Otto has a cat. He told us about it at lunch today. “It used
to belong to a neighbor but the neighbor does not want him anymore so now the
cat belongs to our house. He is our cat because we feed him any way and he has
blue stripes and his name is Lucky and we found a rabbit in the corner of the
garden but it really stunk so maybe Lucky killed it but it’s head was missing
but not the brains the brains were spread all over the grass but it did not
have a head anymore, just the brains. It was really gross!” I let the story go
on a little too long. I always do. My mouth was probably hanging open. I
remember thinking during the brains bit, “Thank goodness I don’t eat gluten!”
Today is noodle day. Rice looks a little
less like brains than noodles. During Otto’s monologue Orion kept on chiming
in; “My cat!” and then “Our cat”, “But my cat”. Otto was not going to let him get a word in
edgewise but it was a good way for me to cut off the more graphic description
of the brains; “Otto, Orion would like to tell us about his cat.” (Please,
please, please! No more stories about cat kill!) Orion dropped his eyes and
said softly, “We don’t have a cat*.” I heaved a sigh of relief. No cat=no cat
kill. I am not always so lucky. I am still struggling with how to direct the
fine art of table conversation when I am too shocked to speak.
We are pretty good at saying, “please” and “thank you”. We
are working on waiting to be served. Some children still grab the food the
minute we sit down and I have to remind them that we wait to be served. Today
Eli caught Miss Jane sneaking a chocolate chip out of the granola bowl! Example
still speaks louder than words, I guess. Orion wanted to know why I was
impolite. I had to explain how even I need to wait to be served and when I grab
things out of the bowl it is impolite. Ah! The bitter taste of humble pie.
Natalie is a firm believer in napkins. She likes her hands
clean and is the first to get a napkin if someone spills. She loves to help and
would spend her meals running back and forth to the napkin basket if I did not
occasionally make her sit down and actually eat something. She helps us all
stay presentable at the table.
We are the fastest table at Lifeways so very often we are
waiting for the other tables to gather themselves for lunch. Leo likes to teach
us songs he knows. Sometimes they are songs he has learned and reworded.
Sometimes they are appropriate for the table and sometimes they are not. I
always have to encourage him to speak up so that the whole table can hear. I
have to encourage Otto to speak more softly so that the whole room doesn’t
hear.
Gus likes to finish with eating quickly and get on to more
interesting things. I think he and Liviah would forego sitting down for a meal
completely. It has been challenging for them to sit through a meal but I think
they have started to enjoy it. Erica has the greatest expressions. Her face the
first time she realized that she would have to hold hands with an almost
complete stranger was beautiful! She did it! Especially when she saw Natalie
and Isabel practically lying flat across the table to “close the circle”! It is
all about including everyone and making a circle of hands is such an amazing thing,
even the children recognize the importance of it.
The lunch table is a small snap shot of what the children
learn throughout the whole day. It is so important to learn the simple tricks
of how to get along, how to respect each other’s spaces and ears. How to share
a conversation, how to have a conversation! It is hard work! Even I forget the
basics sometimes.
My partner, Mark, came home last week citing a study he had
heard about on NPR. A professor had given four year olds a cookie. He told them
they could eat the cookie whenever they wanted but if they waited to eat the
cookie for ten minutes, he would give them a second cookie. It was part of a
larger study which then tracked the children into adulthood. The children who
waited for the second cookie had a much greater success rate in their entire
lives than those who ate the cookie immediately. I. of course, thought of our
little guys waiting patiently to be served. It is comforting to think that not
only are they learning good social skills. It makes sense that they learning
basic skills that can help them throughout their entire lives.
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