Lifelist
Sleep in a castle
Learn a foreign language
Cull my collected belongings
Attend a geek con
Attend an ECE con
Attend a girl con
Finish my ECE certificate
Life on the Inside
Hi parents! I am your child’s daycare worker.
- Yes, I appreciate how hard it is to be a parent
- I do like your child
- No really, even when he/she is a brat
- Yes, he/she is a brat sometimes, you are perfectly aware of that
- I am not picking on your child, I am trying to maintain order
I get two reactions from people when I talk about my job. “It must be nice to sit around all day” or “I can’t believe you can handle that all day.” There is no spectrum, just one or the other.
And here’s why both of those opinions bother me. Obviously I don’t sit around all day. I do spend a lot of time watching the kids, so that, for instance, when a fight erupts I can intervene before your child gets hurt. Hmm, yes. But at the same time I’m trying to prepare activities and circle times. “Real” teachers get prep time. Some daycare workers get naptime. My kids don’t nap. But before this turns into my personal sob story, let’s switch to the flip side.
I LOVE what I do. I love working with children, being witness to their creativity, wonder and discoveries. I love introducing them to new ideas and concepts and seeing them take hold and interpret them in their own ways. Children are amazing. I don’t do it because it’s easy or because it will make me rich. I do it because I want to help your child grow into the amazing person they are destined to be.
Mawwiage
An (unmarried) friend posted this quite accurate (in my opinion) description of marriage:
To be perfectly honest, I think I understand marriage a lot better now. There are times you may be full of angst, times you may want to get out, times you may want to do terrible things to the other person – but at the end of the day it adds so much more, and works so much better than the alternative. It’s just from inside you can’t always see clearly.
It seems spending a year travelling around the world gives one some insights on the human condition.
Salutation to the Dawn
Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life,
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence:The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow only a vision,
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day! Such is the salutation of the dawn.
Kalidasa, Indian Dramatist
The Fourth Estate
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891 (via Stephen Fry)
The things I saw…
It has occured to me that when a post is too long for Twitter, I could theoretically put it here! Hmm. Yes. I see you sighing and shaking your head and to you I say hush.
Letters of Note is a fascinating site full of, wait for it, letters of note! This particular letter was written by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then future President of the U.S. He writes about the experience of visiting a concentration camp shortly after it’s liberation. What struck me was this sentence:
I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
Eerily prescient, no?
