What time is it?

I don't really know. Well over a month ago my cell phone stopped working. It's not that I don't miss having it, I just haven't missed it enough to either drive to Janesville, the nearest T-mobile store front, or order one from the internet. I am on here enough (almost a month of daily writing, some drivel, many random pieces) but have yet to order a new phone. I try to remember to wear a watch, especially on days we are going on the bus, but I rarely do. So I am often the one wondering what time it is. Today, though, Dietrich wanted to know how you know what time it is when there aren't any numbers? He saw a clock at Target with hands that pointed to slashes around a circle. There were no numbers. So we started with making clocks using cardboard and brads, the brads being the highlight of the whole activity. Elliott made a paper CD of all the songs he could think of that deal with time or numbers. Then we found the "o'clock's" of their day: wake up at 7, go to swimming at 9, make dinner at 5, go to sleep at 8.

When the boys were babies I longed for a clocked schedule but by 5 months accepted that it wasn't going to happen and even if it did for a day or two -- nap at 8:30, nurse at 10, nap at 1, walk at 3, bed by 8, what success! -- it was short lived. The only clockwork times that seemed to stick were wake at 3, wake again at 5! I began to think about it life with two babies more like a dance than a work schedule. I tossed the books that suggested anything other than routine would drive us all crazy. The dance of our days had great rhythm, some days, and other times was awkward and searching for a beat. I was always exhausted, but at least I was tired in a way I could live with and not measuring up to somebody else's schedule. Amazingly, they eventually did find more or less a pattern, to the point that one afternoon when they woke early from a nap and we were at the grocery store at 2 in the afternoon, I felt like I was skipping school. The day is so bright! And where are all the other babies? Right, asleep.

Since the new year began another time has taken hold of me. The boys are going to 5 this year, that magical age that Carl Schurz, in my hometown of Watertown, Wisconsin in the late 1800's, decided kids could begin going to school. The idea wasn't his, of course, it was brought from Germany. I've visited the First Kindergarten many times. It was the one attraction, besides the golf course, that we would show to our house guests. I had the tour down after a year, and would ask questions to get the guides to tell the information I already knew from other guides. The kindergarten was a small building with a door, a stove, and space for about 6 kids and a teacher to fit comfortably. The wax mannequins posing in the school are holding hands in a circle (or at least they were in the 80's when we frequented the museum). They are singing a German song.

Fast forward a hundred years or so and kids in our neighborhood are going to a school with 375 kids between Kindergarten and second grade. They wake at 6 to catch a bus at 7 and to return home at 3. Five-year-olds. Why do I feel I am the only one who finds this outrageous? The boys have learned their world from the comfort of their home (and the library, the museums, the zoos, the trains, buses, their relatives houses, their friends houses, their church, the grocery store, the hiking trails, parks, beaches, lakes) for the past 4 years. Why does this age signal a sudden shift to learning in an environment made up entirely of their peers and one adult for half of their waking day? Whose time is it, anyway?