Just for my friend Soph

To my friend Sofelia

.... we laughed, and we laughed hard and are still laughing

Top 10 things of laughs *of things that I've seen happen or happened to me

1. Walking so carefully in the ice, hands clenched inside gloves (and you could tell the fingers aren't in the finger parts of the gloves) and then slipping on your back super hard, like ice beneath you cracking hard, walking into church (Qussauyaq Kashatok)

2. In Sunday school when kids are gathered together, waiting for the leader to come up to the podium, two rows of kids on pews, Agnes Kugstun punches Ben Dock in the row behind us and says "We're supposed to love eachother when we're in church!"

3. Duutii "What you are you gonna eat when we have no more food?" when I didn't want to eat my Chicken Ala King from the good old Kipnuk High Cafteria lunchline, and she had eaten everything but the corn. "Ciin-mi tuakut nerenriciiki?"

4. Me and Sofe walking really fast into the dark road in Anchorage and I said "What if we run into a moose?"

5. At the famous Gaslight, Donna, Sophie and I looking around, Sofe says "Don, there's your boyfriend!" and the yucky guy came up to us three and asked Sophie to dance and we burst out laughing! Naklleng, poor guy ... Sofe, did you dance with him?

6. Leaving the Northway Mall by that bakery entrance "Did you see the big earholes on that guy?"

7. At the end of the church service, I said to Christine, "Atam Frank-aq" Frank Paul was up at the podium listening to whoever the guest speaker was with his mouth open, me and Chris were in the choir robes in the front rows and were supposed to be exiting right after Frank and couldn't stop giggling and Fannie John Amik was sitting next to us and joined in our laughter and couldn't stop laughing either!

8. In the middle of 'Bringing the Sheaves' the lights went out and everbody at church all of a sudden stopped singing. I was sitting next to Miisaq Amik and my mom and couldn't contain my laughter at the sudden stoppage.

9. My dad, exhaling away on the last of his cigarette in the woodstove as I hung up my coat on the wooden coat rack by the door. The coat rack fell from too much weight on one side, the long tip of it cut my dad's cigarette in half and he tataamallaked back while he held on to the other end of what was left of the cigarette!

10. After mopping my room with lots of soap, Donna dumped soapy water all over the stairs outside our house. The qerrun was full and Oscar had just had an appendectomy, Dad and both older brothers had left for fishing. Mom wanted to bring the qerrun down the stairs to make it easier for Donna and I to take the qerrun to the dumping site. The soap made the stairs really slick and Mom spilt the qerrun all over the stairs and was still sliding down the stairs while Aparlliq and Qak'aq were walking by doing their rounds after curfew and they asked "Qaill piceci?"

100th Day of School

Children everywhere (well, these parts of the world) are celebrating the 100th day of school on February 9th.

I think its a great idea to recognize how far the kids have come along in learning and achieving goals.

We never had such days when I was growing up. The most significant part of the school year were the first day of school and the final day of school.

Jeffrey's kindergarten class is doing a project to bring in 100 things that the kids can count and show off for the 100th day.

Raven's class did the same thing last year and I didn't get to see what all the other kids brought in. Raven beaded a 100 bead necklace of different colors with the tenth bead a certain color to signify 'tens' to make it easier to count.

I wanted to do something different for Jeffrey, but running out of ideas. I thought of doing a poster board and showing off 100 things he has learned since starting school. Like the 26 letters of the alphabet, the colors, shapes, etc. But that might be too time consuming for a 5 year old to do. So, I might resort to him pasting 100 pieces of macaroni or millions of little things we have around the house to some kind of shape. Or maybe we could do a 100 piece marshmallow pyramid .... maybe 100 strands of dog hair that our smelly dog sheds, ewwww (maybe not).

Around this time of the year, when I was growing up, we'd be busily coloring away printed out Valentines every chance we got. We'd put our carefully colored pieces of paper shaped beautifully and cut with care, into Valentine's Day boxes all the classes from Kindergarten through 8th Grade had displayed in their classrooms.

During class time or around recess, kids would march in with a handful of their handicrafts to drop off to the classroom box. We'd try to guess who the Valentines would be for depending on the person. And back then, we'd be so honest, well at least me, and put 'To So and So---From Ella" instead of leaving out the "from" part.

On the big day, our teacher would open up the box and pass out every valentine -- all of us sitting at our desks hoping we got the most valentines and the girls oooh-ing and aaah-ing on the beautifully colored valentines.

What I remember most of all those years is Ms Smith in 7th and 8th grade doing mini Valentine cakes with our names on them. I loved those! Happy 100th Day and Happy Valentines Day Ms Smith - where ever you are ....