Life Lessons in Chocolate Chip Cookies

Once upon a time I was a special education teacher.  My students and their parents taught me a great deal about compassion, tenacity, and a great many other things.  Most of the time these lessons were beautiful and wordless.  There was one lesson, though somewhat less poignant, that has stuck with me.  I think of it every time it snows.  Twelve years ago I was teaching in a rural district outside of Cincinnati.  It was our first year in our first house.  We had so much snow that between it and scheduled holidays and in-services we didn't have a five day school week from some time in December until March.  I was reveling in all that I was able to accomplish in my new home.  One of my student's parents did not like the change of schedule quite so much!  In the communcation notebook where we wrote about her son's day so she would know what he had been doing that day, she wrote that, "Some day when you have children you won't like snow days either!"  At that point we'd been hoping for a baby for more than a year.  I promised myself that on snow days I would bake chocolate chip cookies with my children.

This week is arguably the busiest of the fall for us.  The girls are in a play this week, so between long practices and more performances than we were planning on (it got bumped from two to three).  I planned the day to include spelling and physics before sending them off to practice with some tasks to do between scenes.  Then I heard the shouts, "Snow!  It's snowing!"  For those up north it would barely be called flurries, but down here in the south my kids were excited about snow.  So they bundled up and played outside while I baked them chocolate chip cookies.

I get that it is hard to have your plans turned on their ear.  It isn't always easy to rearrange your schedule, figure out what you're going to serve when you weren't planning for so many at lunch, and  you might have had to put something extra special on hold, but I want my littles to know that I am glad that they are around.  They got wet and cold pretty quickly, so we were able to have their spelling, but though we may not have had that physics lesson today, they did get a little lesson in being valued.