When a school becomes a home

Look at these little cherubs!  

This is a three year old class at my boys' school; they adopted us for Christmas and gave us a miniature Christmas tree filled with gift cards.

I can't express my depth of gratitude for my boys' school; it has been their constant through this storm.

What I would have done if I had been homeschooling this year?

Besides the curriculum burning up, how could I have kept it together to give my kids any kind of educational instruction?

And they would have seen crazy mom 24/7, instead of just in the afternoon.

Malachi is in a class of six little boys, and they are all good friends.

Their school feels like a home- like a small town little community of good-hearted people- the kind of place that my boys will remember in flashes of white clapboard siding; the musty smell of an old building mixed with play dough and finger paint; a library housed in what used to be the angular parlor of an old Victorian mini-mansion; a playground nestled under the boughs of huge trees, with little sidewalks connecting each building to the next.

Gabriel is in a class of fourteen kids with two other Gabriels, and he loves it, but we just switched him out to a smaller class because he's got a speech articulation problem, and we wanted him to have more one on one attention with his speech, like the other day when he brought home a Smurf called Greedy who was holding a bag of blueberries- a prize from the prize box for being good-and he said,


"I got a NERF called SHEEDY who has FOOBERRIES!"

He also says "Merry Shitmas," and when he prays to Jesus, it sounds like he says, "Sheesha," which I'm pretty sure is what you smoke in a hookah.

I love hims!!

I always think of Gabriel as my social butterfly, my cool no matter what little boy who just goes with the flow.

If given the chance, he can be all over the place; he's the one who dances like a crazy man during circle time.
But he's also the one who counts the quietest boy in the class, Adric, as his best friend.

And he's the one, at their first school event- a fall tailgating party- who cried as soon as I appeared, and didn't want to leave my side.

Hims has the softest heart on the planet.

Hims just a little lover.

(hims also wears his shoes on the wrong feet all the time...can you tell?)

This broke my heart- for some reason, when he had the chance to swing at the piñata in front of everybody, Gabriel slumped his shoulders and caved in his chest,

and got so sad.
I don't know why.
But he kept looking back at me to come and get him, and I so wanted to rescue him.
But I didn't.


Because I know his school is a safe place, with good teachers, and that they will take care of him, and that
he has to find his own way in this tough world.

But oh, how I wanted to rescue him.

I did shout encouragement from the sidelines (and yes, took photos), and then racked my brain thinking of how I might have failed him as a mother or given him some latent shame that comes out in social situations.

Pause to insert truth: Grace and love cover over a multitude of finite mommy failings. 


Kyrie also loves the boys' school.

Especially the carpool line where she gets to say hi to the pretty ladies who come to get the boys every morning.

And also the snowcones in a cup.

I still remember my name tag from kindergarten.

There's something about seeing your name in print, in a public place, for the first time.

Can you guess which family portrait is our family?

That's right!
We be the green stick people with the googly faces!

And baby Chai?
Hers is a spider baby.

Hers stole everybody else's arms!!

I think I'm the one-eyed momma monster, and Daddy is the one with the big beebo of course.

Malachi checking in to write his name every morning.
He's a Tiger.

When the fire hit, Miss Carey, the director of the school, was on it like white on rice.

I remember Michael and I sitting in her office, tears running down both our faces, as we tried to form the words to explain our situation, and to ask for help- just if the boys could stay after a few days a week while we tried to get things straightened out- that's all we asked for.

Miss Carey and her team of teachers, and so many many parents, got us a free storage unit, furniture, blankets and pillows for the boys, toys, books, two new backpacks, diapers...donations started flowing in immediately, and endlessly.

I would come to school to pick up the boys, and there would be boxes and bags waiting for me in Malachi's classroom.

She let the boys stay after school everyday that first week-feeding them lunch, letting them nap- so that we could take care of fire business.

Taking pictures of their happy faces and texting them to me so that I could see they were still smiling.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this pretty much sums it up.

Stuck to our fridge, even after the fire, was Gabriel's first self-portrait.

Look at that face. Those wide-open arms.

He is obviously super happy to be at his special school.

I've said it a hundred times, but it never ceases to amaze- community is God with skin on.