LIFE WITH MY CHILDREN PART 23

Looking back, it seems like the children and I did a lot ...travelling to Indiana, visiting family and friends and we did. We did everything on the proverbial shoestring. We went to drive-in movies because kids under 12 were free, so I only had to pay for myself. We took popcorn and Kool-aid with us. We went to the Detroit Zoo at least once every summer because that was free. And we took our sandwiches and drinks with us.

The times I cherish most are the evenings we spent at home, alone. After Tammy and Buddy started school, we had a designated homework hour...right after supper. All three of us would sit at the kitchen table and I would help them with whatever they had to do. If they didn't have homework, we would play with flash cards..or I would write problems for them to work out.

Tammy's second grade teacher, at a parent teacher conference, told me she was concerned about Tammy. She said Tammy was clinging too much onto her and not playing with the other kids. Another time, she told me that Tammy's hair "smelled." There wasn't anything I could do about that. Tammy was a bed-wetter and I couldn't wash her hair in the mornings and send her to school with wet hair. We didn't have home hair-dryers back then...except for these bulky affairs with a hood. Tammy did not like school that year and did everything she could to get to stay home. At the end of the school year, after she had complained about Tammy all year, she suggested we keep Tammy in second grade another year. Not because of her work, Tammy was above average in everything, but because the teacher felt Tammy was too immature.

I worried and prayed and fretted about what to do. The decision was mine. In the end, I decided since she was intelligent enough to do the required work, it might do more harm than good to hold her back. Holding her back a year would put her in the same grade as Buddy and I was afraid that would effect her self-confidence in the future.

When she began the third grade, I talked to her teacher and told her about the concerns the second grade teacher had. But...every parent-teacher conference that year was upbeat and positive. She loved Tammy and said, in her opinion, the other teacher had not liked her...and tried to find fault with her. Tammy made friends with the other girls in her class that year and was eager to go to school every morning. What a difference a good teacher can make!

Now Buddy was a different story. Every teacher all through school said he was the class clown. He would do anything, say anything, to make people laugh. Teachers loved him and couldn't say enough good things about him. He was above average in all his classes, finishing before other kids...and often getting punished for disrupting the class then with his humorous antics.

In the first grade, Buddy was placed on the "tutor" list. Student teachers from Eastern Michigan chose certain kids to work with, and Buddy was chosen by two college boys because of his speech problems. They were good, too. By the end of the year, Buddy was speaking as plainly as anybody. These two boys kind of adopted both Tammy and Buddy that year. Besides working with Buddy two or three evenings after school for an hour, they often came by the apartment on Saturday afternoons and took both kids for ice cream. I liked that because it gave me an hour or two to get the weekly house cleaning done. The whole apartment had brown asbestos tile floors that had to be mopped and waxed every Saturday. It was easier to do it when the kids were gone.

In the apartment on Hamilton, where we lived for over two years, the bathroom had a stall shower instead of a bathtub. I was still in the weekly bath mode in which I had been raised. On Sunday night, Tammy and Buddy took their weekly shower. Tammy had long thick hair. Washing it was a real chore...and combing it was even worse. She would scream when I came near her with a comb or brush. I tried my best to be gentle...but still she hated it.

Then, that summer of '65, all the kids in the family...Tammy, Buddy, Avanelle's three kids and Phyllis's daughter...and Kay all got head lice. I went to the drugstore and bought this purple ointment shampoo that would kill the lice. Tammy screamed and cried ...it burned. Buddy didn't mind it so much and Avanelle said her kids didn't either. Tammy had a sensitive scalp. After the lice shampoo...poor Tammy's hair was covered with nits. I brushed it and combed it with a fine toothed comb every night, trying to get out the nits. Still, after school started, the teacher sent her home saying she had head lice. She didn't. She had nits. So, I cut her hair. All that long, beautiful hair. It had never been cut. Both Tammy and I cried all the time I was cutting it. But that was the only way to get rid of all the nits.

A couple days later, we stopped by Avanelle's and Tammy felt much better when she saw Debbie's and Mary's very short hair!