It Occurs to Me

It occurs to me that I've not provided any sort of captions for the Halloween pictures. The large group are all my kinders who screamed when I turned around and gave them a grave vampire face. They are still talking about Halloween. Literally, today a little girl was telling me that on Halloween, Emily teacher had a knife on her head and blood here! I was the official blood painting artist. Ah, theatre and the skills I learned there.
The Mario and ghosts are my lovely artistry skills. Mario now sports a santa beard and hat because I couldn't bear removing him from my room, the children (I) adore him so.
The pumpkin is the one my kinders (I) carved, that recieved what I consider the place of honor on what might be some sort of sacrificial altar in the lobby. As I was yanking a butcher knife in and out of its two-inch skin, my girls were screaming and trying to pile themselves, all six, together on one tiny green chair. Only my bravest, Gloria, got up on the table and faithfully helped me scoop all the slimy, gooey pumpkin guts from the beast. Most of the kids ate the seeds raw, even collecting the discarded glops from the trash while I was preoccupied with other things. My supervisor, who had never carved a pumpkin before, asked if she could feel it. She rolled up her sleeve and stuck her hand inside to finger the orange mess. It's incredible, really, watching someone's face, or so many someones' faces, experiencing pumpkin carving for the first time. What an alien thrill, with new words needed to describe it.
The little boys with me are in my PK class. The one with the bowtie is that kid who is constantly up out of his chair and really should be in trouble, but then he just looks at me with this innocently misheivous amusement and I can't do anything but laugh. His laughter is like a seventy year old man reliving childhood in the body of an eight-year-old, his every movement exaggerated and joyous. He pulled that bowtie up over his top lip to impersonate my Mario drawing that day. The one with no front teeth is the incredibly smart boy who has no volume knob. Sometimes I yell at him just to demonstrate how he sounds to me all the time, and he always looks surprised.