This week it got just a little warmer, and my kids spent a lot of time in a lot of empty, open spaces.
No playgrounds. No swings. No play dates. No approaching strangers with guileless, cheerful, persistent-bordering-on-aggressive gestures of friendship (one of Amelia’s most cherished pastimes). But also: nowhere to be. No timelines to meet. No agendas or expectations or even loose plans, some days. No cars on the road (almost). No birthday parties or organized sports practices to interrupt by wandering too carelessly. No real need for parental directions or intervention at all.
It’s been kind of amazing to watch them seize their free reign and delight in it. You want to run huge, looping figure eights in the eerily desolate parking lot of a big-box store while giggling madly? Go for it. I promise I will not squawk “parking lot behavior!” even once. Call a ten-minute halt to our walk so you can commune with a pair of ducks paddling around in front of a drainage pipe? Knock yourself out.
Yes, I can stop the car in the middle of a normally-busy road so you can roll your window down and stare at an osprey nest. Yes, please do lay down flat on your belly in the middle of a wet, muddy baseball field to study a dew-covered spiderweb.
We went for a walk in our neighborhood, and Amelia announced that she was tired and needed a rest and wanted to lay down in the middle of a cul-de-sac right off the street, and we…..let her? And Mallory trotted over to curl up at her side, and we allowed that too?
“Wow!” Amelia chirped. “The sky looks so wide open from here!”
(Lest you think our whole week consisted of blissful, sun-dappled, child-led interaction with the natural world: it did not. Believe me, it did not. But these times did make the rest of it better.)
Show Your Work
It is very comforting to me to connect and hear from other parents right now, and I would love to hear from you about how you’re processing and parenting your way through this. Here’s a question for you to ponder:
What is the number one most mission-critical thing your family needs to end the day feeling reasonably sane?
If you want to contribute an answer to that question, respond here or reply to the newsletter from your inbox. Silly, serious, poignant, brief, wordy, whatever you feel. I’ll publish them next week, plus a new question to think about.
If you like reading Extra Credit, would you consider sharing it somewhere, or with someone? Parenting can be isolating in non-pandemic times, and lately, well. I would love to be able to share with and hear from more of you. Thanks!
Ask A Teacher
My child’s elementary school teacher is having trouble controlling her students via the Zoom lessons being required by our school district right now. Do you have any tips or best practices for teaching on Zoom that might be helpful for other teachers who might be in the same position?
One hot tip from me would be to GIVE YOUR KID’S TEACHER A FUCKING BREAK, but Matt Dicks also had some actual best practices for Zoom distance learning with elementary schoolers. Plus also some letters about teachers who aren’t providing enough for their students (see my advice above), how to help a 15-year-old struggling with ADD, and evaluating the quality of a preschool.
Recommendations
I really liked this Belle Boggs piece about using children’s literature—Ramona Quimby and Anna Hibiscus, specifically—to communicate ideas about sacrifice and challenge to her six-year-old.
Go ahead and watch man-bunned, yoga-panted Jake Gyllenhaal put his shirt on while doing a handstand. It’s good for your nerves.
Twitter has been a real mixed bag lately because it mostly fills me with a consuming fear and despair that I cannot shake, but also occasionally provides silly little things that delight me and make me laugh for one minute and six seconds, and you can’t discount the value of that:
We’d used Cosmic Kids yoga for a good while before The Shutdown, but unsurprisingly, the YouTube channel has seen massive growth in recent weeks as parents eagerly share recommendations for occupying their kids. Slate interviewed Jaime Amor, the creator behind Cosmic Kids, about her background and process, and it’s really interesting!
I start off by really watching and taking pages and pages of notes because I’m trying to sort of nail down scene to scene what’s actually happening in the movie. I pick out the bits from each scene that I think are the crucial parts that make the narrative work. Then I will look at how I can use the yoga poses that I’ve got in my head, like the vocabulary of yoga poses that are there, in order to interpret those sequences of events. Then I go back through it over and over again basically editing it to take out the fat. And then I take the first five poses, weave those poses together, and then I’ll move on to the next section, and the next five poses and I’ll build it up in chunks basically. And you just sort of slowly but surely memorize it as a flow. Frozen was a heck of a lot of work. It’s like a half-hour-long one woman show, like doing a weird interpretive dance.
Currently reading falconer Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, a memoir about her experiences training a goshawk in the year after her father died suddenly of a heart attack. She is a beautiful writer:
A short scuffle, and then out into the gloom, her grey crest raised and her barred chest feathers puffed up into a merengue of aggression and fear, came a huge old female goshawk. Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thundercloud. She completely filled the room. She had a massive back of sun-bleached grey feathers, was as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell, even to staff who spent their days tending eagles. So wild and spooky and reptilian.
There’s something very soothing to me about reading gorgeous passages of description focused on nature and animals right now. $4.96 on Kindle, too!
Get in touch and tell me what your feral children are up to:
Email: extracredit.newsletter@gmail.com…or just reply to the newsletter directly from your inbox!
Twitter: @carrie_AB_