Normal kids

Most of the things that happen at our house are boringly normal.

Last night I stepped on Cerberus. Well, the small plastic model of him, anyhow, not the actual guardian of the underworld.

William pitched one of his occasional three-year old temper tantrums tonight—he had a little melt-down.

Laura packed five DVDs and three videos for her trip to her grandmother’s house this weekend and decided about halfway through packing her clothes that she really really really wanted to stay home—and could she?

Nope. Chris and I banned Cerberus to the toy box again, hauled Will out of the bookstore hollering “but I WANT the dragon,” and sent Laura off to Siberia, otherwise known as Grandma’s. And probably the most normal thing of all—I have been busy worrying about my beautiful talented children and what will happen to them in another year of school.

I keep thinking about our parent-teacher conference with Will’s teacher last month when we asked about why he’d been placed in the Caterpillar classroom instead of becoming a Butterfly. We’d found out that Will, who turned three back in April, would be in the younger kid class, while one of our friend’s daughters, who won’t turn three until September, is going into the older three-year old class, and asked about this in conference. Age, apparently, isn’t the only placement factor, and in Will’s case, the center carefully considered his “emotional maturity.” Evidently when Will has one of his little melt-downs every now and then, he is just too needy. He’ll do better, his teacher earnestly explained, in the smaller classroom, where he won’t have to compete for attention quite so much. Now I am just sure that no other kids in the Glow Worm class ever have tantrums and want attention. My bright little William, who when Laura was red-eyed and sniffly as she got into her Grandma’s car, asked “Are you bringing my sister back?” William, who tonight reeled off his plans for the immediate future: “Tonight we’ll go home and I’ll brush my teeth with my Batman toothbrush and go to sleep, and then I’ll wake up and eat Honeycombs and go to school with my friends, and then Mama will take me out somewhere and we’ll see a Spiderman suit and she’ll say yes and I can play Spiderman.” My “emotionally immature” three-year old.

And my beautiful bright daughter, who scored badly one a test one afternoon in second grade and has been ineligible for the district’s Gifted and Talented Program since—because the only factor considered in placement is some combination of the test scores from the current year, and those from second grade. Not grades. Not teacher recommendations. Test scores. At work, I had a sticker on my office door for a while that said “My child is not a test score,” but I’m thinking maybe I need to start wearing it now. Laura only became truly conscious that she was missing something with GTP this past year, and we had one of our “purple cloth talks”—a story for another day—in which I explained to her as well as I could why schools use test scores and that test scores aren’t always a predictor of intelligence and how the fact that she’s not in the program means it’s the sorriest excuse for a Gifted and Talented Program there could be—and well, I was sort of losing my objectivity at that point and had to stop.

I want, like most parents, more for my children than I had myself. More opportunities, more education, an easier time finding those things. A better job when they grow up (especially since at the rate Chris and I are going they will have to support us in our old age). I want everybody to love them as much as I love them. I can’t understand why every teacher doesn’t fall over to praise their great intelligence—what vocabularies! What reasoning abilities! And even great manners. What more could you want from a kid? Empathy? A three-year old who worries about whether Kitty had dinner yet? A ten-year old who will play Heigh-Ho-Cherrio with a three-year old over and over, even when he doesn’t play right? My two normal kids, both already with files and assessments and paperwork laying a path down a nice normal road.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shopping for colleges yet. Nobody had Harvard onesies, although we do have a savings bond or two tucked away for tuition some day. I just don’t quite understand this path for one child with Cerberus and a plan for life, another with glasses perched on her nose reading and rereading all summer long. Not that I think either will stay on the road their files are mapping for them now—but I wish they didn’t have to start out straying, because it’s just so simple for a teacher to check one box instead of another, based on a tantrum one day, a test another, the weight these normal things take.