, I don’t want to go to Carderock, no I don’t want to go ice skating, both of which were uttered Saturday morning—and we let her say no.

How much of the general reduced cooperation is her punishing mom for being away (by doing it in front of dad) and how much is some other inexplicable dynamic of a 5-year-old brain, we’ll never know. I think it’s all about not being able to articulate what’s happening in her head.

So we stayed home, and then went to the school auction on Saturday night, where we bought two baskets of stuff—one filled with science books and projects, one with empty pads and notebooks and markers and books about being an author—and a National Geographic family atlas. We hid the author basket for Valentine’s Day and left the science basket on the rug in her room for her to see when she woke up. She came around 7:00 wearing a giant smile—the basket was two feet tall and wrapped in decorative cellophane. We did an inventory: a book on why things are, a book explaining gross things (we read the fart entry immediately), a book of games, a chess set and book, a plastic bottle filled with science experiments, an adventure atlas in which a detective travels around the world.

We had lunch at the Owen/Burnses. The usual three-boy chaos, plus two kids from another couple. So Chloe disappeared to play, emerging only to air grievances. I tried, futilely, to attach the second-hand Trail-a-Bike I bought from neighbors to Melissa’s new hybrid (her Christmas present). Back to the garage it went. Chloe and Melissa bike for a bit, then Chloe and I biked over to the Price’s for a bit, where she bounced on the trampoline with Charlie for a minute, emerging soaked and unhappy. We borrowed some clothes and biked home. Then to Scott Dailard’s for the (greatest) Super Bowl (ever). Chloe and Miranda and Julia play fabulously. They were dressed in leotards and fairy dresses in minutes, watched (oh, dear) High School Musical, frolicked for hours.

This morning. Tired girl. “I want to wear jeans!” she cried after trying on some new “yoga flairs”and judging them insubstantial. The first, green, “shrug” she wanted to wear was too tight over her long-sleeved shirt. The second, pink, one was acceptable. She ate (bagel, grapes, cereal, milk with two straws) improved her spirits. She finally agreed to bring 100 Scrabble tiles to class as part of a celebration of the 100th day of school—each kid has to bring in 100 of something they like; Chloe couldn’t decide. I went to the gym. They went off to school.

Melissa took the day off, and picked her up at school, and they walked home, and they played Connect Four. I didn't go down for an hour, and when I did Chloe was grumpy because she kept losing. Now, she came racing upstairs in elation because she won had legitimately: a breathless recitation of the final game, a beatific smile pushing into her flushed cheeks. I hoisted her onto my chair, kissed her tummy, and shared her glee. Funny, it makes up for every moment spent apart.

They Test. She Reads.

We love our public school. We love the teachers. We love the principal. We love the other parents, the energy, the community. Do we know enough to love the education? Impossible to say, after five months.

But we know this: Chloe couldn’t read full sentences in September. She can read full books now. She reads the weather report on the back page of the Metro section of the Washington Post. “Today. Rain. High 53. Low 34. Saturday. Partly cloudy. High 51. Low 39.” Our favorite forecast is for a “wintry mix.” We love how she says “wintry mix.” She also now can scan the agate list of other cities. Fairbanks, Alaska, is a favorite because it's cold enough to trigger exaggerated expressions of incredulity (though the concept of minus 32 degrees must be confusing on many levels). Without my asking, today she found and reported on San Francisco, because I'm traveling there next week.

In “reader’s workshop” in her classroom, each child gets a bag of four books they select from a level-appropriate box. Chloe is in the highest level. The books have two short sentences on each page. “We need to talk about that,” a teacher says. Weeks ago. Can we get her some harder books? We’re still testing.

The sympatehtic librarian tells me that kindergarteners aren’t allowed to take out books. But she’ll sign them out to me. We take out three the first week—Mr. Putter does something, Nate the Great and the Phony Clue, Cam Jansen does something. She breezes through the first, concentrates and makes it through the second. Has more difficulty with the third, which has more lines of text per page, narrower leding, slightly more complex words.

The librarian is gone after Scrabble club. But she leaves the door open for me to return with Chloe and check out some new titles. Chloe and I browse the shelves. I show her how the books are group by subject. We pull books off the shelf and put them back. She settles on another Nate the Great, the same Cam Jansen, an Oliver and Amada Pig, and, to complete a class assignment, a book about the Earth.

As soon as we get home—early, with plenty of time before dinner—she sits in one of her little chairs in her living room “office.” I lie on the couch under a blanket. She opens one of the new books—Oliver and Amanda’s Christmas by Jean Van Leeuwen—and reads it aloud. All 56 pages, nonstop, pausing only to show the class the pictures, or tease the class by occasionally refusing.

Fear and Insecurity on the Playground

When do we develop insecurities? Fears that can’t be controlled. Irrational anxieties of which we can’t be disabused. When is the absence of self-awareness replaced by the very essence of it?

A couple of months ago, Chloe mentioned a second-grader, T.J., the friend of a brother of one of Chloe’s classmates. She was excited by him. “T.J. was at Isabel’s house!” she said. Then one day she reported a concern: T.J. said hello to her in the hallway and she didn’t like it. Another day T.J. shouted her name too loudly. Another he ran up to her quickly—too quickly—and greeted her loudly again. “I don’t like it when he says my name.”

This I understood. When Chloe becomes comfortable with a person, she is open and outgoing. Until then, though, she can be painfully shy, tucking her chin to her chest, not looking the other person in the eye, whispering an inaudible greeting, retreating into her shell like a turtle poked with a stick. She doesn’t explain it; I don’t think she can. And I try not to ask. I just encourage her to speak loudly enough so others can hear her, explain that people are just being polite, that people like her and want to be her friend, that it can seem rude not to look at someone who’s talking to you. On one hand, I’m glad she’s selective about friendship and trust, and not overly gregarious or crazily reckless about whom she extends a hand. On the other, I want her to be self-confident and cordial and welcoming to familiar people who welcome her. A fourth-grade teacher told me yesterday that Chloe still dips her head when she says hello. My heart sank.

So T.J. When I picked up Chloe at afterschool one day, the older sister of one of Chloe’s pals told me that Chloe was standing behind the shed on the playground and wouldn’t play with anyone. Just stood there. The image was devastating, our little girl alone and afraid. I thanked the friend for telling us—a smart and mature revelation for a second-grader. Later, I gently asked Chloe why she didn’t want to play with her friends. Chloe meekly, embarrassedly, admitted that she was afraid of T.J. Did he say something mean? No. Did he hit you? No. Did he scare you? No. That’s when she said he ran up to her and said her name too loudly.

I told her she shouldn’t be afraid of anyone on the playground. That it is a place every kid is entitled to play. That she shouldn’t hide behind the shed because the teachers need to know where she is. That her friends want to include her and miss her when she’s hiding. The teachers promised to watch her. Mr. Jones, the tall, dreadlocked aide in Chloe’s kindergarten classroom, is her protector. He pledge to keep an eye on her, and he told Chloe to tell him whenever she felt uncomfortable.

I picked up Chloe early one afternoon. We exited the gym to the playground. Chloe’s head ducked to her chest and she pulled on the hood of her sweatshirt. “Hi Chloe!” a sweet-looking redheaded boy said happily, not terribly loudly, completely unthreateningly. Head still bowed, Chloe meekly whispered, ``Hi.’’ She turned away from T.J. She picked up the pace.

Melissa thought Chloe had a crush; she remembered the feeling. At 5 1/2, though, I said? That doesn’t seem possible. For a few weeks T.J. vanished from the conversation. Then, yesterday, Mr. Jones told me Chloe won’t play with anyone while watching the school basketball games after school. She’s worried again about T.J. (He doesn’t attend the afterschool program but does play on the playground and go to the games with his babysitter.) Mr. Jones spoke less with concern than disappointment that he couldn’t her to stop worrying about the boy.

Then today. Another afterschool teacher pulled me aside at pickup. Chloe refuses to play outside after school, she said. She seems worried about a particular boy. She constantly looks for him on the playground. She seems scared. The teacher just wanted me to know, and I filled her in and asked her to keep me posted. Chloe stood to the side. She knew what the teacher was talking about. She always knows what people are talking about.

I didn’t bring it up then, or over dinner (at Neisha, a Thai restraurant a half-block from school, but the Pad See Ew “didn’t taste the same” as at our usual Thai restaurant; that and she nearly collapsed in exhaustion into her plate) or at home. Maybe tomorrow. But what? How do we get her to overcome this first real anxiety or insecurity or irrational playground fear or whatever it is? I contemplate calling T.J.’s parents, but can’t compose the script. Your son seems like a great kid—and I have no evidence that he isn’t—but our daughter is afraid of him? Your son says our daughter’s name too loudly? Your son has prompted and irrational obsession about and fear of your son? Can our daughter meet your son in a neutral place, to see that he means no harm?

I want to protect her from the T.J.’s of the world, imagined and real.

Bad Guys

In bed last night, Chloe asked, for the second time this week:

“Is there really such a thing as bad guys?”

“Well, some people aren’t as nice as other people, so yes, there are bad people.”

“No I mean bad guys like burglars. Who come into your house and steal stuff.”

“There are burglars. But they won’t come in here. That’s why we have doors.”

“Because I dream sometimes that burglars are going to come and take my room.”

“No one’s going to take your room, sweetie. And I’ll always be here to protect you and take care of you.” Yes, sometimes we lie to our children. At least for now we do.

“Okay, dad.”