After eating my breakfast of champions this morning, consisting of donuts, bacon and Diet Coke, I found myself having a little anxiety attack.  I know to work on my breathing and I begin talking to myself to calm things down a bit.  I had some Diet Coke left and as I looked at the straw, without thinking, I blew into the straw.  Little bubbles at first, then bigger bubbles that shot Diet Coke towards my face.  And I laughed, so I did it again.  Several times blowing bubbles until I felt better.  I can’t remember the last time I blew bubbles and I remembered I used to tell my boys not to blow bubbles when they were little.  Why the hell not?  Blowing bubbles is fun and if they’re not out at some fancy restaurant, home should be a safe place for blowing bubbles.  When did I decide that it wasn’t ok to blow bubbles?

Have you ever watched kids having fun?  I don’t see it as much anymore, but it usually consists of the loud ones yelling and running around, leaping on and off of things, and the quiet ones sitting with friends or reading a book.  They create story lines of heroes and villains chasing each other around the playground. They laugh at the goofiest things and want to repeat things over and over again to recreate that first hysterical laughter.  I can remember laughing with my brother once at the dinner table and all he was saying was strawberry or something silly like that and we laughed until we couldn’t breathe.  He just kept repeating it over and over.  We would do MadLibs and say the silliest things and laugh like crazy.  That happens so little anymore, that out of control laughter that sends tears down your face, where you can’t talk without going into spasms of laughter.

I miss laughing like that.  There are certain expectations to being a grown-up and the more “grown-up” I get, the less I like it.  I like sharing stories and laughing with a small group of friends or playing games with my family.  I like watching animated movies with creative dialogue meant for adults but with action appealing to kids.  I love going out for milkshakes at 9:00 p.m.  I like buying pretty school supplies for myself with flowers and bright colors and drinking out of a wine glass with multi-colored flip flops painted on it.

In a beige and black grown-up world, I’m learning to throw in some boho and flowers.  I’ve decided to let the hair go white but it’s got to have a purple tint to it.  The toenail colors change every month to go with the seasons or holidays or football with hand painted flowers.  It’s all a bit childish I suppose but I kind of lost out on some of my childhood, most of which I have great difficulty remembering, so I’m taking advantage of the fact that I can create whatever childhood I want now.  And in this childhood, I’m blowing bubbles.

How does this reconcile with classroom management when I’m teaching?  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Organized chaos is what I would like to have but kids can be somewhat different today.  Instead of just enjoying themselves and their time to create, they like to be mean, out of control and destructive.  The ones who don’t tend to be intimidated or annoyed with the ones who do, so I have to keep a tight lid on things, which goes completely against the grain of letting kids be kids.  I want my students to remember school as a place where they had fun learning not a place where they had to learn.  I’m still working on this.

So maybe I need to keep trying to do things like a child would do, feeling the feelings, laughing at the silliness, experiencing the wonderment of it all and then help kids learn how to do that again.  Although I think my principal would frown upon me teaching them to blow bubbles in their milk.