Tag: Lydia

The Lydster, Part 86: Homework

I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities, and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when when grading the assignment.

As I’ve noted, I tend to be the one who works on the homework with the Daughter. She even had an assignment during the week off from school for Passover/Easter. Only 7 of the 24 students actually did the assignment, and Lydia was the ONLY one to color it, as requested, albeit on a Monday morning she was returning to class.

On the weekly homework, there are 10 spelling words to copy plus a bonus word. She’s quite good at this; I don’t think she’s gotten worse than a 95 on her weekly test. The homework also includes writing sentences and some math.

Occasionally, I find the exercises with the graphics to be a bit obtuse, but never more so than earlier this month.
The exercise:

“When y is at the end of a word, it can stand for the long sound of I as in dry, or the long sound of e, as in pony. Say each picture name. Circle long E or long I to show the sound of y in each picture name.”
You may not be able to see the graphic clearly, but I was having difficulty discerning what was being asked for:
2. city or sky?
5. cry or baby?
6. why (that’s a REALLY subtle concept for a first grader)
8. sunny or sky?
9. shy or boy (shy is REALLY subtle here)
10. heavy? (pry is the answer, again not a concept my daughter knew)
15. cloudy or sky?


And the next page
4. sleepy or yawn?
So I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when grading the assignment.

That very evening, I got a note back from the teacher, in which she, working 1-to-1 with another student on the homework “realized the difficulty and confusion with this worksheet page.” She promised to remove the assignment for next year’s homework, and that the Daughter wouldn’t be penalized for any errors.

I think it’s very comforting that her teacher, who I’ve met with a couple of times, was so responsive.

The new Mother’s Day reality

The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son.


Someone sent me this picture some months ago. I thought it was rather funny. Specifically, it reminded me of the Paul Simon song Mother and Child Reunion, which is based on a chicken and egg dish that Simon had at a Chinese restaurant.

Then my mom died, and it’s my first Mother’s Day without her. The visual is still funny but in a more melancholy way. Melancholy humor.

I’ve discovered that Mother’s Day ads REALLY irritate me lately, more than Father’s Day ads did 10 years ago. Maybe it was because it was longer between when my father died until the next holiday (August to June) than it is for my mom (February to May). But probably it’s because I get more e-mail solicitations than I did a decade ago, and they are more difficult to ignore.

The picture above is of my mother with her favorite son many years ago in front of 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY USA; the house and the trim, BTW, were green. The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son. She was generally polite enough not to mention that I was her ONLY son.

Last Sunday, there was a Mass for Mom at the Mission San Diego Basilica de Alcala in San Diego. As my sister Leslie reported, it was “beautiful. It was the regular Noon Mass, but it was announced at the beginning that this Mass was for Trudy Green, mother of Leslie Green, who is a member of the Mission Choir.” I will be getting a copy of the event. “It was a packed house on a beautiful day.”

The bottom picture is of my daughter with her favorite mother. Carol is, among other things, a good mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers, and all of you who have or had mothers.

 

The Lydster, Part 85: Peanut free

What’s odd is that, as a kid, I LOVED peanut butter. But I must have ODed on it, because the smell now makes me nauseous.

As some of you know, the daughter has a peanut allergy, discovered when she was given a peanut butter cookie shortly before she was three. Interestingly, she didn’t have the typical symptoms of swelling. Instead, she vomited – several times. And she has been tested about a year ago, and she is still allergic.

I’ve noted here in the past that there are basically two kinds of people when it comes to food allergy safety; people who have a family member with an allergy, and the pretty much oblivious. Because there’s so much cross-pollination with them, the daughter avoids tree nuts as well as peanuts, even though she is not specifically allergic to them.

I remember a couple of years ago that we were invited to the house of a friend for lunch. We gave the hostess the information beforehand. What did she serve? Nutella sandwiches with nut bread we couldn’t let her eat either.

Likewise, at a party Lydia attended just a couple of weeks ago, the cake had no peanuts or nuts but was processed in a plant with nuts. Fortunately, we always pack alternatives for such an occasion.

Fortunately, she’s not allergic to airborne peanuts, as some people are. The first time Lydia ever flew on a plane, a couple of years ago, the flight attendant, passing out peanuts and another snack, practically passed out when I mentioned my daughter’s allergy. I was appalled by this story about a restaurant chef lying about the fact that the foods were “gluten-free” when, in fact, they were not; highly irresponsible.

I am comforted by the fact that, at least at this point, she won’t take peanut butter deliberately. She was writing her homework, and she had to just WRITE the words “peanut butter” and she complained how awful it tasted, even though she hadn’t ingested it in over four years.

What’s odd is that, as a kid, I LOVED peanut butter. But I must have ODed on it because the smell now makes me nauseous. Meanwhile, my wife really rakes in the Halloween candy, just on the peanut butter products alone.

Pictures c 2009 by Alexandria Green-House

The Lydster, Part 84: Cousins

It’s Lydia’s 7th birthday today.


On her mother’s side, Lydia has three first cousins, 10-year-old twin girls, and a nine-and-half-year-old girl. But on my side, we gave my parents three granddaughters about a dozen years apart.

Rebecca, Leslie’s daughter, is 32 and lives in southern California with her husband Rico; she’s the one wearing the coat in the two pictures below. I can tell you that she has been a great, supportive cousin to Alexandria, Marcia’s daughter, who is 20 and lives with Marcia (and lived with my mother) in southern North Carolina. Likewise, Alex has been a wonderful cousin to Lydia.

But until recently, Rebecca and Lydia had never met, though Lydia had seen Rebecca and Rico on the TV show Wipeout back in September. So when Rebecca arrived in NC for my mother’s funeral, we made sure that the two of them had some quality time together.

Unsurprisingly, Rebecca was also a terrific cousin to Lydia, who was a bit in awe of her big cousin after her impressive, albeit second-place finish, on a very rigorous game show.


In fact, when we drove, in two cars, to Salisbury National Cemetery, some 40 miles each way to bury my mother, Rebecca rode with Carol and me, in the back seat with Lydia; they seemed to be entertaining each other thoroughly. I’m glad they got a chance to meet. I’m only sorry that it took so long, and the circumstances which finally brought them together.
***
Oh, yeah, it’s Lydia’s 7th birthday today. I had a meeting with her teacher earlier this month, and she said that Lydia is a bit of an old soul. The teacher might make what she called an ironic aside, and Lydia, as often as not, would “get” it and laugh when no one in the class did. She’s still rather shy around adults, but she does pay attention to what they say and do.

Lydia is also getting more clever. A couple of days before my birthday, my wife arranged for my OLD friend Uthaclena, his wife and his 16-year-old daughter to come up from the Mid-Hudson Valley as a surprise. Lydia knew about it and was very good about keeping it a secret. On that day, she also assisted me in moving furniture and got me a tweezer and a flashlight so I could remove a couple of slivers from my finger. So she’s also become quite helpful.

I love you, daughter o’ mine.

(First picture C 2011 Uthaclena; other pictures C 2011 Leslie Ellen Green – taken with her cellphone!)

It’s the equinox ASK ROGER ANYTHING

Lydia is very curious about death. Specifically, she was fascinated how my mother’s cremains could fit in such a small container.

It’s finally spring (or autumn) and it’s time for me to relax and you do the heavy lifting. This is the regular segment in which you get to ask Roger (i.e., me) anything you want. Nothing’s off limits.

Now, as I often mention, I AM allowed to perhaps engage in a little bit of clever obfuscation, but I cannot lie outright. If you ask anonymously, the amount of trickery will no doubt increase.

Actually, I already have a question to start. It’s a query that Uthaclena asked last month that I’m too lazy to look up. The upshot was, “How is Lydia coping with her Grandma Green’s death?”

Actually, she’s fine.

A few things are going on:
1) She knew my mother, but not that well. She saw her last year once, the year before once. They talked on the phone rarely. Now, my mother, with my sister and niece, did come up a month after she was born, and my mom and my daughter had been in each other’s presence a few times after that, but the daughter’s not likely to remember most of those.
2) She has had a cavalier, even what others might call an inappropriate casualness, talking about death, e.g., the way she’s spoken about my father and my wife’s brother John being dead (before she was born), which I took as the naivete of a child.
3) She is very curious about death. Specifically, she was fascinated how my mother’s cremains could fit in such a small container. What is the process?

So ask away.

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