Fresh Tomorrows (and Chocolate)

Hello and welcome to a nice, snowy, last-Saturday-before-Christmas Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is December 19th.

Only 3 more days of distance learning and then it's Christmas break. Woohoo! We are counting down the days!

Ever the optimist, I have been diligent in my due diligence to search for the silver linings of 2020. But, folks, here we are, down the last stretch before we can hang up the skates and call it a year, and I can't wait. 

This year has pushed me to be more creative, more innovative, and more positive on all fronts than ever before. It's part exhilerating, all this discovery of this seemingly limitless pool of motivation and inspiration, but part exhausting as well. I am tired, peeps, and oh, so ready for a year-end break. Yet, just when I think I'm ready to throw my hands up in resignation, tune out the kids, and binge on a year's worth of Hallmark movies, another little sliver of insight shines in my eye, giving me hope that, yes, we can get through another week of 2020. This week was no exception.

So here was this week's adventure in parenting:

The shiny-object luster of distance learning and its perks - Sleeping in! Go at your own pace! Pajama day! - faded fast this week, especially for the Kindergartener. To battle the blues, I realized that I needed some sort of carrot to dangle before his little nose to keep him showing up at his own "desk" in the living room with his Chromebook. So, I picked what works for me: chocolate.

On a whiteboard, I kept track of the Kindergartener and Third Grader's good choices and bad choices. For every assignment completed, a tally mark went in the good choices column. Because I'm a super positive mom, I awarded tally marks for other things like focus, good manners, patience, timeliness. I also gave bonus ticks for every time the Kindergartener printed his name across the top of his multitude of papers - no small feat for a kid who has 7 letters in his name.

And the strategy worked. The Kindergartener loved seeing his tallied groups of five accrue. I even earned cool mom bonus points because we practiced counting in groups of five. 5, 10, 15, 20...

At the end of the day, kids cashed in their good choice points for chocolate chips. We grouped them again in piles of 5 sweet morsels. 5, 10, 15, 20.... And I would hand over the chocolaty wages earned for that day.

Now, let's pause here and talk about those bad choices. You might think we are a perfect family (so says the neighbor kid. "You guys are the best family ever!" he declared when I announced one day we could make chocolate chip cookies.) But no, we are as "normal" and as dysfunctional in our own way, much like any other family.

After handing over the good choices chocolate earnings, I would go back to the whiteboard and tally up the bad choices. Bad choices included things like playing games instead of doing homework, watching more YouTube videos than mom allowed, shutting off the computer right in the middle of the teacher's explanation on Google Meets. Breaking a lamp. (Twice.)

Just like Monopoly or The Game of Life mimics real life scenarios - sometimes you get paid and sometimes you have to pay - the kids had to return one chocolate chip per bad choice. 

Maybe I sound like a mean mom, but let me tell you, these were some impressively solemn, life-lesson like moments. I give the kids lots of credit because they were pretty compliant and didn't make a fuss when returning a portion of their sweet salary. "You eat it, mom!" the Kindergartener would cheer. But I also think the kids took it so well because they still had plenty of chocolate left over to enjoy. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps it's not such a big deal to lose 6 chocolate chips when you still have 23.

And then Thursday happened.

There must have been some strange cosmic dust floating in the snow because Thursday was a baaaaaad day where the bad choices outnumbered the good choices. By a lot. Even with my above average abundance of positivity, I knew there was simply no recovering from it. 

Fortunately, some wisdom presented itself as I recalled my most favorite literary quote from Anne of Green Gables: “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it...well with no mistakes in it yet.”

And so I told the kids just that. The fact of life is sometimes you just have bad days where the bad choices are going to (far) outweigh the good ones. When that happens, the best thing you can do is take it for what it is. Tomorrow always starts fresh with no mistakes. (Yet.)

The kids nodded, maybe gave me a squinty look while they pondered this adult logic, before accepting their fate and moving on to a new activity. There would be no chocolate chips. But tomorrow would start fresh, a Friday filled with the promise of beginning again.

Sure enough, the next morning, everyone in our household awoke with a tingle of optimism; a hint of celebration in the knowledge we had rounded all the bases of yet another week and all that was left was the crackling anticipation of crossing the homeplate of Friday before finally heading into the weekend. The littles hopped to it determined to make good choices. And you know what? It turned out to be a pretty good day. This Monopoly-banker mom even gave out a few chocolate bonuses.

On This Day

Historic Highlights (credits)

2012 - Election of First female President of South Korea

Park Geun-hye is the eleventh President of South Korea and also holds the distinction of being the first female head of state in Northeast Asia. She assumed office in February 2013.

1984 - Hong Kong Treaty Signed

Formally known as the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong, the Sino-British Treaty was signed by Zhao Ziyang of China and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom in Beijing. The treaty decided the fate of Hong Kong as a territory of China from July 1, 1997.

1972 - Apollo 17 returns to Earth

The last mission of the United States' Apollo program spent 12 days in space and was the first human spaceflight launched at night from the United States. The three-member crew spent more time orbiting the Moon and on the surface of the Moon than during any other Moon landings. It was also the last time humans set foot on Earth's only natural satellite.

1971 - A Clockwork Orange released

The dystopian film was directed by Stanley Kubrick and was based on a novella of the same name by British author, Anthony Burgess. Based in a futuristic London, the film opened with critical acclaim, though the centrality of violence in it drew a lot of mainstream criticism. Today, the movie is considered to be one of the best movies of the 20th century.

1886 - Sherlock Holmes' The Adventure of Beryl Coronet begins on this date

The short detective story written by Arthur Conan Doyle and featuring detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend and assistant Dr. Watson began on this date with the theft of 3 precious crystals from a coronet. The story is the 11th in a series of 12 stories contained in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Happy Birthday to You!🎶 

1980 - Jake Gyllenhaal, American actor

1974 - Ricky Ponting, Australian cricketer

1967 - Criss Angel, American magician

1915 - Édith Piaf, French singer-songwriter, actress

1906 - H Allen Smith, humorist/author (Low Man on Totem Pole)

Remembering You

2012 - Robert Bork, American lawyer, scholar, United States Attorney General

2009 - Hussein-Ali Montazeri, Iranian theologian, scholar, activist

2008 - Dock Ellis, American baseball player

2000 - John Lindsay, American politician, 103rd Mayor of New York City

1848 - Emily Brontë, English novelist

Take the good with the bad and make it a great Saturday.

Kim 

Non, je ne regrette rien. (I regret nothing.) - Edith Piaf