Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

I went to the moving on ceremony -- "graduation" for second graders who are finished at Franklin School and are moving across the neighborhood to Randall School for third grade. The principal, my friend Cathy McMillan, is retiring and I wanted to be there when the school and the new PTO board honored her. It was very nice, yada, yada. But the wild thing was that I did not remember anything about this ceremony from last year when Julia's class moved on. Nothing. Nada! I spoke with the person who I sat next to last year -- she remembered what I said (about setting up the play room for a complete dinosaur summer -- funny that I am do the same thing this week), I did not even remember sitting next to her. The whole time there and most of the rest of the day, I tried to tweak my brain. I read the blog entry for that day. Yes, indeed I was there and noticed as few things. But it is as if it never happened.

I've read about forgetting things around someone's death, but this was almost a month before David died. Life was going along very smoothly at that point. I had visited Cheshire in NYC for a few days, and I think that David was back at work part time. I thought I was emerging from the fog.

Stress, trauma, shock does crazy stuff to a body and a brain. I wonder what else I forgot.

I continue to clean and mix up the play room -- I'll be getting to my desk and files next week. I am putting away a lot of toys that Julia doesn't touch and hopefully, showcasing a few things she forgets about. I am setting up a few corners -- one for calendaring, one for money learning, one for reading. Maybe if I had a dozen more kids to practice on, I could home school. I will try to post notes on our work and what we are doing with hopes of comments from some of my more experienced readers. Please, please.