Summer Stories (2023)

1.It has been so beautiful out here this week. The sun finally came out! 

During the school year, we have a weekly newsletter that comes out Sunday nights with details for the week, important dates and reminders, and usually a little note from me. During the Summer, you can look forward to a weekly email with my musings and any updates. This is the first one.

In the first week of camp, there were a few younger siblings of older Cottage kids who got to experience their own school days for the first time. While the big kids played out in the Big Yard, a few little people were in the Small Yard, realizing that their parents had actually left them there for the first time, instead of just bringing them along to pick up their sibling. It was a big and scary surprise to those kids! There were some tears shed.

Teachers coordinated care so that those children would be supported by people who will be their teachers in the Fall as best we could. Teachers helped friends settle, sat with them while they cried, reassured them (along with social ambassadors from the class– looking at you, Twyla), and when none of that was quite enough for them to feel safe and ready to play, we recruited the older siblings to help. Some of those kids came over to eat snack with their older brothers and their friends, and then the bigger kids helped the littler ones move back to the Small Yard and get settled into play. Having someone who loves you there was so special and important! The big brothers were such kind, generous helpers. 

Over in the Big Yard, although most of the kids have been at Cottage before, there were brand new friendship dynamics, with some friends they were used to playing with who weren’t there. It took a few days for leadership to emerge, and some kids found themselves included in new friend groups among older acquaintances. Other children just leaned in to playing with a bunch of new faces, earning themselves a saved spot at the snack table through infectious humor and persistence! It has been peaceful and fun. 

2. Each day at the end of class and cleanup, all the teachers sit down for a debrief meeting, like we do at the end of your Cottage volunteer days. One topic that came up every day this week was block play, particularly in the Big Yard. Check out the slideshow attached to this email about the stages of block play, which don't move along a timeline tied strictly to age, but instead unfold over time as children have access to free play with blocks. 

We observed a recent alum child who has often shown interest in blocks but had not done much building before suddenly spend time each day making enclosures and stacks of blocks. They seem to have taken a leap forward working with the new mix of kids we have in Summer! We also observed an incoming Mulberry kid using horizontal stacks of blocks in a narrative about families and pets. And the use of lego duplo blocks for every idea under the sun has been insatiable!

I played a fun game with some kids at Lunch Bunch this week where a child who was inviting me into play suddenly flopped down on the big rug and told me that they were stuck, and asked me to pull them out. Instead, I pretended to try to pull them out, but instead, I flopped down on the rug and got stuck, too! We kept trying to pull each other out and flopping back down, our bodies pressed against the floor. After a while, more kids joined, and it became more about squishing each other and making a big pile, with me on the bottom until the stack of kids tipped over slowly, such that everyone had a chance to be squished and squeezed but just for a little bit before we reset and did it again.

The game was a way for kids to get a little cuddle without asking for a hug, a great way to get a bunch of proprioceptive input, and an exciting invitation for some gentle roughhousing. Games like that also present valuable opportunities for kids to practice phrases advocating for themselves, like, "I don't like that" or "'That's too hard" or "I need a break!", things I did not seem to know I was allowed to say until I was fully an adult. Some schools don't allow that kind of play, because adults feel afraid of someone getting hurt. I would argue that taking some calculated risks in a safe, supportive environment is likely to have our kids much more able to keep themselves safe. 

3. This week's smaller classes made it a bit easier for us to accommodate much needed repairs to the ~100 year old plumbing in our beautiful house. Thanks for your patience with the mess, the rerouting, and the hold on the use of some of the bathrooms for a minute there. Sounds like it will all be done Monday.

I have been mostly upstairs writing and planning for our Parent Teacher Training in the Fall, a process that I have led since my first year on the teaching staff because it's just my cup of tea. I love talking with other adults about how we do things in this special way that makes Cottage feel so magical. But--and I don't mean to shock you--it's not magic. It's actually just research based best practice that has been time tested and implemented by skilled practitioners, our teachers, and they make it look easy. I feel like I get a little better at explaining it every year, and I am excited to share my updates with you that first week in September. 

A child I know pretty well came in this week wearing a superhero costume. Kids are allowed to dress however they feel comfortable to come to Cottage, and they are certainly not the first person to wear a costume to school. But superheroes are interesting, because in my experience, they tend to be a window into what the child may be experiencing. Superheroes are powerful, and brave. Superheroes rescue people, and fight bad guys. Kids tend to think in a sort of black-and-white way at around 3 and 4 years old, and superheroes fit right in to that. 

On this day, my little superhero friend was looking over the fence, asking if their little sister needed support. The sister was playing happily. The superhero read a book with another child and me about a knight fighting a dragon and saving the kingdom. They pointed out the knight's armor, and the dragon's sharp teeth and claws. They didn't finish the book, but they also didn't go play. They checked on their sister again. She was still fine. 

Finally, the superhero asked if they could just be with their sibling in the other yard. We said yes. They ran over and got a big hug from their sibling. They played, together. They looked at the teacher, a question in their eyes about if they had to go back. The teacher said they could stay. The teacher pointed out that in fact, the superhero turned out to be the one who needed support, and that is okay. In real life, it's not black-and-white. We all need support or a hug sometimes. 

Starting this week, we will have a new face in the Big Yard: Teacher Jenny! She was personally recommended by Teacher Wallace, and she will be helping out for a few weeks while some of our regular teachers take some time for themselves. I'm sure you will help her feel welcome. 

4. First, let me just say that apparently there was a full on wedding in the Big Yard this week, and I missed it! Congratulations to the two children, who seem to have immediately moved on from that sweet moment to their regularly scheduled play.

There’s a lot that is hard about Summer for kids at Cottage. They don’t have their regular class or classmates, they have different teachers, the rhythm of the day can be a little different; it can be pretty uncomfortable for them at first, even if they have been at Cottage before. Lots of kids are brand new in Summer, too, or brand new to this particular classroom. Everybody has to figure out who they can play with. For some kids, who take a long time to warm up, it can take most of the day or even a few weeks before they really start engaging with other children.

This week we saw some Small Yard friends who had had a super hard time saying goodbye to their families earlier who have begun to cry for just a short while and then engage more. One child who had been asking lots of anxious questions about the time and when their parent would be coming back was consoled by Teacher Ana’s shift to talking about the routine of our day, and what we can do together, ultimately asking, “What are YOU going to do today?”. Another child who had been very upset before found lots of fun ways to play, and now that they have a feel for how our day goes, they seem at ease and able to enjoy their time with us. 

I had an opportunity to join a few Morning Meetings and Music Times this week, both times when we come together in a “circle” (well, it’s usually sort of circle shaped, but we aren’t purists about that). I got a chance to notice the different ways in which we each participate in our group times. I noticed a child in the Small Yard who was up and moving during the first song, but who moved not to the leaf mat we had set out but instead to a chair for the second song. By the third song, they were drumming along to our beat on the little side table, clearly a full participant even though they were off to the side a little bit. 

Another day I noticed a Teacher do the same thing– they were off to the side at Morning Meeting instead of right up against kids in the circle, but still part of the meeting, singing and keeping a beat. I heard quiet kids give morning news to the whole class. I heard outgoing kids tell us what they had had for breakfast. I saw hugging mom’s leg news. I saw teachers who love to talk in a group and teachers who seem to never want to do that. 

I really love that we are a school that has room for all the ways people are. I have seen teachers at other schools “help” a child sit at circle time by moving their body and keeping it there, even as the child struggled to move away. I want kids (people) to learn to listen to and trust their own body. I want us to listen to our body’s messages about what feels good to us, and what feels like too much or too close or too loud. It doesn’t matter if it’s not too close or too loud for someone else; each of us has the right to make ourselves comfortable, and I am pretty sure we can pay better attention to the class when we aren’t mostly thinking about how hard it is to stay seated just so. Our group times don’t depend on everyone staying quietly seated in a neat circle. They just depend on us as participants being present. 

5. I was sitting on the floor next to a child just now and they stood up, looking me in the eyes, and told me, “This is the exact right height to kiss you”. 

Earlier this week, I was pushing a child on a swing in the Big Yard when they told me about a child who was not there yet, and they sighed and kind of rolled their eyes, telling me about how the child was “Bad Kitty” at school. A few of us talked about the Bad Kitty book series by Nick Bruel, which my daughter loved. She always loved to read books about characters who do scandalous things she herself would never do, and Bad Kitty was one of these. 

But the other child never called themselves “Bad Kitty”– it was an interpretation based on the character’s actions. Lots of times, children have recurring characters they play at school, and frequently, they are alter-egos who do all the things the child themselves knows are distasteful or not allowed. My all-time favorite was Doctor FluShot, who went around poking people and scaring them. Right now, we have a kitty. The character builds a cat house that nobody is allowed into, scratches and pushes people, takes things out of kids’ hands and runs, calls names. If you try to talk to the kitty, it meows and runs away. 

It’s funny, but I don’t think that kids like playing those games, not even the ones persistently doing it. I think they like us to stop them and restore order. I think they feel like they have to inhabit those characters to make sense of the cognitive dissonance of being a person who sometimes does things they know are wrong. We all do, sometimes, but it’s a new experience for a young child, and again, they are really black-and-white thinkers. In a world of good and evil, they have to see themselves as good, so those actions they can’t reconcile are something somebody else did. 

Well, after a few problem-solving conversations earlier this week, the teachers agreed to try moving the main components of the cat house overnight to see if it might shift the narrative. At first, the kids in that game looked around and couldn’t find the house parts, and they stood around trying to figure out what to do. With some of the same parts that we had kept in the space, they made a carnival, and all of the other children were invited. They rode through it on bikes, standing in for roller coaster cars. One person stood to the side and acted as a stoplight, a kid-powered control on the speed, volume, and wildness of a bike or racing game that all the other children chose to obey. 

This is something that might happen in a curriculum like ours, that is responsive to the kids we have and what they are working on. We observe what they are playing (play being how kids make sense of the world), and sometimes if they seem a little stuck, doing the same thing day after day or doing something that bothers other kids, we might shift what materials are available or where they are offered, and oftentimes, that’s enough to help the kids be able to find something else they want to explore. 

A parent visited the Small Yard for the first half of the day, as their child is slowly adjusting to school. Teacher Ana told me that the children in the class played longer and showed more interest in that parent’s child than usual, and it reminded her of what was missing from the yards in the Summer: it’s you, our families.  Kids watch to see their parents talking back and forth with this other adult, and that friendly conversation helps humanize the teachers to them. Kids see how a child has a parent who loves them and cares for them just like they do, and it humanizes the child for them. Parents have a different energy, and the kids welcome it so much, and we do too, because we know that the best educational experience for young kids includes families as valuable and irreplaceable partners and co-learners. We can’t wait to welcome you all back in the Fall. 

6. I love writing these for you. It feels like a conversation, because often I am talking about topics that have come up for several of you, or that you have brought to me and I know are on your mind. Often I don’t know who I will reach, but I trust that this work of raising and teaching  young children is an area where we all want support, and I know how good it feels to know that we share common experiences. 

In fact, I accidentally wrote too much this week, so now there’s also a new blog post: “It’s not about me”

Both yards wanted our only copy of Go Dog, Go! this week, but the Small yard was still using it. As they read it, kids started repeating the funny lines from the book, as one does. A child was trying to get the attention of their favorite teacher from across the fence, and put a silly bucket and later an even sillier doll potty on their head, calling to the teacher to ask, “Do you like my hat?”

We had a busy week at the writing tables outside in the Big Yard. Late last week, some people had been using stop signs in a game, and a teacher decided to supply the kids with cardboard, tape, popsicle craft sticks and markers to make their own signs. They did! Kids had signs saying “stop” and “go”, but also “danger”, “keep out”, and “Beware of Bigfoot”.

Another day, kids descended upon the sign making area but instead used all the supplies to carefully make guns for their game. They took a long time, some of them doing finely detailed work, seated at a table, markers in hand, like the kindergarteners they will soon be. And one of the most remarkable parts of that game of gun making was that it showed just how little information these kids had about guns.

There was a gun that was a rectangle with three orange squares in a line in the center, mounted on a stick as a handle. There was a gun that looked like colorful triangles, side by side in a small rectangle. There was one that vaguely resembled a spaceship, but colored black. One child showed me their “gun” and then told me that “it shoots bullets!”, followed by making it go “bang! bang!” at me, to which I vaguely smiled and said, “hmm!”. The child was satisfied. 

Sometimes grownups, who know a lot more than we maybe even want to know about guns, worry about kids playing pretend with guns. Sometimes adults add a lot of information to the little that kids know about guns. Sometimes we do this inadvertently, by reacting to that “bang! bang!” by pretending that we have been shot, dramatically play-yelling and falling over. What a fun and fascinating spectacle we are when we are doing that!  I can see why kids would want to repeat it! And then we end up explaining what we are pretending to do, and then that requires further explanation. Another option is to say nothing, just observe and be present. They will learn more soon enough. For now, maybe just let them play pretend. 

Other days the writing table was lively with storytellers and bookmakers. A child sat down and told the teacher that they were going to tell them a story, and they began to recite a Pete The Cat book from memory, one that we don’t have at school.Then they proceeded to make up an entirely new story starring Pete The Cat, and had the teacher write their dictated words while they drew illustrations.  Later, another child dictated a letter to Pete The Cat. 

A favorite moment from this week was also one of the hardest, when 3 friends were fighting because all of those kids only know how to play with one person at a time. This is an age appropriate problem for kids going into Rainforest class, and one they will shortly be able to solve on their own, but not yet. Somebody was playing with a new friend, and the friend they had played with before was furious, upset that they had apparently lost their friend. Imagine how upset you would be if it felt like you had just lost your only friend! 

Teachers were close by and putting their bodies in between as the three kids screamed, pushed, and threw sand at each other. Then, an older sibling of one of the kids came in and told the children that “Cottage is for everyone”, as a way of telling them that they could all play together, which seemed to diffuse the fight. Hooray for recent alumni, our unofficial Junior Counselors!

7. This is the second to last Summer Stories email, because after this last week of camp, all the teachers have a little time off to reset and relax before we jump into the busy first weeks of the new school year. Teacher Gaby is back with us this week, and Teacher Monica will be with us through Wednesday, in case you want to express your appreciation to her. Teacher Alejandra will be with us through Friday. This is the second year both of them have joined us for Cottage Summer Camp and I am just so proud of how insightful, caring, and attentive they are. We are so fortunate to have the staff that we have, throughout the year and during the Summer, when we plan in conjunction with our teachers so that we all get to have full lives, even if that means we miss them sometimes. I am thankful that it’s important to all of us that we view our teachers as whole, real people, and make room for all of us to take care of our families and take care of ourselves. As every parent knows, you can’t pour from an empty cup. 

Some of you got to see Teacher Wallace this week, as she was filling in so that I could have a little time away– first to make sure I didn’t have Covid (yay, I don’t!), and then, because I planned for “just in case” and then things turned out better than I expected, I was able to spend some time with my kids while they are still on Summer Break. We saw the new Disney Haunted Mansion movie, because we are Disney nerds and (obviously) the Haunted Mansion is our collective favorite. We went swimming. We watched our family’s favorite show, Adventure Time, and joked around and made references that only people obsessed with Adventure Time would get. We went back to school shopping for my kids, who are starting middle school and high school respectively, and found the perfect cool backpack and the perfect cool shoes for my daughter (my son is easy to shop for because he only wears comfy clothes in gray tones, basically, for years and years now). 

And while I was a little concerned about what I would write to you this week, because I only heard a couple of days of stories from the classes, I began to think that maybe you might like to hear about how it is having these two Cottage kids who are the size of grownups now. 

On Thursday, we had our Middle School orientation. My daughter has been so nervous for months thinking about this big change from her safe elementary school, where she and her brother have been since leaving Cottage, where the Principal knew every child by name and even knew who they were aside from that. Picking up her brother from middle school last year, she would remark on how big everyone looked, and how many people there were. I would find kids who looked like sixth graders, who hadn’t yet hit a big life-altering growth spurt that thrust them into quasi-adult bodies. We would both admire kids with cool style, which the uniforms in elementary school kept concealed. We did a routine, where I was early or on time for picking up her brother just about every day, which matters a lot to her. Like me, she feels safe when things feel predictable. 

We had a big advantage coming into the middle school orientation, and that was that we knew that she would know lots of kids from her elementary school there, including, and especially, her best friend since she was at Cottage. We met this kid before she was born, during the Summer when the older siblings were about to be in Olive class together, and each of us moms was gigantically pregnant. Our daughters were born exactly one month apart. 

I have to pause this story and tell you that I had lost a very much wanted baby between the two kids I have, and I was so scared (and SO sick) when I was first carrying Vivienne. Another mom at Cottage had twins my son’s age, and I’ll never forget one time asking her something about causing a miscarriage after a nurse had told me maybe breastfeeding or carrying my son had caused it, and she brushed off the worry, and said something like, “oh, is this your first miscarriage?”, and it opened this window in the stifling room I was in where I was the only one this had ever happened to, because people don’t like to talk about it. I was so grateful to her. Later, this same mom’s water broke at drop off one morning, and she was so matter-of-fact, sending her husband to tell the teachers that there would be grandparents picking up the kids that day because they had to go to the hospital. 

My daughter took her first ever steps one day in Olive Class at Music Time, joining the circle and dancing (Teacher Ana was one of the teachers!). When she was big enough to come to Cottage, I started working here. She cried every day at having me always on the other side of the fence from her. It was hard the whole time. And the thing that made Cottage work for her was the mothers of her three best friends, who would care for her and help her when she was sad, and cared for her after class while I was finishing up my work. We did joint babysitting together on our non-Cottage days. We did playdates and birthday parties. We took walks together while the bigger kids were in class and the babies were in strollers. We grew friendships. 

After Cottage, two of the besties went to different schools, and Vivienne and one other girl came to our elementary school. Now, the two of them are transitioning together to middle school. A few weeks ago at the girl’s birthday party, they planned a pool party at their house for right after middle school orientation, and this mom of her forever friend, who had been such incredible and indispensable support to me way back when they were little, was the same mom who hosted this party now, when my daughter still needed emotional support to know that there were going to be safe people there when she got to school. 

I see Cottage kids every day at middle school pickup. Some kids wave at me and others pretend they have never seen me before, and either way is fine. I just really love that there is this continuous community of safe adults around my kids as they grow and change and make whatever mistakes they will make as middle and high schoolers. And I love that I can see class after class of Cottage kids at these public schools, because I know that they know how to solve problems, and they know how to treat people, even if sometimes we all slip up. 

I thought it would be a lot scarier to have big kids. I was so unwell at that age, I dreaded what my kids might have to go through. And there is still so much ahead of us in years and in whatever experiences we will have, but I know now that we will do it together. Not just me and my kids, but me and my kids and their friends, and their friends' parents, and the other parents they don’t know but who I know, who are also in our community looking out for all of us. 

8) Somehow the soft, whispering goodbyes of Summer are hard in a different way than the end of the school year goodbyes, with our key ceremonies, certificates, hugs, tears, and the last Goodbye Song. When a kid’s last day is in the Summer, we have already done all of those rituals that mark the end, and when this last day comes, it’s more like that last time that you nursed, not knowing it was a last time until there was no next time. Or, for those of us with bigger kids, the last time you carried them to bed before they became too heavy, and you have to help your gigantic sleepy child lumber to bed themselves. 

A few kids announced this as their last day at Morning Meeting. Once we got to the yard, somebody suggested playing a game where they were going to climb a mountain at the North Pole, and they were never ever coming back, and my assigned job in the game was to stay down below (the play structure, which, logically, was the North Pole), and mournfully call out to them, “oh no, don’t go! I will miss you so much! Oh, won’t you ever come back?” and they turn around and gleefully yell, “NO!” More children joined the game, and some of them were penguins who were going to push me into the icy cold water, which was a form of snuggle in practice. They would stand at the top of the structure, telling me over and over how much bigger they were than I was, how tall. 

In another game, two children found lots of seed pods on the ground, fallen from the trees above, bright green and immature. They started handing them to me, describing the different seed pods as people from Cottage: a tall one was Teacher Jason, two small ones were Tate and Evie, some others were Lennon, and Remi, teachers and kids, one after the other until I must have been holding twenty. 

Some builders mixed concrete to build a toy store. They framed it sturdily with blocks, poured water from a bucket into sand, and slowly moved their homemade concrete into the basement floor of their building, bucket by bucket. They smoothed it and patted it down before laying floorboards carefully over the top, and started to build the walls.  

A child arrived late, and somebody stopped their work to run over, yelling, “your best friend is here!”, to a child that kid had been playing with very intensely these last weeks. All of the adults found each others’ eyes and exchanged…was it relief? Delight? Adoration? It was a special moment, made more special that none of us could have predicted how this third child would have reacted. 

Over in the Small Yard, a kid who had been missing her mom so much before now says goodbye and within ten minutes, has taken off most of her clothes and dunked them into the water! She spends the rest of the day shirtless and free. Another shirtless child suggested a dance party, and they used a preschool songs playlist so everybody could show off their moves to familiar tunes. Another dancer chimed in with a song request, and as Teacher Ana began to sing, the child corrected that they wanted to hear recorded music, so they played more, and danced more. 

Another child arrived late, not having a great morning, and eventually settled into a swing, where they stayed the rest of the day. The swing can be a calming activity for children, giving gentle vestibular input, and provides a nice vantage point for observing others. After a while, the child on the swing had cycled through several other children as side by side swing partners, chatting, joking, and holding hands. 

The teachers sat down to debrief, like we always do. We talked about all the fun games that we saw, and what that screaming was about, and who else was playing that game, and what happened after that. We checked in about kids we did not get a chance to personally observe but who were observed by our teammates, and triangulated our growing understanding of each child. We ate some little sweets in celebration of another fun summer at Cottage. One of them told me that being here is actually the break, and as someone about to go home to my own kids, I know what they meant. We are tired and happy, and ready for a new year in September. Happy Summer.