Willow in the enormous banyan tree in Lahaina Town (which, whoops, you aren't supposed to climb on)
At the beginning of the school year I went to Back to School Night and sat at Willow's desk to learn all about the Grand Master Plan for third grade. She's my fourth kid in third grade at the same school and Lex had the same teacher, so there wasn't really anything new. Except. The kids were supposed to bring in EITHER two cans of beans (about a pound each, right?) or some small hand weights for morning exercises - the five or ten minutes at the start of the day where the kids sit in their seats but do some weightlifting to get their fidgets out before they buckle down and work on math.
Naturally, I sent my child to school the next day with two cans of chickpeas.
Over the last few months she's not said really too much about it, but maybe she's mentioned once that other kids have weights and she has those stupid cans. I took the 'other kids' to be maybe two or three other kids. Like how when they say that EVERYONE ELSE in their class has a cell phone and really it's only two or three kids who do. Right?
Last weekend Scuba hit the sick wall and was going to lose his mind if we didn't get out of the house. By that point he'd been sick with pneumonia for a week or more, and since he already isn't fond of lounging about, spending the week mostly in bed was killing him. So I drove us (I never drive. I always make him drive. I hate driving.) to the sporting goods store to look at exercise bikes and dumbbell weights because he's thinking that he got sick from working out at the gym where people do disgusting things like cough and blow their nose all over their hand towel and then throw the towel onto the treadmill handlebars. GROSS.
The sporting goods store had a big row of teensy little cute colorful one-pound hand weights, and Scuba, being the good parent between the two of us, said Hey, doesn't Willow need weights for school? Let's get her some.
So we left with powder blue hand weights for Willow and a bunch of dumbbells (a little five-pounder for me to work out with, even). And on Monday afternoon when she came home from school and saw them sitting on the bookshelf in the living room, she lit up. ARE THESE FOR ME?
Know WHY she was so happy? Everyone else in class really does have weights and she was the only one working out with two cans of Trader Joe's chickpeas. I feel so bad about it, but in my defense, if it had been one of her older siblings, they'd have been all up in my face every day asking for weights. She's just a content kid, so sometimes I miss seeing what she needs.
