After a three-year hiatus I am once again teaching French. You know the old teacherly saying, “It seems like the students are getting younger every year?” Well, in my case, it’s true. These are the youngest students I have ever taught. They don’t remember 9/11. They don’t know who Michael Jackson was. They definitely don’t [...]
On Tuesday we counted 130 instances of the letter S during morning shopping errands. I’m trying the old “letter of the week” theme with Sam and we are starting this week with S. She’s keenly interested in that letter. She may believe on some level that it belongs to her. But it also belongs to [...]
Lobsters always makes me think of Annie Hall. Sam and I didn’t try to drop any live ones in a pot of boiling water but in our creation of the crusty crustaceans we did manage to get paint EVERYwhere, resulting in much giggling and hopping and contorting of bodies on our way to the tub. [...]
While trying to organize some of the clutter in our little house before 14 people come over on Thursday for the first session of Allons-y les petits (my preschooler French class — !!!) I came across this story Sam wrote last month. She dictated it to me and after I’d written it down she illustrated [...]
Amtrak carried us to Richmond, Virginia on July 1, where we were warmly met by Grand-mère, Pop-Pop, and Grandma Carolyn: The next day, Sam turned three and three quarters, a fact which she shared repeatedly with everyone she met. We picked up a rental car and then drove to Charlottesville, where AC and I lived [...]