March 8: Nick’s Grandpa Bob died this afternoon. We were planning on going out there tomorrow morning to see him one last time. Nick has never lost anyone before and I worry that he will feel guilty that he wasn’t there in his last moments. But the truth is that it wouldn’t really have been him. His real last goodbye is the way we both picture him in our minds when someone says his name. How he was before he lost all the weight, before the urine drainage bags poked out of the bottom of his robe, and when he still performed magic tricks for us while telling stories about watching women pretending to drown in front of Errol Flynn’s boat in hopes he would bring them on board. Tonight, we schnapps drank in his honor from the silver shot glasses he gave us as a wedding present, the ones he was given on his wedding where tradition dictated he had to drink a shot of schnapps with every guest. He tried to take precautions, but it didn’t amount to much. He drank olive oil beforehand to limit how much alcohol absorbed into his body. He bride tried to pour him tiny shots, but her hand often slipped. Before the end of the night, he was sloshed.
March 9: Mom texted me that Odell also died yesterday. Today is Grannie’s 84th birthday. Nick and I FaceTimed with her. She told us that he went peacefully, which she was grateful for because he had been in pain for so long. She handed the phone to my mom so that she could flip to the back camera and pan over the living room table full of flowers and cards. In a moment of dark humor that I realized my brothers, father, and I all must have inherited from her, she called them her birthday bereavement cards and gave a small chuckle. In Odell’s honor, we ate popcorn, one of the four different foods he would willingly eat.
March 10: The vet said Addie’s rash is most likely caused by her licking herself too much. She suggested that we put a cone on her for two weeks and see if that clears things up. At first, we tried the regular plastic cone of shame. Her ears couldn’t fit in it and she couldn’t walk through a doorway or jump on the couch without the lip catching on something. Then we got her an inflatable one, which looks like a life vest. She seems to enjoy this one more. It’s like she has a pillow everywhere she goes. She almost looks like an oil painting of someone wearing a ruff.
March 11: All day the kids have been obsessed with this banana song, which makes them all scream “I’m a banana” and “No, I’m a banana” at each other in the most annoying voice they can figure out how to do. It caused a fist fight.
March 12: I tasked the girls with making kindness fortune tellers. My example included sentences like “you are kind”, “you are strong”, and “you will succeed”. They had difficulty writing out nice fortunes. Nancy G. tried to write in “you are freaking ugly” when I wasn’t looking. When Rosa finished, she held it out to me. I picked, purple, 2, and 6. She opened the paper flap and announced that my house won’t explode.
March 13: The STEM challenge today was for them to make the tallest free-standing tower they could out of fifteen balloons and a few feet of tape. I had meant to use painter’s tape, but the roll Ana handed me that morning was stronger than expected. When the kids decided to change the structure of their towers, they popped them when trying to pry them apart. One group ended the challenge with only five surviving balloons. Luckily, they thought this was hilarious and very proudly showed off their 18 inch tall tower to the rest of the class.
March 14: Briana has absolutely no self-control. She is like a baby in a way, always grabbing whatever passes in front of her, and often tucking it into her mouth. She did that with a scoop of Vaseline when we made lip balm a few weeks ago. Today, we made stress balls out of balloons, cornstarch, and water. She got too excited and grabbed at the balloon when there was only cornstarch in it. A powdery spray erupted out of it, her face and hair instantly coated in white.
March 15: We made marshmallow constellations of the Big and Little Dipper so that my students could locate the North Star at night. I wanted to take pictures of their creations for the newsletter, but that idea got ruined when I gave them a sharpie to write their names on their papers and five out of six of them also wrote THERE ARE 14! DO NOT TOUCH! to keep their younger siblings from stealing their marshmallows.
much love,
hedgie
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