Pages

Friday, September 15, 2017

A teddy bear picnic

Yesterday afternoon Benjamin rushed out of school and plopped down in the grass beside me before I even had the chance to heave my whale-like figure off the lawn get up.

"I have to show you a paper from my backpack!" he gushed, so even though we were in a flurry of activity with dozens of kindergarteners and their caregivers milling about us as they, too, sought to be reunited with each other after their long 2.5 hours day apart, I happily let him unzip his backpack and, with great gusto, present to me this Most Exciting Paper because he never wants to show me what's in his backpack.

I had to have a frank discussion with him about who was in charge of ensuring he obtained an adequate education (that would be me, not Grandma (though Grandma is my helper), so he had to show me the papers in his backpack (though he was free to share them with Grandma as well as me, keeping the papers from me was not an option)) to get him to allow me to go through his school things. (Sheesh—this kid!)

But not this time.


This time he was so excited about the paper in his backpack that he had to show me right away.

"We can bring a teddy bear to school!" he squealed before I could even read the paper informing me that their class would be having a teddy bear picnic the following morning. "But it has to fit inside our backpack," he told me, "So I can't bring Zoë's big new one."

He picked out a teddy bear when we got home and then spent the afternoon playing with it and lost it, so this morning he had to pick out a different teddy bear to take to school. He choose one of my childhood bears (the tag says 1984 on it; and I mean to take a picture of him with it but...didn't) that he has been playing with quite a bit recently.

Despite the morning's bear mix-up, he was so excited to get to school that he could hardly walk. He was dancing and prancing down the sidewalk, talking a mile a minute.

He was still dancing and prancing when Zoë and I picked him up a few hours later. He wanted to stop at the playground on the way home to get "all of Teddy's wiggles out" because "Teddy ate so many snacks that she's just all full of energy" but, of course, "Teddy can't really eat so really [Benjamin] ate all the snacks" so he was the one full of boundless energy.

We stopped at the playground and Benjamin told me all about the picnic before running off to use up some of that energy of his (Zoë was more than happy to play alongside him).

Their little picnic mimicked the diet of an actual bear (which is our school mascot, because black bears live in the mountains): berries (to "represent" berries), honeycomb cereal (to represent honey), goldfish crackers (to represent fish), and blue gatorade (to represent river water).

He kept using the word represent but could hardly pronounce it; it was funny.

On the way home from the playground I started singing Teddy Bear's Picnic and Benjamin stopped dead in his tracks.

"What?"  he asked, completely flabbergasted. "Mom, how do you even know that?"

I guess I haven't sung that song in a while. I know I used to sing it to Miriam and Rachel (pre-Benjamin and proto-Zoë) before bed. Apparently it's time to dust it off again.

3 comments:

  1. That was a fun post! Made me smile. I could really shock Benjamin and sing that song, too, I guess!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You should! Our neighbor Necia started singing it when we walked past her house and he was floored again. :D He will be in awe that the whole world knows that song!

      Delete
  2. Sweet post! I'd love to see a picture of your old bear with Ben sometime. :)

    ReplyDelete