Track and Field - and Training Bras
She signed up for track and field again. She had quite enjoyed it last year at school, and had decided she would go for it again. This year, though, some enthusiasm seems to be in short supply. She can't, she has confided in me, run fast enough. The smaller, lithe (read: skinny) kids have a far easier time of it; their limbs conform far more readily to the exigencies of concentrated motion than do hers, evidently. We try to encourage her, to tell her she has to give it more time, become accustomed to the physical stress, that it's good for her. She isn't dreadfully impressed with our arguments in favour of encouraging her to persist. She may be only nine years of age, but she's nobody's fool. If she isn't having enough fun, if it doesn't seem to be worth her effort, if she sees other, more streamlined children achieving a far better result more effortlessly, she'll give it up.
We think it's good for her to continue. Not just for the conditioning which she could use in greater physical activity, but we were also aware of how much she enjoyed the cameraderie that went along with last year's interschool meets at the season's conclusion. All of this is good for her physical and social development. But there are other areas also which can be of use to her development.
She's always liked her teachers throughout her school years, including a year of preschool. This year is an exception. She thinks her home room teacher is dour and fixated on discipline. "She treats us like kindergarten kids, Bub" she told me. Evidently all of this new teacher's previous teaching experiences have been in the early primary grades, and our big little girl is now in grade four. None of her little coterie of friends like their teacher, either. Angie is, though, very enthusiastic about her arts teacher, she likes her social studies teacher - and, alas, she very much dislikes her French teacher, lamenting the loss two years earlier of another French-language teacher whom everyone adored. Worse, this year her home room teacher will teach music which will likely mean that all the strides Angie made in learning to read music, to play recorder with great flair may be for naught.
Yesterday Angie was wearing a sleeveless tie-dyed, front-tied shirt, very attractive with her nice jeans. I peered surreptitiously at my grandchild while she was busy with this and that, and decided, yes, definitely, she was wearing a bra. At nine years of age, wearing a bra. Truth to tell, my neighbour from across the street did take me aside a few months back to tell me she thought Angie was becoming rather 'developed' and she thought it was time her mother got a training bra for her. I protested she was too young. Now, seeing Angie with what was unmistakenly bra straps peeking out from her sleeveless shirt, I thought perhaps there was utility in that. But I said nothing to her. Not wanting to embarrass her? I don't know.
In any event, when her mother telephoned early this afternoon before Irving went over to the school to pick Angie up, she said Angie was wearing a pair of her chunky-heeled boots (they now take the same size footwear as well as clothing). And she also mentioned that when she was doing the laundry last evening she came across a bra she hadn't recalled wearing herself and asked her daughter about it, at which point Angie told her mother she had worn it. And here I thought Karen had bought Angie a training bra. Angie, that little devil, had gone into her mother's underwear drawer, just as she often goes through her clothes cupboard (Karen permits Angie to wear some of her clothes) and had selected a bra for herself. Karen laughed when she told us this, and opined that it was because Angie's girlfriend Stephanie, who had slept over with Angie on the week-end wore bras, as did another of her schoolchums. And to think, these are 9-year-old little girls, shorter, skinnier than Angie!
She wasn't wearing a bra today, and I discussed it with her. If she wanted to wear a bra, I told her, she should wear a training bra, not one of her mother's. And anyway, she had lots of time to get around to that kind of thing, and didn't have to be physically uncomfortable just because her friends wore them. No, she said, it was comfortable enough, and she felt better wearing one yesterday because the front of her blouse was low. She certainly had a point there. I hauled her upstairs to my armoire and shuffled about looking for something resembling a sports bra (I never wear anything resembling a bra; now I'm retired, no longer in the work force I can do as I please) and pulled out two short stretch tops with spaghetti straps. "Neat", said the emerging clothes horse, they would do.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, September 24, 2005
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