Further Travel Blogs...

May 21, 2007

Yesterday we went to my Aunt’s house on Dad’s side of the family. This is the Pierce family, whom we usually connected with at my grandmother’s house in Mountain View. For the past couple of years, Bob and Joan have dropped by mom’s house when we’ve hit town. This year they invited us over to their house, and invited their kids…my cousins. One of them has a little boy about a year younger than David and about a year older than Lauren. This is Zeke, their second cousin. (I think this is the only bloodline second cousin for them from MY side of the family. On Doug’s side I’m sure there are many more…most are much older, however, and either in--or graduating from--high school.) I haven’t seen my cousins in at least a couple of years, probably since Dad’s funeral, so that was kind of fun. It was a gorgeous day, and the three kids hit it off almost immediately. There was a wooden swing on a tall tree to play on, and a little “village” of tents and tunnels…those soft-sided playthings that kids love.

In the end, the kids had a blast and the adults had just as much fun watching all three of them. They shared the swing while cousin Johnny pushed them (oh rapture!), and the boys decided to roll around the yard in the big nylon tunnel and then set it upright and run around like big caterpillars. There was much falling into, falling onto, many bonks in the face with errant fists and shoes. Lauren, being the smallest, got the brunt of most of that (besides, the boys wouldn’t complain about such minor slights), and she kept running to me with the most foul and sour look on her face to register her complaints.

We were only supposed to stay for a couple of hours, but in the end we were there for something like SIX hours! (Oops.) We didn’t eat dinner until about 10 p.m., and Mom had to be the one to stuff both kids into a deeply unwanted and instantly-detested bath while I cooked.

It clouded over and eventually started to rain while we were there. We were all under an open porch, so we didn’t mind a bit, and the kids thought the rain was the best thing EVER. The porch had a bunch of bird nests hidden up in the far back, so there were finches and chickadees flitting in and out. (Gee, birds. Must be nice!) The kids were acting a lot like the birds, flitting in and out of the rain, with great shrieks of laughter.

Eventually they even broke out brownies and ice cream, and of course David and Lauren thought they were going to explode on the spot. It had gotten colder and a lot of hunting jackets sort of appeared out of nowhere, so many of us were suddenly clad in bright orange. This included Lauren, and obviously an adult hunting jacket on such a little kid is going to make her look like a pumpkin in nothing flat. I think she retaliated by oozing chocolate ice cream all down the front of the jacket. I wasn’t paying any attention, of course, or I would have stopped her. My cousin Dawn (Zeke’s mom) sat there watching her the whole time and giggling, taking a sort of morbid pleasure out of knowing that she wouldn’t have to be the one to hose the little darling off.

Little Princess’ new trick is to respond to reasonable requests with the phrase, “Don’t want to; not going to!” So far I’ve managed to restrain my own base response to this, but after three weeks of hearing it, my patience grows ever-thinner. This is why tigers eat their young.

We talked a bit about the school systems; apparently Zeke is getting some really cool stuff from the public system, despite the fact that their districts are facing the same problems as ours. Our own district has lost accreditation, and will undergo a state takeover in June. (Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why? "St. Louis School Board awarded no-bid deal to counter charters.") Many of the schools have been consolidated and closed, and I see on the news here that Denver is facing the same thing. (A quick Google search shows the same concerns in Rhode Island, Mississippi, Nebraska.) This makes me really wonder what in the world could have caused the educational system to collapse in on itself in such a grand, wide-sweeping manner? Especially since such a collapse allows the state and federal government such bigger powers, when they’ve traditionally been left to the local school boards? This smacks of a power-grab initiated by the federal mandates of that No Child Left Behind bit. Of course your major question to be answered is: Why do the states want to take over the schools? What’s in it for them? (Reporter’s Rule #1: Follow the Money.)