Notes

Over the last several weeks, I have been busier professionally than I have ever been in my life. Now that most of the difficult parts (for this job, anyway) are behind me, it is time to start catching up. Below are a few notes I took during the midst of the craziness.

***

Jameson picked up a packet of seaweed wraps left out from last night.

He pointed to some of the chinese words, and said “These mean SUSHI”.

"Well, sort of Jameson," I said. "Those are words in another language. Do you remember when Aunt Jurate was speaking to her niece Agne, and we couldn’t understand? They were speaking another language. These figures here on the package are words in another language. There are lots of different languages in the world."

"Oh," he said, absorbing the concept. "Was Aunt Jurate speaking in cursive?"

***

Alex looked at me when we got back from a program in Jameson’s classroom. I was running on about 3 hours of sleep, after supervising the install of multiple different changes in IT systems after the hospital opened. In fact, looking over the last 8-9 days before that day, sleep had been in short supply and stress had been high. (things went really well, by the way… I’m just very passionate about what I do)

He looked closely and said, “Mama, it must be really hard to open a hospital. I can see the dark circles under your eyes.”

***

Jameson’s classroom teacher assigned a number to each child in the first week of school. When they line up to go out of the room for special events, they get in “number” order.

Jameson is obsessed with these numbers. He is #22, and is totally passionate about the number 22 as a result. When he sees the number 22 anywhere—the store, on a sign, in a book—there is a great deal of shouting and excitement. We started to tune into how excited he was by this entire numbering scheme, and now we take our amusement from quizzing him about it.

(yes, this is where we get our amusement)

Who’s number 5? “Josie,” he says.

What about #12? “Avery,” he says quickly.

What about #19? A quick reflection, and then he says “Sylvie.”

Today he was talking (again) about the numbers… he mentioned that he’s surrounded by girls when they get in number order. He didn’t seem all together disappointment by this awareness.

“But,” he said, sighing deeply. “They take a bit of getting used to.”