Firsts.

Sometimes I miss those little baby days of firsts.  First real food, first words, first crawling, first steps, first running....so many things. The growth is constantly visible and occurs so quickly it can be mind-boggling.

At one month old, everything is new and exciting!

Then, after a couple of years, the pace seems a little slower for some reason.  To be sure, there are still milestones - words turn into sentence fragments that turn into sentences, scribbles turn into letters that turn into written words, doodles turn into amorphous shapes that turn into stick figures.  The evolution is more reasonably paced - so much so that you might not even realize it's happening until it does.

Which is probably why, in these last few months, the several "firsts" we've experienced with Anna seem so striking.

This may be Anna's first real character drawing - "It's a minion giving another minion a haircut, mom!"

The Proud Moments of Grownups

Glory days, well they'll pass you by, 

Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye,

Glory days, glory days...

Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture

A little of the glory of, well time slips away 

And leaves you with nothing mister, but

Boring stories of glory days.

-- "Glory Days," Bruce Springsteen

When we're young, it seems that moments of pride are in abundance.  Our first A on a school assignment. Our first real hit in baseball.  A trophy that we won.  A ribbon for being a good citizen.  A prize that we got for doing something good.

Why can't adulthood be like that?

My little league baseball card. 

Overreact Much?

I've been scouring the web looking for interesting and thought-provoking stuff for the blog.  Just before the tragic school shooting that occurred near Cleveland, Ohio last week, I found this unbelievable article about a four year old's drawing that led to her dad's arrest in Kitchener, Ontario.

Now, my initial reaction was - are you kidding me?? A small child draws a picture and they immediately send in the cavalry? It seemed a drastic case of reacting first and asking questions later.

But then I read about yet another senseless tragedy involving a young student and a gun....and I backed off my outraged stance a little bit.

[Not the drawing referenced in the article. Photo from www.littledaisycafe.com.]

What Will It Take?

I can't stop thinking about the racist math problems that I posted about the other day. I'm not trying to overdo it with this topic, but it just absolutely floors me that in the year 2012, this kind of ignorance is still widespread enough for things like this to appear in kids' school assignments. So I think it needs to be discussed. A lot.

What's worse is the flimsy justification that the math problems were supposed to coordinate with social studies lessons. That makes me wonder what in the world those kids are learning in their social studies and other classes.

Photo from abcnews.com

Obviously, the larger issue of racism isn't limited to public schools - it's everywhere, still. I just read an article about a racial slur used to describe a customer on a Papa John's receipt. And that was in Manhattan, just last Friday.  So clearly it doesn't matter whether you're in a huge, supposedly cosmopolitan city or in rural Georgia. Ignorance is everywhere.