What would Gamma do is a good question to keep in mind when dealing with life’s vagaries, whatever the hell a vagary is. Ah, caprice, impulse, whim. Okay. I’d been worried about her in school, you’ll recall. In particular, boys poking her with pencils and a dumb teacher.

My wife does have an appointment to talk with the teacher again today (“Stop letting boys poke Gamma with you!”) But in the meantime Gamma (it’s too cumbersome to keep calling her “the youngest one”.) seems to be adapting well. The principal of the school told us a while back she’d been observing the kid, who she figures is sneaky enough to survive. For example, the way she circumvents the recess rule. They have several recesses, but are allowed out of the classroom for only one. It works like this: all kids can run around in the school (they don’t have much of a playground) during the big lunch recess. Then, during the other shorter recesses, they have to stay in their rooms, except for one class each time that gets to go out through the school (they can play with toys etc lying about). This is to minimize chaos in the school, I think.

So what Gamma does is, during the main recess, she makes appointments with her girlfriends from other classes (although in the first grade, she hangs out with older kids from second and fourth grade) to meet in the bathroom during the smaller recesses, where they smoke cigarettes or whatever. That way, she gets to play with her friends during every recess, not just one. I think she figured this out on her own.