normalcy

I had to hand it to her: it was a portrait of stoicism, really. To wait out her full bladder till she could not even limp her way to the toilet without an incident. And to steadfastly refuse to admit to any need to go, throughout the afternoon.
“All 1st graders really need to learn is how to read!” exclaimed a coworker in one of those teacher-ranting sessions this evening. Fresh from my day with one classroom of high-maintenance first graders, I begged to differ: “Actually, I think the ability to ask to go to the bathroom is another relatively important 1st-grade skill . . .”
But I really couldn’t blame the girl. I had difficulty forcing myself to use that odor-heavy room myself. And I was tempted to ask them if they knew they were supposed to use the toilet and not the bathroom floor drain at one point in the day. But they were still giggling from their classmate’s mishap at the time, so I figured I’d best refrain from any suggestion that might perpetuate the downhill spiral of classroom behavior . . .
Yet the little one herself seemed unfazed by it all. When she told me about it, she handed me a phone number for her mother and calmly instructed me to call her mother and ask for clean clothing. It was near enough the end of the day that she didn’t actually miss all that much, and we only had one lesson disrupted, which was one that I didn’t miss too much. Social Studies was never one of my favorite subjects, anyway :-)
Just another day of normal childhood adventures: the everydayness of which I will never again take lightly . . .