Animal Man
Today “Mr. Valentine” the animal man came to Roan’s kindergarten class. He brought a wallaby,
snakes (big and small) beautiful frogs, walking sticks,
tarantulas, scorpions, hedgehogs and porcupines. Now for Roan’s homework he has to draw a picture of four of the animals he saw today. Sound out their names, write them and write a sentence about each. A lot to ask of a kindergartner, right? I think so.
Steve is trying to be as relaxed and nurturing as Roan scrawls out a drawing of a tarantula and I want to remind Steve that his own adult level of drawing is so terrible I use it to comedic effect in my solo show- showing slides of it- at the Groundlings. (He draws me this cute series of stick figures doing various things… it’s amazing his brother Daniel was such a talented artist because his drawing is the definition of chicken scratch. Quite clever though. And all the cuter for it’s lack of artistic perfection.)
Roan just said, “The lizard is spiky.” “The snake is silky and soft.” “The tarantula is black and soft.”
Steve says, “You already used the word soft for the snake.”
Roan says, “How about the tarantula was black and furry?”
Roan is only in kindergarten. So sometimes he’ll draw a 2 backwards. Or sometimes he’ll write a word and the first letter will be lower case and the second letter will be uppercase. Or he’ll write the first letter and then there will be a space the size of the grand canyon before the next letter.
Sometimes Roan will draw something that will be so ridiculously disjointed that I’ll have to hold back my laughter and slight concern.
Steve and I both are pretty chill parents and usually love sitting next to Roan doing homework with him. But today Steve had to take over, banishing me over here to my blog, because I have a bad headache and was getting a little testy. Saying things like, “WHY is the W as big as the whole piece of paper??!” Thankfully Roan has a sense of humor and is doing a great deal of laughing. Anyway, Steve said, “Let me handle this.” And just this moment I heard Steve say, as calmly as he could, “Why would you make a Z that big?!”
“I’m going to go Poo Poo!!” Roan announces and runs off.
Today I had a meeting regarding a project I am going to be working on. And during the meeting a small spider hung from the ceiling from a web. 
A string of a web released the spider down from the ceiling right in front of my face and I tried my best not to stare at it, thus drawing attention to the spider, thus possibly embarrassing the woman I was meeting with- who had a spider making a web in her office. Lots of smiles and big eyes on my part.
Which is what I notice Steve to be doing to Roan right now. “Good JOOOOB!! You’ll have to write pretty small here!! OK! LET’S DO IT! YAY!”
