An Open Book

I, like many US citizens, see the 'Patriot Act' of 2001 as an invasion of privacy. Although, looking through someone's library records does tell a lot about a person. 

Wow, Paige finished this book in a few days:

And these ones in just two days:

Hum, but she's not moving very quickly on this one:

Spoiler: it's because I'm taking so many notes.

A lot of these tween parenting books give tips about how to get your child to open up to you. We all know "How's it going?" doesn't usually get you a real answer even with adults. But, I learned a new trick about how to get the scoop from my friend Ana at the Kita Christmas party. If you see your friend looking sad or happy just declare it. Hearing, "you look horrible," gave me permission to get out some of my pent-up tears. Which, is a good segue to why I was crying again this morning in the Kita.

I just found out that one of our beloved Kita teachers, Judy, died of cancer a month ago. In the last couple years she'd moved to the Kita around the corner so I'd had fewer daily interactions with her. The parents at the Kita around the corner knew that she was sick and died, but the news wasn't public at our Kita as most of the current kids never had the pleasure of having Judy as a teacher.

Like most of the teachers at Kita, I didn't know her well. I knew she was about my age and moved to Berlin for a boy. She was kind and bubbly. She was forgiving when Hugo started a revolt on an Ubahn while on a Kita field-trip. Just last week we were looking at Crosby's Kita picture album and Carmen pointed to her and said "That's Judy." Carmen knew her, even though she'd only met her a handful of times at joint Kita field-trips.

There are some jobs where you can fake enthusiasm or be motivated enough by renumeration to do the work. However, anyone who chooses to be a preschool teacher does it out of love. I am grateful for the love Judy poured out to my kids over their collective seven years at Kita. I wish I'd had the chance to tell her one last time how thankful I am. Instead we'll be sending a video to her grieving mom in Colombia of the kids singing a song. We were blessed to have Judy in our lives. We will miss her beautiful smile and warmth.