Goose egg

• I got a call from someone in the principal's office at Archer's school today -- never a good sign. Turns out he whopped his head on something during recess. Given his communication difficulties (the more urgent the direct questions, the more Archer refuses to address them), we were never able to determine what happened, but it seems pretty likely that he ran into something forehead first. Could be the pavement, but there's absolutely no scrape, so it might be a piece of playground equipment. I'm glad Noel was on the case to go check him out at school, because I didn't have to see the bump on its head at its full flower. By the time I got home, it was down to about the size of one of those superballs you can get out of gum machines at all-you-can-eat buffets, and that was painful enough to see. Archer's main concern through the whole episode was whether he'd get to return to his school routine (take away his set schedule, and he's adrift in a cold, uncertain world) and whether he'd get a Good As Gold sticker for not having any discipline problems all week. (Things were already somewhat dicey since Archer's teacher was out with a sick son yesterday and today, leading to anxious uncertainty about whether the extra Good As Golds would be given out.) It'll get better before our first Halloween party tomorrow night, but he's still going to look like a junior astronaut who got clocked by a slowly rotating arm of the international space station.


• Today I saw a flier at school for a special night at the local roller rink, billed as "Old School 80's Skate." Excuse me -- the terms "old school" and "skate" do not match with "80's." Are these people under the impression that Flock of Seagulls featured a lot of roller disco in their videos? I can only suspect that the proprietors were trying to combine skating with something that this college audience finds attractive -- eighties music -- but the combination just reeked of Doctor Moreau to me.


• There's a writing center in Archer's classroom, and periodically he sits at the table and composes something. A couple of weeks ago, he came home with a "Topic List" that his teacher had assigned to him, which he had filled out with items like "My timer," and apparently it meant a lot to him. (He went through a brief phase where he was giving us thank you notes for everything, and he wrote one to his teacher thanking her for his topic list.) Whenever he comes home with an inexplicable piece of writing, I try to reconstruct what prompt was given to him. Sometimes, as with the following list, my imagination fails me. A book about himself, maybe? About his self-portrait? Sentences that begin with "I"? In any case, if it had been the work of anyone but my little boy, I'd suspect a horrible performance anxiety lay behind it -- but since it's Archer, I know it's just the parameters of his identity.
  

The Picture

Pg. 1 I do good behavior.
2 I have a good job.
3 I do a great job.
4 I earn good-as-golds.
5 I listen.
6 I have great behavior.
7 I carve pumpkins on Oct. 31.
8 I can be pride.
9 I do a good job.
10 I have a birthday on Aug. 19.
11 I have happy boxes.
12 I do good choices.
13 I do things correct.
14 I follow directions.
15 I praticipate.