Archive for December 15th, 2009
Who knew that daycare had homework?
Oh wait, J knew. He knew because he picked up the sheet with the assignment, that one that he left in his truck over the weekend, leaving Ava (well, me) only a short time to to complete her project. And since I’m a professional procrastinator when it comes to schoolwork anyway, J and I were frantically cutting and gluing and stealing images from the internet at the last minute in order to make sure she didn’t go in empty handed on the day the class was learning about winter holidays important to each student’s ethnic heritage.
Oh yeah, and we had to make a flag. Thank heavens she’s from China because that made the flag ever so much easier. J handled this part – gluing yellow construction paper stars to a piece of red construction paper.
Once the flag was complete I was tasked with illustratatng the Lunar New Year on the flip side of the flag. This was not as easy as it sounds since it’s kind of hard to compress the (arguably) most important holiday of the year onto a 9×12 canvas. Not to mention, my printer was almost dead so the image quality was crap AND we didn’t have even one non-dried up glue stick in the house so we had to use regular old Elmer’s glue which was a mess. I didn’t figure out either of these things until almost midnight, by the way.
Ava did help paste a couple of the items on but she lost interest rather quickly since there was an Eggo waffle calling her name for breakfast. I finished it up, blew it dry with a hair dryer, and only then figured out it wouldn’t fit in the laminator. No time to do anything else so off we went with my apologies for being so disorganized and bearing a crumpled piece of paper with approximately 14 cups of damp glue holding everything together.
Except we were one of a very few who even bothered to complete the project so her flag was featured very prominently on the classroom bulletin board. She was pleased as punch…especially since her picture was on there for everyone to see.
However. It did raise one stupid/negative question from one of the staff members at her daycare since they took this as an opportunity to ask me questions about her adoption which annoyed me because #1 it’s happening during the most chaotic time of the morning when everyone is dropping their kids off and I’m running late as always and #2 she was asking somewhat personal questions about Ava’s birthparents and abandonment (using somewhat unpolitically correct terminology) in front of Ava’s whole class, kids and parents alike. I was pretty proud of myself for answering calmly instead of snarkily and telling her that I would be happy to discuss the relevant parts of Ava’s adoption if she would like to step outside of the classroom to do so. It was about this time that she realized she’d overstepped a bit and backed off straightaway.
Please forgive the photo quality (iPhone) and the amateurish first attempt at sharing a bit of Chinese culture. All in all, I was pretty proud of us since we’re still really new at this helping kid with homework thing. I’m sure we’ll get better with time. Or that Ava can do her own homework – I like that solution much better anyway.