Saturday Snapshot -- New Year Celebration

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.

Isn't it funny, all the separate holidays that we have based on religion or culture, but New Year's Eve is one that we all can celebrate around the world, of course, at different times depending on our time zone. And yes, I know that some cultures have separate calendars so different new years, like the Chinese, but really, all around the world we celebrate on Dec. 31 as a new year begins.
I like being united with everyone.
We had a terrific party at my friend Sheila's house. She throws the best parties whether New Years or Fourth of July.
Here are a couple of pictures of us celebrating.
Tracie brought cut outs attached to sticks so that we could do silly pictures.

That's Tracie in the middle. She's a librarian and comes up with all kinds of clever ideas. Janine on the right is one of the women who hiked the Appalachian Trail with me. 

Laura on the left has a son close to Spencer's age. They were best friends for a while, united in their love for basketball. 

Here's a group picture, a groupie, of a bunch of us just after midnight. Sheila's 16-year-old is photobombing us in the very back.

And after the clock struck midnight, we decided we needed to dance. I love the expression on Pam's face, on the right. She looks so sassy. We were waving our fingers at Dan who was taking pictures. All except for Sheila in the back who didn't realize we were posing.

I hope everyone else had a fun-filled New Year's Eve and I hope the coming year is just as filled with laughter and dancing for all of  you as I had at Sheila's party.

Joy

On my way onto campus yesterday, a young mother and her 6-year-old daughter walked past me. The mother had a scarf tied around her hair and knotted in the front as if she covered curlers. She wore sweat pants over her taut body and a t-shirt. She walked quickly in her flipflops, and her little girl, in a one-piece shorts outfit and pony tails, hurried to catch up. The girl carried a bag on her shoulder that slipped down until she pulled it back up.
"Now you need to be quiet while you're sitting in the hall," the mother informed the daughter as they scurried past me. The girl silently nodded her head.
"That means no singing and no dancing," the woman said. "And no talking loud to Nonni on the telephone. Just draw and write quietly."
That made me think differently about this pair. The woman, a 20-something, inner city mother, returning to school. Her daughter home during the long summer days rather than at school.
I wanted this little girl to be free to dance and sing. I pictured her, arms outflung, twirling through a grassy field, stopping only to make daisy chains. She only wanted to live, to not be stymied. In spite of  the hardships she was born into, she had managed to find joy in life -- joy that made her sing and dance at random moments, like a happy little girl does, like an improbable high school musical.
Some people might have judged this mother for taking her daughter along to college and parking her in the hallway. I might have judged her one not-so-long-ago day, but more and more, I see the lives of desperation many young mothers live, trying to claw their way out of poverty.
This mother needs to attend college to get ahead. She can't afford to hire a babysitter, and she isn't allowed to bring the girl into class. So she'll leave her in the hallway with a cell phone and a caution to be quiet, to act against her natural little girl instinct.
This morning, before I left campus, I stopped by an office. The chair of the English Department is temporarily acting as a dean until the school hires someone else.
"I have a big idea," I told her.
She stopped what she was doing and turned to listen to me.
"We need day care for school-aged children during the summer." I told her the story about the little girl who wanted to sing and dance. "Students should be able to leave kids there free of charge during their scheduled classes."
"I'll write it down," she said, searching through stacks of paper until she found what she called her "dean" notebook. "I think it's a liability problem though."
Maybe it won't happen. Maybe students will continue to park their children at computers and on couches and in hallways while they sit in the backs of classrooms and worry about their children entertaining themselves.
But maybe, our school, heavy with students returning to college, will set up a place that on a sunny summer day, children can sing and dance while their parents study and try to move their family up a step in the economic echelon.

Cowboys

The wind came sweeping down the plain in our little town this weekend as the high school put on the musical Oklahoma. When Grace was in high school, I worked on costumes for weeks before the musical. This year, teaching 7 college classes, I avoided volunteering. But Earl went to work on the set and kept telling me how intricate it was. I finally got a chance to see for myself on Thursday night. One of the other mothers texted to ask if I'd help sell flowers. So I passed out carnations for a dollar and got to sneak in to watch the production.
Tucker tried out for the ensemble and in addition to being a cowboy, got to be a dancer, which meant throwing himself on the floor, learning the two-step, and flinging girls around the stage. As a matter of fact, at the end of the production, they gave him the "brute strength" award because much of the time he was lifting girls into the air. Not a bad way for a 16-year-old to spend nine weeks of rehearsal.
He says it was a lot of work and he doesn't know if he'll do it again. He had to juggle swim team with musical, and going to States to compete, and he has already started track practice. But I think he had fun, and I could tell he was having fun on stage. Who knows, next year, maybe he'll get the nerve to accept a speaking part.