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Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Shady Acres

A couple of weeks ago, Miriam told me about a spot in the schoolyard where she and her friends like to play. Drawing heavily from Anne of Green Gables, they have called it "Shady Acres" and there's a rock, a stump, a hill (originally an anthill, they changed it to be the big hill), and a couple of bushes nearby. They named everything in Shady Acres as follows, respectively:

  • The Rock Obama
  • Donald Stump
  • Hillary Clinton
  • George HW Bush
  • George W Bush

When I was out with the kids at recess last Thursday they gave me a tour of Shady Acres. Noting the fence bordering their magical world, I said, "What about Abraham Chain-Lincoln?"

They loved it. And now I'm totally cool in the eyes of a bunch of grade twoers (or second graders, whatever you'd prefer to say*). Woohoo!

Yesterday when we were walking past the playground to go to Rachel's chorus performance (because we always park in the front parking lot and end up walking the whole way around the school (parking in the bus lot just feels wrong)), Miriam told us that she and her friends have since added two more presidential places:

  • James Garfield (the little field below Hillary Clinton)
  • John F. Can-nedy (the garbage can; why not James Buchanan?) 

How she and her friends got to be so hilarious, I'll never know. But I love it.

* In Canada we tend to add -er onto the grade number. When I first moved to the states and would talk about "grade teners," my friends thought I was talking about "great tenors" for the longest time. Because we also don't use the terms freshmen, sophomore, junior, or senior to refer to high school students in Canada (at least, not at my high school) so to me people were grade niners, teners, eleveners, and twelvers. Totally not related to this post at all, except that's still often use the -er suffix instead of using ordinal number followed by the word grade (eg. first grade, second grade, etc. vs. first grader, second grader, etc.) and because "great tenors" kind of has something to with choir and I mentioned Rachel's chorus performance (she gets upset whenever I call it choir rather than chorus; I'm not sure what the difference is, really). But there you go: it's tangentially related.


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