There is a hymn we sing at church which includes the line “scatter sunshine all along your way, cheer, and bless, and brighten every passing day.” The tune began running through my head about half way through parent/teacher conferences at Kiki’s junior high school. We had 6 teachers to visit. Each of the classrooms had a large whiteboard. Gleek and Patches were naturally bored at being dragged along, so in each classroom they left little deposits of artwork on the whiteboards. They drew little suns in red and green and blue. The red suns were suns. The blue suns were water suns. Neither Gleek nor Patches deigned to tell me what the green suns were. All these suns shone down upon lumpy water, hills, lava and the occasional fish. The hardest part of the evening was prying Gleek and Patches away from the current art project to travel to the next room. We could have been done in half the time.
Our last stop was the band room. The band room contained an array of impressive percussion instruments. Huge kettle drums, and big bass drums, and xylophones of various sizes, and full drum sets, and cymbals, and bongo drums, and chimes, and a gong, and a triangle they all beckoned to my four bored-and-tired-and-hyper children. It is fortunate that the band teacher has children of his own because there was no way I was going to be able to enforce a hands-off policy. Instead he asked that I enforce a hands-only policy. This prevented the kids from taking the gong mallet to the thin skin of the giant drum. We had to wait for about 15 minutes, but the kids didn’t mind at all. They ran from instrument to instrument, experimenting with all the sounds they could make. I wandered through trying to keep the volume to a minimum and to make sure that no damage was done. As I watched I wished that they had a chance to fully explore, to really make a bunch of noise with these instruments. That stuff was all so cool. I wish I could have played with it too.
We finally departed the school on a quest to purchase a dinner. The conferences had been preceded by an appointment and hours of invoice sorting. I had no energy left for cooking. The kids did not lack for energy though. They all ran ahead of me to the car.
Tomorrow Kiki will go to all her classes and see all the sunshine that her younger siblings left scattered behind. The thought makes me smile.