A few nights ago, Nora’s school hosted a “Journey Through the Grades” event. It was a chance for parents to move from classroom and classroom and get a glimpse of the Waldorf cirriculum for elementary through middle school. It was a great experience. Grown-ups sat at tiny desks, singing songs and drawing pictures. We all left happy.
But perhaps even more enlightening was the half hour spent before the event with other kindergarten parents. Halfway through the year, we are all starting to loosen up around one another.
I was telling the Louie’s mother (names have been changed, as they don’t know I’m blogging about them) about shenanigans Nora and Louie had been up to.
“Did I tell you about the trap?” I asked.
“No!”
“Nora and Louie set a trap for Harry. Out on the playground the dug a hole and covered it with sticks, hoping he’d fall into it!”
Harry’s father happened to be sitting right there and his ears perked up. Nora and Harry had a history of not getting along. Harry had called Nora little. (She is, especially compared to kids in her class from a year to three years older.) We had done some role playing on how to handle these kinds of comments without getting upset: “Why, yes, I am smaller than you because I’m younger.” etc.
Harry’s dad then told of the day Harry came home with a huge, bruised bite mark on his shoulder which he said Nora had given him.
“Little Nora did that?” Harry’s dad asked him.
“She’s little but she can hold her own,” the five-year-old Harry replied.
Nora had told me that she and Harry were getting along better lately. But all I could get out of her was, “We worked it out.”
Indeed.
As my friend Monica likes to say, sometimes that girl is straight up gangsta.