Day Thirteen. The boys are playing this game where one of them slaps the other, really hard. Like, so hard that I can feel it in my stomach when it happens in my classroom. Then they slap someone else. “It’s a game, Mrs. Feyen,” they tell me, smiling. “What you do is you slap someone, really hard, then that person… View Post

Last Tuesday, when the girls and I got out of the car from school, Hadley said, “Mom! Get over here and look at this tree!” She sounded freaked out and being the nature lover that I’m not, I was already in over-reacting mode when I pivoted and turned back towards what my daughter wanted me to see. The tree looked… View Post

I am standing at the copier when a woman comes in smiling. She’s so friendly and even though I’m not in the mood to talk, I smile and say hello. How’s the writing going, she asks me. I say fine because I don’t want to talk about how my writing is going. It’s going terrible. I am behind on so… View Post

For an explanation of this project, click here. Plants in glass vases sit on sills on one side of the Computer Lab. I think they’re real, but they’re the kind that don’t seem to need much water. Pebbles fill about a third of the vase and the green shoots out from there. I don’t know anything about plants or flowers… View Post

For an explanation of this project, click here. When Harper was a baby, Jesse and I would drop her off at the church nursery and say something like this: “She’s OK playing by herself, but she might realize we aren’t there if you start talking to her.” We knew she was shy, and talking to strangers, albeit friendly strangers, was… View Post