< Mer + y > < Chr + ist + mas >

It is just before noon on Christmas morning in Southern California. I'm in a cabin in the San Jacinto mountains, nestled among tall pines and taller rocks. Everyone else in the cabin is still asleep, except for my friend's dogs and me. I'm sitting at the kitchen table on my laptop, and I opened my Shameless drafts (I have about a dozen or so unfinished posts...) to see if I could find one to finish and post, but they all require more remaining work than I can commit to on a holiday.

Instead, I'm sharing a photo from earlier this school year. Each Monday, Poppy's babysitter texts me her spelling lists, which are, frankly, a total disaster for Poppy and probably for many third graders. There is little connection between the random list of phonograms at the bottom and the words that show up on the list. Spelling "instruction" consists of busywork for homework: writing the words alphabetically, writing each word five times, writing the words in bubble letters – nothing even remotely orthographic in nature.

Most weeks, I retool Poppy's spelling list into word sums and etymological relatives that help make sense of their spellings. If our schedules line up, we meet to go over them. But this fall semester was hard between my evening commitments and Poppy's limited availability. I felt discouraged early on in the semester, worried that we would lose the slow progress we had been making.

But mid-semester, Poppy's babysitter texted me this photo, and it kind of rekindled my trust in this orthographic understanding and my hope for Poppy's continued growth: