Making a holiday out of a haircut

This morning Joey and I had to hustle out the door, right behind Ella and Alex, to get to my Integrationskurs on time.  We didn't quite make it, our best intentions aside: we'd brought some bread with us, for the birds on the Limmat, and it was hard to pull ourselves away from feeding first the ducks, and then the seagulls who caught our crusts midair, and then, Joey's favorite, the swans ("Big as me!"), who finally deigned to come over and share our breakfast.

We stopped on the way home, too, getting dumplings for me and gummy candies for the kids.  Joey, charmed the shop owner out of a little bag of gummy bears, and he made them last all the way home, narrating their small adventures on his stomach before making them scream ("Ahh! A big boy! Heeeeelp!") and then dropping them into his mouth.

The two Ellas came home shortly after us. I invited nochElla to join us for the afternoon, but she told me she couldn't: she had two Joker assignments to write this afternoon, besides their heaps of homework.  "Ah, and what awful thing did you do?" I asked her. She sighed: "Well, one of them is for forgetting to write my name on my paper, and the other is for forgetting my hair bauble for gym class." My Ella and I looked at each other, and then Ella went and found a few spare hair ties to hide in her gym bag, just in case.

You know, after that rush of Jokers in the first week of school, Ella hasn't brought home a single one. I guess she decided to make an effort to try to figure out the systems and the myriad of rules in the class. And that's lucky for me, too, because that meant I got to take the kids out for the afternoon, instead of prodding Ella to finish her work. I didn't have ambitious plans for the day, but we were going to try something new.

Heading to the GZ: "Is it safe, Joey?" "Yeah, it safe."

Once each month, a woman sets up a walk-in haircutting session in our Gemeinschaftszentren (or GZ, or community center): at 15 francs per kid, it's a bargain, even by American standards. And my boys, they were looking kind of shaggy.

Because Wednesday is a half-day at school, there's a lot of other things going on at the GZ for the neighborhood kids, things to keep my gang busy while we waited for their turn in the dance studio, where they were doing the haircuts. Of course, there's always that great playground

and the library was open as well. I hate to admit it, but it's been a long time since we've gone there, long enough that the kids were really excited by the novelty. Ella, in particular, had run ahead, and was bouncing on her toes when I got there "You'll never guess what kind of book they have here! Guess! Guess!" she demanded. Calvin and Hobbes, it turned out, and some Garfield books, too. "I think these will be really good for my German!" Ella was selling them, hard: "Can I take them out? Please?"

There's a ten-book limit at the library, and Ella loaded herself down with comics, maxing out our card. We also discovered a shelf of English grown-up and children's books that are free for the taking and don't count toward the limit: Ella picked out Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, squealing that there was a new Harry Potter book that she'd never read.

Apologetically, I explained about the change in title. Ella knows all about British English.  That's what they teach in her school, and apparently they're slightly snotty about it. Ella, she speaks mere Amerikanische...but she's learning to say "lorry" and "nappy" and "brilliant." I'm waiting for the day she walks out the door, calling "Pip pip!" Anyway, she started reading her book, and noted that there wasn't any difference, not until she got to the sentence "Dudley had learnt a new word ('Shan't!')"

After the library, the kids moved next door to the art room, where they were having an open studio.  I'd always meant to check this out, but I'd been saving it for grayer weather. Instead of having any guided activity or project, here the kids are free to raid the shelves for any materials that they want, and they have bins of anything you can imagine: feathers, googly eyes, wood pieces, shiny paper.   Ella and Alex dove in, pawing through the possibilities.

Joey, however, was growing very impatient with me. Ahem! He'd been promised a haircut! I asked the supervisor of the art room if it would be possible to leave my big kids there. She glanced at them: "Oh, of course! Just as long as they know where to find you, at home or wherever."  But I was just going across the hall.

Just as we arrived, another woman came in with a son who had to get to a soccer (or, as Ella would say, football) practice, so we let her go first. But Joey was paying attention: "Hey! That's not FAIR!" he objected. When it was finally his turn, he climbed eagerly up on the stool and sat quiet and still. A little too still: halfway into the haircut, we noticed he was starting to nod off. So Joey finished his haircut with me propping his chin up, with Joey mumbling something about not being sleepy.

As I was holding his head, I noticed Joey felt a little too warm. And then he slept all the way home, and didn't really wake up until 9:00, when he crawled out of his room and fell asleep again on the living room rug.  So we've got sick one on our hands.

But Alex and Ella were having a wonderful time. Alex was working on a picture of a volcano, and he'd spent a lot of time decorating some silver coins and bedazzling things with iridescent plastic.

Ella had made something that looked a bit like a dream catcher, and she was in the middle of constructing something, either a ball run or an internet, out of a series of tubes.  The supervisor said that my kids had been quiet and self-contained and very busy. "Do you see that group of girls over there?" She gestured to a large cluster of five-year-olds. "They all want to copy your daughter's decoration." Their moms were obediently cutting out circles of cellophane and trimming strings of beads. Ella was thrilled by the compliment.

Ella's creation. And where's Alex?

Alex and I left Ella to her devices, and Alex took his turn getting his haircut. He thought that the story of Joey falling asleep was so funny that he pretended to fall doze a couple of times, too, but he managed to get a good haircut in spite of himself.  As the hairdresser was sweeping up at the afternoon, she laughed, pointing out my kids bright blond curls, mixed in with all of the darker hair.

When we went to collect Ella, I asked the art supervisor what the charge for the afternoon would be: they charge according to the materials used.  My kids had used a lot of stuff, particularly Ella, who had taken up armloads of mailer tubes. The supervisor asked, tentatively, if I thought seven francs would be too much.

Let's see...she watched my kids for three hours and kept them in art supplies. I guess that's fair. The kids ran home ahead of me, Ella with tubes flapping behind her as she carried home her creation.

But apparently my kids weren't quite sated.  After a quick dinner for them, they disappeared to make leaf rubbings, leaving Dennis and me to to a more leisurely meal. It was as close to a date as we've had in ages. And meanwhile, Ella covered my front window with cut-out leaves, and Alex made me a half-dozen pictures. Both the kids were just so peaceful and content: I think today was just what they needed.