Screen Free Week

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            We have fights in our home about screen time and Minecraft, but on the whole our kids don’t spend too much time on screens.  (Amy would prefer even less, but she grew up watching almost no TV except Little House on the Prairie).  But between Screen Free Week this week and the gradual return of daylight (if not warmth), it’s been nice to see our kids spending so much time outdoors or with their noses buried in books.

            Elsa began spring soccer last week.  Practices are Tuesday and Thursday late afternoons, so it’s been a little chilly.  Amy brings her to practice because I teach till 4:45, but I go pick her up.  This past Tuesday was sunny and relatively warm, so I sat in the bleachers beneath big white clouds moving swiftly across the sky, and more or less read my new book, The Orphan Master’s Son, which won the Pulitzer in 2013.  I looked around at the green grass of the field and the light red touches on the tips of the tree branches and it seemed almost impossible that a month ago it would have been dark and snow still covered the ground.

            When I came home this evening, Cormac and our tenant’s kids were riding bicycles in circles in the driveway while Elsa sat on the edge and wrote in a book she just picked up at the Book Fair called The Totally Tea-RRIFIC Hat-Tastic Book All About You.  I told her I’d get her a couple books at the end of the week, but she smuggled her Spend Jar into school today, hidden in the bottom of her backpack, because she couldn’t wait.  She bought that book, and a journal with a lock, and a book about sports, because she’s all into being a jock lately (while her brother is all into being a nerd).

            This evening Amy had to rush back to school for the World Language Department’s Awards Ceremony.  So I spent the early evening sitting at our countertop with the door to the porch open, supervising the kids as they did their homework.  Then I rounded them up while it was still light and we took a walk down our street to the Fenton River.  We have Joshua’s Trust Nature Preserve all along the opposite side of our road and then a field, an old mill and mill pond, and a stone bridge at the bottom of the hill.  Elsa and Cormac walked along the top of the bridge wall to the mill side, and then Elsa walked beneath the bridge so she could belt out “Your Song” and listen to her own voice echo out from below and across the water.

            We got back to the house just as evening descended upon our little valley, and I let Elsa onto the computer so she could write a goodbye poem to Miss Riley, a student teacher from UConn who’s been in her class this semester.  She’s been running Writing Workshop in Elsa’s class, and Elsa has become really fond of her and will miss her.  All my advisees have been telling me about their students crying on their last days this week.  I don’t know that Elsa would let herself cry but she feels strongly enough to want to write a poem.

            Cormac immediately sequestered himself in his room to dive into Treasure Island, which he started just this past Monday.  He’s been on a pirate kick since we let him watch the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  He finished Pearls of Lustra on Sunday (from the Redwall series) and wanted a new book, so he and I pored over the books on his shelves to see what he had NOT read yet, and made a small stack.  As soon as I placed Stevenson’s novel on the pile, he grabbed it.  He’ll read that till after Elsa goes to bed.  I would read to Elsa from Masterpiece, which is about a cockroach who can paint like Dürer, but she seems to have misplaced the book, so we will have to go with something else for now, maybe The Cloud Searchers, which is book three in the Amulet graphic novel series.  She just got that for Easter.

After Elsa and Amy are asleep, Cormac and I will pick up The Return of the King and resume where we left off, with Gondor just coming under siege and Gandalf worrying about Frodo’s journey to Cirith Ungol.

            Once I can get Cormac to bed, I’ll pour a glass of wine and stay up too late reading more of my book.  (But despite Screen Free Week and since it’s still too cold to sit on the porch at night, I might sneak a peak at the NBA playoffs.  I think the Memphis-Portland game should still be on.  Just don’t tell my kids).