If I Had $100 Dollars

So Liam has inherited a particular trait from his father. I'll call it...the Absentmindedness About Things trait. We kind of go in spurts where lunch boxes, hats, coats, guided reading books, etc., somehow don't make it home every day. When we walk to school to pick him up, it's not a huge deal - we'll just walk around to the front office and ask if he can go back in and look for them (or sometimes we have to search Lost & Found, or out on the playground where the coat has been found hanging, or once it was in a different teacher's classroom (?)). It's too cold to walk right now, so we've been driving. It's freezing outside, in fact. And Monday Liam got into the car at pick-up without his coat or hat. The teacher who walked him to the car even told him "You should have a coat on!" when I opened the van door, as if perhaps I was the one sending him out into the elements not properly dressed. I was not happy, because then I had to drive through the carpool mess and back around to the front of the school, and there was no way I was unbuckling Natalie and Owen and dragging them out in the cold to go back and look for the coat. I did drive around to the front, but I just opened the door and shoo'd Liam out to go to the office himself and ask to be let back in (I'm trying to get him to do more things for himself these days too. He's by far old enough, and he is the type that would let someone else do everything for him if he could.) As I sat stewing, waiting in the car for him, wondering how long it would take him to return (have I mentioned he is slower than molasses in January?) I opened his backpack and read his daily papers. And this is what I found.

For the 100th day of school he had to finish the sentence: "When I am 100 years old..." and he wrote (spelled correctly so you can read it) "I will have a family. I will have 103,239 children. And be an astronaut."

I'm thinking, well I would want to fly to the moon too if I had 103,230 children!! ha ha It was very sweet though. I think the number of children was his way of making a joke - he has been developing a funny sense of humor lately.

And If I Had $100 Dollars... "I would give $50 to Haiti and $50 to Mom and Dad." (and a picture of him happily giving away his money with a smile).

Dang! That boy sure knows how to take the air out of my anger. I was surprised to read the Haiti part. Suspicious Mom that I am I even asked him later if everyone wrote that or if someone told him to write that (he said NO, everyone wrote their own thing). So maybe my effort at popping the kids out of their shiny suburban bubble that one night and making them watch the Hope For Haiti benefit concert had some effect other than the trauma that Jim predicted after they saw images of rubble and blood and death. I really didn't want to traumatize them, but I was seized by a panic that night of "Jim do you realize that our kids never even watch the news?? (We only watch our tv after they go to bed, and usually get news from the paper or online). Do you realize they don't know that anything bad happens in the world?? Don't they need some exposure to the realities of life??" Not like a music concert with some little clips of a few disaster images will actually do this...but I was quite concerned that night for their compassion and moral character, and a little exposure to different musical styles doesn't hurt either. Anyway...I'm sure Liam wrote these things because he thought it would impress his teacher or myself, because I guarantee you if he had $100 the very first thought in his head would be Target or Toys R Us. But it was nice to see that he was thinking about it at least a little. I guess I won't need to be breaking out the Iraq war footage just yet. And he came back out with his hat and his coat with no problem, and we all went home happy.