almost for­got Avery’s achievements!

Avery had two red let­ter mile­stones this week: she was award­ed the
cov­et­ed Pen License from her beloved Mrs. Bick­ley, which puts her in
the cat­e­go­ry of gulls allowed to use pen instead of pen­cil, with all
the rights and priv­i­leges there­to! The License itself must still be
lam­i­nat­ed, but the priv­i­leges have been extend­ed already.

Fur­ther­more, she received her Lev­el One skat­ing badge, the one she
earned last week on her sick day, unfor­tu­nate­ly, miss­ing hear­ing her
name read out at assem­bly. The actu­al badge is red and impressive,
and needs to be attached to some­thing. Appar­ent­ly some of her
col­leagues attach them to their back­packs, but in that case it had
bet­ter be iron-on so I don’t per­fo­rate my fin­ger try­ing to get through
lay­ers of bal­lis­tic nylon. I think bet­ter is to sew it on her games
jer­sey. We’ll work out the fin­er points over the week­end, at which
time I must also sew a miss­ing but­ton on her over­coat, a task that
occurs to me pre­cise­ly once per day: as I’m but­ton­ing her up in the
morn­ing. Then I don’t think about it again till the next morning.

I just got off the phone with my fam­i­ly in Con­necti­cut, everyone
gath­ered togeth­er (except Joel, the hedo­nis­tic boy, hav­ing a massage!)
to enjoy Jane’s exploits. How we miss them all.