When you have a blog, there are lots of important things to take into consideration. Whether or not you can write should be high on the priority list, and since I’m somewhat able to string sentences together coherently, I suppose I qualify.
Then there’s this thing called appearance. What image do I want to project to the world? Blogging software allows you to pick many different themes, and none of them inspires me to write War and Peace, particularly. Since it’s already been done, I guess I don’t have anything to worry about. Mostly I’d like the thing to look pleasant, and sunflowers make me happy, so I usually art up whatever I’m doing with plenty of ’em.
So today I changed my theme, and things look different. I can always go back … or choose something else. I mainly would like the photos I take to look gorgeous, though I suppose that’s more up to me than it is to WordPress.
Anyway, this morning I traveled 67.8 miles on foot from the elementary school to the fire station with a teeming horde of kindergarteners.
You have never been anywhere until you’ve walked down a busy thoroughfare, through a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, down a parking lot, and across three lanes of traffic with 47,837 6-year-olds.
They squirm and they wiggle. They tug and they pull. They skip, scatter, and flee and pick up pieces of gunk from the sidewalk. They are utterly charming.
So maybe we only walked six blocks. And maybe there were just 40 of them: two classes’ worth, including the one to which my own little urchin — front row right, in the jean jacket — belongs.
They met the nice fireman. They poked and they prodded him, and asked him penetrating questions like, “why do you have those Christmas decorations over there?” They were in the spirit of Fire Prevention Week, you see.
The walk back to the school was as eventful as the 4,000-mile trek getting there. A highlight: a funnel web, one of the three types of web we’d learned about in our recent spider studies and one as yet unobserved by us.
So if this week I have a theme, it’s that everywhere I go I’m surrounded by spiders — and the sticky hands of kindergarteners.
Spider webs, the sticky hands of kindergartners … same difference! 🙂
I still remember how bitterly disappointed I was when I visited a fire station in kindergarten, and there was no pole. I mean, really, if there’s no pole, then it’s less a fire station than a garage, you know?
They all wanted to know about the pole! There must be a pole. I think the excitement factor of being a fireman must be a lot less in this new, non-pole era.