I Love A Parade
When we arrived at preschool, 10 minutes late as always, it was immediately apparent that we should have been on time. I knew that the Child Development Center was having a parade today as a grand finale to the celebration of the Month of the Military Child (that is, kids whose parents are in the military, not kids that are obsessed with wearing camouflage and shooting guns). What I didn’t know was that the parade was starting right at 9:00. I was told that Lauren should wear a yellow shirt today, but no one told me that the parade was starting so early, that parents were marching too, or that it involved leaving the center grounds and parading with an actual marching band.
As I pulled into the parking lot, the members of the Army Band were unloading from their bus and all of the kids from the center were lined up and ready to march. There was nowhere to park, and as I tried to pull through the parking lot to park on the street, the day care center head walked toward me shaking her head saying “Please stop your car,” in a measured quiet voice that one normally reserves for the very young or the mentally challenged. I put the brakes on the car and my spontaneously combusting rage and said “I’m just trying to get out of the way. Where can I put the car? Can I leave it here?” Here being along the yellow fire zone curb. I could see she was dying to tell me no, but she gave a long look and then a long sigh, and then said “I guess you can leave it here for now.”
I was tempted to give a look of my own, but ever mindful of the impressionable young souls around me, I parked and got the kids out of the car. I figured I would be stuck for about 5 minutes until the parade got underway and then be released to my zealously guarded 4.5 hours of freedom that I get every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Unfortunately, I was wrong. As I started to lead Lauren over to stand with her preschool class, she began to cry and wriggle and inform me that “No, NO, NOOO! I don’t want to be in the parade!” I tried to be understanding for a minute, since she was probably as surprised as I was to find the parade about to begin the moment she arrived at school. But then she said something that reignited my fuse: “I’m afraid of the band!”
My children love music more than any other children I have ever encountered They will sing songs that they learn at school, songs that they learn on the radio or CDs in the car, songs from TV and TV commercials, songs they’ve heard at church, and songs that they make up themselves. They were absolutely obsessed with the Sound of Music for almost a year, until we brought home Mary Poppins, which has held on as a favorite for more than a year already. I think Marty learned to speak for the sole purpose of requesting repeated viewings of the Sesame Street “Peter and the Wolf” DVD. The kiddies insisted on hearing the Irish Tenors every time we rode in the car until Christmas time, when they learned every song on the Muppets Christmas CD, and only agreed to remove it from the car in February when I bought the Curious George CD (which they have also learned completely). Sometimes for fun I’ll introduce them to one of my old CDs, and then listen with amusement as they sing along to Erasure or REM using their own lyrics. Marty drags his wooden xylophone around with him everywhere, sometimes to play nicely and sometimes to just bang on and yell like a budding young Dave Grohl. Aislinn has a guitar that she carries around and sings with, and sometimes just strums absentmindedly while she’s watching TV. I’m not claiming them to be musical prodigies; they are just absolute music nuts.
But most of the time the kids don’t sing songs, they sing stuff that normal people would speak. My life is not a soap opera, it is a regular opera, everything is sung at all times. Unless they are exhausted or crying, if I ask them what they would like for lunch, what they would like to read, what they would like to do, they answer me in song. The styles that inspire their tunes range from Gregorian Chant, to Broadway musicals, to atonal new age music. I was always embarrassed to sing when I was a kid, so to make sure that they don’t become self-conscious, I never comment on the fact that everything they do is set to music. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes they sound like a cartoon, but they always sing everything with great enthusiasm. The girls have a certain high pitched, Mary Poppins-inspired style that they use when they are doing what they call “beautiful singing.” They have a down-home, Kentucky raised, hillbilly style that they use for country singing. But generally they just sing in their regular voices and they can all carry a tune, so to a mom, they sound quite nice indeed.
And it’s not just the singing, they are nonstop dancers too. Right after Marty turned two he invented the Slow/Rock-It game where he directs us to sing a “slow” song so he can do ballet until he screams “Rock It” indicating we are to sing a fast song so he can rock out. Lauren has an outfit (that she wears inside the house about four days a week) consisting of pink ankle socks, pink shorts, and a pink t-shirt which is her gymnastics/ballet girl outfit. Whenever she’s got the outfit on, she prances around on tiptoe, acting very graceful and performing her version of ballet while she plays, eats, watches TV, whatever. When Aislinn receives a new pair of shoes with hard soles, she can hardly keep from trotting out her version of tap dancing on the parquet floor. If I had any aspirations to be a stage mom, I probably could have enrolled them in some sort of Broadway boot camp for children, like the sports camps that the kids from the Soviet Union were sent to at age 3 to become great gymnasts. Only rather than pine away for their childhoods, my kids would probably love it.
So there I was at the day care center this morning, absolutely flabbergasted with my little soloist who claimed to be afraid of the band. We have seen the Army band perform on many occasions and they have never provoked a fight or flight response in Lauren. In my annoyance I concluded that she was just being difficult, but I didn’t make her march. I went into the center to sign the kids in, and discovered that Marty’s class was off marching too, so we went outside to sit on the curb and wait for the parade to return. It was a beautiful day, and I knew that a parade composed of children 5 and under was unlikely to be gone for long, so I decided to just enjoy the weather and the time with the kids who, of course by this point, were dancing around on the grass. I wasn’t annoyed anymore, but I had to know, so I kept pestering Lauren with questions (in a persistent manner that I learned from her actually):
“Why are you afraid of the band?”
“Don’t you remember how much we liked the band at the Christmas tree lighting?”
“Didn’t you see how much fun the kids were having marching behind the band?”
“Don’t you remember that parade on Clifford where Jetta marched with the band?”
“Do you think it is too loud?”
“Did you think they would walk too fast?”
She was evasive, and finally admitted that she wasn’t afraid of the band. I knew it! So I asked, “What was the problem then, why wouldn’t you march with your class?”
“I don’t like the clown.”
The clown! Now there is a childhood phobia I can get behind. I certainly would not have forced Lauren to march off after a clown, even a harmless clown at a Month of the Military Child parade. We sat in the sun, safely out of clown range, and listened to the drums as the parade circled the block. When the band came back into view they began to play again, and Marty got up to dance. The band eventually assembled in front of the center to give a little concert, and I took the kids over to sit with their classes. The clown wandered off with some of the teachers and left the kids in peace to enjoy the show. I gave them each a little hug and kiss and headed off, 45 minutes later than normal, but happy that we would not have to avoid the Army band for the rest of our time here.
As I pulled into the parking lot, the members of the Army Band were unloading from their bus and all of the kids from the center were lined up and ready to march. There was nowhere to park, and as I tried to pull through the parking lot to park on the street, the day care center head walked toward me shaking her head saying “Please stop your car,” in a measured quiet voice that one normally reserves for the very young or the mentally challenged. I put the brakes on the car and my spontaneously combusting rage and said “I’m just trying to get out of the way. Where can I put the car? Can I leave it here?” Here being along the yellow fire zone curb. I could see she was dying to tell me no, but she gave a long look and then a long sigh, and then said “I guess you can leave it here for now.”
I was tempted to give a look of my own, but ever mindful of the impressionable young souls around me, I parked and got the kids out of the car. I figured I would be stuck for about 5 minutes until the parade got underway and then be released to my zealously guarded 4.5 hours of freedom that I get every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Unfortunately, I was wrong. As I started to lead Lauren over to stand with her preschool class, she began to cry and wriggle and inform me that “No, NO, NOOO! I don’t want to be in the parade!” I tried to be understanding for a minute, since she was probably as surprised as I was to find the parade about to begin the moment she arrived at school. But then she said something that reignited my fuse: “I’m afraid of the band!”
My children love music more than any other children I have ever encountered They will sing songs that they learn at school, songs that they learn on the radio or CDs in the car, songs from TV and TV commercials, songs they’ve heard at church, and songs that they make up themselves. They were absolutely obsessed with the Sound of Music for almost a year, until we brought home Mary Poppins, which has held on as a favorite for more than a year already. I think Marty learned to speak for the sole purpose of requesting repeated viewings of the Sesame Street “Peter and the Wolf” DVD. The kiddies insisted on hearing the Irish Tenors every time we rode in the car until Christmas time, when they learned every song on the Muppets Christmas CD, and only agreed to remove it from the car in February when I bought the Curious George CD (which they have also learned completely). Sometimes for fun I’ll introduce them to one of my old CDs, and then listen with amusement as they sing along to Erasure or REM using their own lyrics. Marty drags his wooden xylophone around with him everywhere, sometimes to play nicely and sometimes to just bang on and yell like a budding young Dave Grohl. Aislinn has a guitar that she carries around and sings with, and sometimes just strums absentmindedly while she’s watching TV. I’m not claiming them to be musical prodigies; they are just absolute music nuts.
But most of the time the kids don’t sing songs, they sing stuff that normal people would speak. My life is not a soap opera, it is a regular opera, everything is sung at all times. Unless they are exhausted or crying, if I ask them what they would like for lunch, what they would like to read, what they would like to do, they answer me in song. The styles that inspire their tunes range from Gregorian Chant, to Broadway musicals, to atonal new age music. I was always embarrassed to sing when I was a kid, so to make sure that they don’t become self-conscious, I never comment on the fact that everything they do is set to music. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes they sound like a cartoon, but they always sing everything with great enthusiasm. The girls have a certain high pitched, Mary Poppins-inspired style that they use when they are doing what they call “beautiful singing.” They have a down-home, Kentucky raised, hillbilly style that they use for country singing. But generally they just sing in their regular voices and they can all carry a tune, so to a mom, they sound quite nice indeed.
And it’s not just the singing, they are nonstop dancers too. Right after Marty turned two he invented the Slow/Rock-It game where he directs us to sing a “slow” song so he can do ballet until he screams “Rock It” indicating we are to sing a fast song so he can rock out. Lauren has an outfit (that she wears inside the house about four days a week) consisting of pink ankle socks, pink shorts, and a pink t-shirt which is her gymnastics/ballet girl outfit. Whenever she’s got the outfit on, she prances around on tiptoe, acting very graceful and performing her version of ballet while she plays, eats, watches TV, whatever. When Aislinn receives a new pair of shoes with hard soles, she can hardly keep from trotting out her version of tap dancing on the parquet floor. If I had any aspirations to be a stage mom, I probably could have enrolled them in some sort of Broadway boot camp for children, like the sports camps that the kids from the Soviet Union were sent to at age 3 to become great gymnasts. Only rather than pine away for their childhoods, my kids would probably love it.
So there I was at the day care center this morning, absolutely flabbergasted with my little soloist who claimed to be afraid of the band. We have seen the Army band perform on many occasions and they have never provoked a fight or flight response in Lauren. In my annoyance I concluded that she was just being difficult, but I didn’t make her march. I went into the center to sign the kids in, and discovered that Marty’s class was off marching too, so we went outside to sit on the curb and wait for the parade to return. It was a beautiful day, and I knew that a parade composed of children 5 and under was unlikely to be gone for long, so I decided to just enjoy the weather and the time with the kids who, of course by this point, were dancing around on the grass. I wasn’t annoyed anymore, but I had to know, so I kept pestering Lauren with questions (in a persistent manner that I learned from her actually):
“Why are you afraid of the band?”
“Don’t you remember how much we liked the band at the Christmas tree lighting?”
“Didn’t you see how much fun the kids were having marching behind the band?”
“Don’t you remember that parade on Clifford where Jetta marched with the band?”
“Do you think it is too loud?”
“Did you think they would walk too fast?”
She was evasive, and finally admitted that she wasn’t afraid of the band. I knew it! So I asked, “What was the problem then, why wouldn’t you march with your class?”
“I don’t like the clown.”
The clown! Now there is a childhood phobia I can get behind. I certainly would not have forced Lauren to march off after a clown, even a harmless clown at a Month of the Military Child parade. We sat in the sun, safely out of clown range, and listened to the drums as the parade circled the block. When the band came back into view they began to play again, and Marty got up to dance. The band eventually assembled in front of the center to give a little concert, and I took the kids over to sit with their classes. The clown wandered off with some of the teachers and left the kids in peace to enjoy the show. I gave them each a little hug and kiss and headed off, 45 minutes later than normal, but happy that we would not have to avoid the Army band for the rest of our time here.
posted by Shannon at 11:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home