cows and ... ducks?

We used to live in the town of Maynard, Massachusetts. That big white house on the corner was where I spent the first seven years of my life.



My grandfather, my mother's father, died in that house five days after his wife, my grandmother died. He was 96-years old when he died and he was the picture of good health. He just decided once my grandmother passed away that he didn't want to live anymore.

So he stopped.

This was my very first friend, Amy's house. She lived a few houses down the street from us. I'm still in touch with her family and love them. Very much.



This is the old Corner Store directly down the hill from where we used to live. I remember going in to this store, all the time, when I was a child. I can still remember enjoying my Dip-N-Stick on the front steps. Or was it a Dip-N-Lick?



All I remember is that my teeth would tingle when I'd eat it, probably because the sweet and sour sugar, smothered over a solid sugar stick, was rapidly decaying them.

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This is the Coolidge School which was a two-minute walk at the end of our street.



Now it's an administration building, but years ago, all seven of us, attended at least some school at Coolidge. My mother has fond memories of sending the kids off to school in the morning, and then we'd be home for lunch, what seemed like 10 minutes later. She tells me the story of dropping my brother, Wally, off for the first day of Kindergarten and by the time she got home - he was already there. He'd beat her home and said, "I'M NOT GOING BACK AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME."

Oh, but she did.

So he retaliated by shaving the identical neighbor twins totally bald. But only after he shaved the head of every single doll his five sisters had amassed.

Directly behind Coolidge School is the first hill that I ever sled upon in my entire lifetime.



I remember that hill being SO HUGE when I was a child. It still is big, but when we took our children sledding at Coolidge during our recent trip to Massachusetts, they thought it paled in comparison to Jericho Hill in Marlborough, where Uncle Wally had taken them sledding earlier in the week.

(Bridget, that link is for you!)

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Speaking of school, and to respond to a question that Kelley posed to me, earlier today, our children are doing fantastic in kindergarten. While we didn't have much of a choice as to whether they'd be in one class, or separate classes (there are only two kindergarten classes at our school), we opted to keep them all together.

Despite the fact that they are all in the same room, our children are thriving.



The all have their own *gasp!* friends and they very rarely interface with each other during school. I'm not sure, yet, what we'll do next year, but I might pursue keeping them in the same classroom. Not because I don't think that they wouldn't be perfectly fine in their own separate classes (they were in their own Montessori classrooms), but because it would make life considerably easier for us if we only had one teacher with the same curriculum and homework to deal with each day.

Also? I know that my children aren't ALWAYS going to be in the same class for their entire academic careers. Why I'm sure they'll each pursue their very own PhD tracks. But I don't think it hurts to keep them together for the first few years of elementary school. As time progresses and we can see that we need to make a change, we will. As for now, we subscribe to the philosophy of Keep It Simple.



Three Children + One Class = SIMPLE.

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Speaking of Maynard, this picture, which my sister Beth has hanging in her dining room, used to hang in the kitchen at our house in Maynard.



Even though I had taken four years of Latin in high school, I never stopped to really look at this picture and decipher it's meaning. I just thought that it was some ancient philosophical phrase. Or at least I did until Beth read it aloud to me, recently. And that's when I realized it was about a kid named Billy who confused 40 buses with a bunch of trucks loaded up with cows and ducks.

Oh see Billy, see her go!
Forty buses in a row.
No Billy! Them is trucks!
See what's in 'em?
Cows and ducks!

So much for my ancient philosophy theory.