New Zealand: what future?

Yesterday I went to a special assembly at the girls' school. There was a powhiri (welcome ceremony) for all new students and their families. We who were the manuhiri (visitors) met in a classroom to practise a waiata and to have the protocol explained to us, and then we walked around to the school hall and gathered at the door. Inside the entire school was lined up facing us, with the Kapa Haka group in full costume at the front. One of the eldest girls called us, "karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai" and then the whole school welcomed us in with a haka.

Isobella has been in the Kapa Haka group since the first week she started at this school. I went along as parent help last week when the group performed at a multi-cultural concert in West Auckland. The kids were beside themselves with excitement. We negotiated crowds, ate lunch, got ready and had a quick practice, and in the end we were left with only a few minutes to get all thirty-something of the kids down through the hall and onto the stage. They did really well, considering there was no adult in the background to coach them. It's a pretty white group, and they didn't have the same volume or feistiness as some of the other groups, but they did their very best, and you could tell they loved every minute of it.

One of the other schools performing that day was one of the local schools in our old neighbourhood. This was a small school, one of those schools that some how along the way becomes the second-choice school for families who have the resources to choose something other than their local school. The roll at this school is tiny compared to the school up the road with the "excellent reputation", and has a high percentage of Maori and Pasifika kids. Is this the cause or the effect of the "white flight" that has gone on around it, who can say, but the result is undeniable. Still, it's a big-hearted school doing its best with limited resources and support. And the school's presence at the festival was hard to miss. They had just about the whole school involved, the kids were brimming with pride, and very happy.

We were able to watch this school performing on stage just before we went off to get our kids ready. It was their Kapa Haka group, a big group of kids in full costume, with piupiu skirts and the girls with moko face- painted on. They looked fantastic, they were loud and proficient. Then just behind me a man who seemed to be one of the dads of the group stood up and started a haka of his own from the audience. He was loud and passionate too. By standing and doing this he was offering the highest honour he could give the kids in that moment, and giving them his sincere and tangible support. I looked at the man, a wild looking Maori guy with a woolly grey beard and tats down his arms, and I could see that he was bursting with pride for those kids up on stage. In a moment I realised how incredible it was for him to see his child up on stage, belonging and succeeding at school by celebrating being Maori. I cried. I couldn't stop the tears rolling down.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Maori kids got the strap for speaking Maori in class. Not so long ago, Maori children were likely to grow up ashamed of their Maoriness.  Whole generations have passed without having seen their culture and traditions valued. Who is crying for that now?

I was down at mum's last week when she was watching a TV programme that follows families with missing members and helps them find them. An elderly Maori had discovered he had fathered a son without his knowledge, and that son had been adopted. The programme tracked the son down in Australia and I watched the father and son's emotional reunion. It was a grey day, and the family had set up a welcome party underneath the carport at the end of the driveway. I watched as the family welcomed the son, assembled together just as the girls' school had been at our assembly yesterday. The wife of his father, his soon to be step-mother, led the call. "Karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai" she called, tears rolling down her face. The son walked towards them, his tears welling up too. The father met him, they shared a hongi, and then held each other in the tightest embrace, sobbing. The father whispered in Maori in his son's ear, over and over. I couldn't understand the words, and neither could the son, but they were like a soft song that washed over him. In that moment, no other language would do.

It's election day next Saturday. Politics was kept back stage while the Rugby World Cup was on, so it's felt like a very short lead-up. I've been more unsure about who I'll vote for than I have been for any election previously. I'm a left-leaning kind of girl, but I wouldn't call myself "left". I have some very "right" tendencies, but I'm definitely not "right", and even "centrist" doesn't describe me either. If I could dial up my ideal government it would be like an icecream cone with several scoops, each made of different flavours. I'd choose a policy from here, a policy from there, an ideology from one end, and another from the other end. Meanwhile, in the real world, a bleak financial outlook combined with some very desparate needs mean that I'm basically stumped. I can't see any one party that has the big picture covered.

I've been reading some sobering facts about our nation. The UN recently released a paper on child welfare entitled "Doing better for Children" and New Zealand doesn't fare too well. We have some of the worst statistics for children's health and well being in the OECD. Overall, our child mortality is higher than the OECD average. Twenty percent of our children are living in poverty. Maori children under 15 are six times as likely to be living in an overcrowded household, and Pasifika children are twelve times more likely. This has led directly to high rates of diseases that have completely disappeared from most developed countries. Margo White in the Listener notes that rheumatic fever is taking its toll amongst some of our children. This disease, which shouldn't exist, can leave children needing immediate heart-valve replacement surgery, and then monthly penicillin injections. Dr Norman Sharpe, the medical director of the NZ Heart Foundation, says that there are a thousand children on the Auckland register having monthly penicillin injections to prevent rheumatic fever re-occurring. Lance O'Sullivan, a Northland-based GP, regularly sees children who are "walking around with the heart of an eighty year old." His stark indictment;  "this is a disease of poverty, and brown kids... this is a race-based problem."

There's been plenty of political rhetoric thrown around recently about race-based policy. There are a few politicians who use it to fear-monger and to get attention. They want us to believe that race-based policy is morally repugnant, that it's a form of racism itself, and that it benefits some, only to leave the rest out in the cold. It's an easy position to hold when your culture is in the majority wherever you look, and when you live in a warm, dry, and comfortable house, and don't need to know where your nearest food bank is. But to believe it you have to be in some measure of denial about the reality of life for those on the other side.

At the end of the welcoming ceremony at the girls' assembly, the group of us who were being welcomed filed across the hall and greeted the front row of adults and children on the other side. Some of us shook hands, but most of us shared a hongi. That beautiful pressing of noses symbolises the oneness of shared breath. For a moment, the visitor and the host are one. Once the greeting was over, we the visitors were given new seats, right next to our hosts. I looked back over to the other side of the hall where the visitors began the ceremony, and the seats were empty. The meaning was clear. There were no more visitors, everyone now belongs.

That oneness is exactly what we need. We could all do with more opportunities to walk in each other's shoes. It's too easy see people as either "them" or "us." But what sort of future is that?

hard week, happy ending

This shows you how happy a girl can be on the day of the performance of her school show. Don't you remember? Eating dinner early, jumping in the car in the new evening light of spring, being hustled into a room full of other children just as excited as you are. The air so thick with expectation you could stick your tongue out and taste it. Just look at her.

The funny thing is that I'm here at home writing this, while she is right now on stage in her moment of glory. Up until this morning I was the one going, and Paddy staying, because all week he has been the sickest of all of us, but today we were neck and neck, he slightly better, me worse. Isobella fervently prayed last night that Dad would be well enough to go to the show, and this afternoon when I told her he was, she was over the moon. Wasn't bothered much when I told her that that meant I was too sick to go. I love how she loves her Dad.

Anyway, he is there sitting in the school hall now, Greer beside him, video camera in hand, capturing the moment. But I'm capturing the moment too.

I'm weary and sick of being sick.  I don't need to say how exhausting it is when everyone gets sick at the same time, because you know. We've had a week of it. I didn't even know the date until yesterday.

I'm getting picture updates from the show on my phone, and it's wrapping up now with a haka, the whole crew. I can see in the mass of faces up on stage that they are overjoyed. Rugby makes these kids happy, especially at the moment. They love their haka, and they love their country.

I can't think of a better image that expresses the heart of a kiwi than a bunch of kids up on stage doing a haka as their grand finale, and reveling in it.

still re-modelling the dream

It's two o'clock in the afternoon and I'm sitting at the dining table eating lunch. Abigail is in bed and my two big girls are nearly at the end of their first day at school. I almost can't believe what I've just written. The decision to send them to school has happened so quickly, I'm still in shock.

Homeschooling was never something I planned on doing. As I've told you before, I once swore I would "never" homeschool.  Ha. Those words came back to haunt me when, as Isobella was about to turn five, the dream of a homeschooling life crept into my heart. At that stage Isobella had petit-mal epilepsy that was not yet controlled by medication, and it seemed cruel and counter-productive to send her to school.

I started reading and thinking about homeschooling. Through books such as Teach Your Own by John Holt, and through the internet and blogs I found along the way, a whole world opened up to me. Not a small, sheltered and narrow world, as I had assumed, but a wide and fascinating world, full of intelligent parents who were passionate about giving their children a holistic and broad education, while still giving them plenty of time and space to play. This blog, and this blog were the first blogs I ever read, and those families enchanted me with their other-worldy life of books and nature and freedom.

 Just before Isobella turned six, we had to decide whether we were going to continue homeschooling. To my surprise I found that school seemed like a good option, and Isobella agreed wholeheartedly. Isobella was happy at school, she made friends and had a great teacher, but she didn't thrive the way I'd expected her to. When people asked how school was going I'd say "school's fine." Then after six months I realised that it was okay for me to want more than just "fine" for my daughter.

So over a year ago now, we decided to go back homeschooling.  It was an answer to the cry of my heart. I realised that not only had school not been good for her, it hadn't been good for me either. I had turned myself inside out to find a morning routine that got us to school on time, and I found the after-school pick-up almost as stressful. The decision to go back to homeschooling felt like us deciding to be us. It felt like I was saying, to myself and to the world, we're a little different, and we need to do things a little differently.

I've loved teaching my girls. I found that I'd rather be teaching my own kids than anyone else's. And as I've written before, homeschooling "made me the mother I'd always wanted to be." It taught me to just be. It gave me permission to step out of the busy world of pre-school activities and be mostly at home. It taught me that there were no commitments in my life that were more important than my children, and it forced me regularly to be completely present with them.

Most importantly, homeschooling gave Isobella the space and freedom to be herself at a time when her self-concept as a learner was most vulnerable. She told me after we took her out of school that the boys had teased her for her "scribbly" writing and drawing.  She had often been on the list of kids who had to finish their stories at lunchtime. And sometimes she would bring readers home that completely bored her. It was so good for her to be able to do her own thing at home.

Then in May this year I took Greer out of kindy a term early and started homeschooling her as well, because I knew she was ready for it. I couldn't see it at the time, but actually, that changed nearly everything. Greer quickly flourished, and one day during her first week of "official" homeschooling, I looked at the two of them working up at the table and the thought came to me in a flash, those girls are going to love school when they get there.

One night a couple of months ago I had a dream. In the dream Isobella was at school, and she was happy. When I woke up the next morning the dream sat in my heart like a half-open door. I tried to pretend it didn't mean anything, but the dream wouldn't go away. It scared and thrilled me at the same time. And so we started thinking about school again.

I found myself admitting things I hadn't admitted to myself before. I did find it a challenge teaching both girls. Their needs were very different, and I often felt like I had to be constantly on point to keep Isobella on task and to keep up with Greer. And then there was Abigail, whose daily mission was to climb up onto the table as many times as possible! I realised that I had been unconsciously withdrawing from the girls at breakfast time, in preparation for a morning of school work, and then withdrawing from them again at lunch time because my brain had just had enough. Afternoons had to be outside play or rest time, because by then I had simply run out of words. I don't know how other introverts do homeschooling, but I think if we had carried on I would have got very worn out.

I've shed more than a few tears over this decision. I felt like sending the girls to school was giving up on the dream that was so precious to me. I wondered how Isobella would cope, and I feared the return to a family life lived according to an institutional timetable. But since we first started talking about it the girls have not changed their minds. To say they were keen to start school would be an understatement.

It's taken me three days to write this post and it's now Wednesday. The girls have settled into school easily. They are in love with the library, have both joined the group that helps with the worm farm, caught the school bus home yesterday, and will be catching it again in about half an hour. I'll put Abigail in the buggy soon after three, put the dog on his leash, and walk up the road in the sun to meet them.

But I don't think I'll ever be a typical school mum. I don't feel any different this week, with the girls in school, to last week, when they were at home. I don't see school as the perfect answer to their education, and we didn't stop homeschooling because it wasn't working. After three days at school Greer is already saying she is bored with maths. She wants to count to one hundred, not to ten.

And that's the thing, see. We can do that. We can count to one hundred all afternoon and all weekend if she wants. I won't completely pack up our homeschool things, and if Isobella still wants to write stories with me I'll be in heaven.

Reading over the other posts I've written about homeschooling has been hard. I've felt tears pricking as I read. And it's been surprising to see how similar each stage of the journey has been. None of the decisions along the way were easy. Each of them was accompanied by tears and deliberation. And each time I felt pulled, as I do now, in both directions. School, good. Home, good.

I'm seeing something now that I never saw before. We really don't fit neatly into either the school or the homeschool box. My girls crave the stimulation and company that school gives them, and yet, for various reasons, they don't naturally slip into their place in the system that is a public school. I know that school will not meet all of their needs. And yet I have a gut feeling that somehow, despite that, they will thrive.

And then there's me. It's not like I'll be sitting around twiddling my thumbs. There's no question that this house is a job in itself, and there is plenty of work to be done on our business projects. And what about all those words I haven't had the time or head space to write? We had a big chat about school with the girls one night before we shifted.  They were so keen on the idea that I was taken aback. "If you girls go to school, what will I do at home all day?" I asked, half teasing, half choking back the tears. "Write, Mama," Isobella piped up immediately. "Write!"

guess what this is!

So you knew the idea was still hanging around somewhere... I told you about that here.   You knew it was part of a dream I wasn't sure of the form of, or the taste of, but longed for anyway.  You knew I was confused about how and why we'd done it in the past, and didn't have any idea whether we'd ever do it again in the future. Remember?

Well. Since those formative wonderings, the idea of homeschooling has come back to life.  You could say the dream has gradually taken a form I can see and describe.   It all started with that post, and those tears of joy I told you about watching the girls sitting doing "school" work up at the table.   It was followed soon after by a week at home for Isobella where she was too sick to go to school, but not sick enough to be on the couch all day.   I told her if she stayed home she'd need to "do some school" so I found a maths website on the internet for her, and it all started there.  From the hours she spent loving that maths website, she went on, mostly self-directed, to writing stories and typing them out, to reading old readers, to pulling out her old maths text book and doing some of the pages, to more reading... and more writing... and more internet maths. This went on for four days, and every day she became more content, happier within herself, and more proud of her work.  It got to the point where I said to her "you know this is what homeschooling looks like," and she replied, in so many words, "let's do homeschooling again Mum."

You need to understand that the week wasn't perfect.  I spent the first morning she was at home wondering constantly what was happening at school and what she was missing out on.  I got over that.  The second morning I lay in bed and thought about the prospect of being at home all day with three kids, no kindy, no activities, and had a moment of panic.  Where had my peaceful house gone? I got over that one too.   Then there was Thursday, my "writing" day. My treasured day, the gift that school had given  me, the day to myself (shared with Abigail) that was going to enable me to write the book.   Well Thursday turned out to be lovely, and I still got a bit of writing done.  By Friday I was in heaven.  I couldn't take the smile off my face.   I felt incredibly, deeply peaceful.   It was a peace that came from being free from the tyranny of getting to school in the mornings and being tied to pick-up time in the afternoons, a peace that came from spending the week doing something I now realise I love, a peace that told me my dream of a different life for our family was alive and well, and it took the unexpected form of homeschooling.

So that envelope in the photo above is our application to homeschool Isobella.  It spells out, in tidy-looking tables and concise paragraphs, how and why we want to homeschool.  It will be in the post today!

Re-modelling a dream

I’m sitting at the desk in our new study. This room was once the playroom and has just been completely re-arranged. When this room was in between stages, not a playroom any more and not yet a study, it felt so empty. It was a sad thing for me. Creating the playroom had been a big part of my homeschooling dream. I wanted a creative, natural playspace, where our homeschooling resources could be easily reached, a room full of possibilities.

The dream began way back when I first had the crazy idea of homeschooling nearly two years ago, and its seeds were in the blogs I read of families who had created for themselves a life of adventure and learning together. The dream they sparked in me was tantalizing. It was so different from anything I’d seen lived out around me, so rich in opportunities for good family relationships, so creative, beautiful and natural. I wanted a life like that. It was the hippy in me I guess, the one that has been with me ever since I was born to a pair of hippies in 1974.

Those blogs I read sparked many hours of dreaming of a different life for us, and wondering how I could take our very ordinary lives and weave something more out of them. I was longing for something I felt we didn’t have. I wanted to create something that was uniquely us. I wanted to do family our own way.

So when we decided to homeschool Isobella it was a decision that brought great joy – to all of us – but especially to me. I loved every moment I spent reading about homeschooling and thinking about how we would make it happen, and turning this room from a study to a playroom was a big part of that. Every moment of organizing and shifting and sorting and tidying made me so happy. I was making my dream happen.

And most of the time, the room worked. The girls loved playing in it and when friends were over they were usually in there. I loved standing in there after the kids were in bed and looking over from the family corner to the table and chairs to the bookcase with the kids’ books and homeschooling things on it. I would stand there smiling. My dream was happening. Last November when homeschooling  suddenly became going to “real” school  (you read about that here) the playroom got neglected. The homeschooling resources got messy and were largely ignored, and I didn’t go in there and stand smiling anymore. Actually, I would go in there and feel sad, because the room now reminded me of that dream. The one I was very confused about. The one that I felt I’d given up on, by making the decision for Isobella to start school.

And so the room stayed, half-loved and half-ignored. Starting school was a big upheaval and took a lot of our focus, then there was Christmas and summer, and then getting back into school again with the New Year. I quietly got on with getting myself into a writing routine. Then about a month ago I realized how much both Paddy and I needed a study. I had a fleeting escapade with the idea of moving house, and then one night when I couldn’t sleep I realised we could have everything we wanted in a house (other than more space) right where we are. The idea of a study had come back again. The playroom was dismantled. The girls went back to all sleeping in the same room. Their toys have been downsized and re-arranged, and, amazingly, it works. I am sitting at my old, favourite desk in front of a window with a lovely outlook, filled with trees and sky. It’s not too squashy, we even have a blank wall (the only one in the house!!) and it feels good. Paddy can get away to work, and I can get away to write.

But sitting in the corner to my right is that bookcase.  In the same place as it had been when this was the playroom, still cluttered with the remains of our homeschooling things waiting to be… sorted? Given away? Put in storage? I have been ignoring them, focusing on the rest of the room, putting off the inevitable. They are the remains of the playroom, and therefore, the remains of the dream.

I can’t tell you right now whether that dream was simply for a season of time, or whether it was about my misguided attempts to re-create my own childhood. I can’t tell you right now if we made a mistake in homeschooling, and will one day look back on it as a “blip” or whether we made a mistake in giving up homeschooling, and will one day regret sending Ella to school. I can’t tell you whether I let myself get caught up in envy as I read those homeschooling blogs, and tried to create a homeschooling life as a way of trying to create a “perfect” family.

But I can tell you that when I look at those homeschooling things on the shelf, I feel a pang of longing. And when I sat down with ella yesterday afternoon and got her to write a story with me, it felt so good. And I can tell you that when I stood in the kitchen and looked back at our dining table with Ella there writing a story and Greer next to her doing her own “work” that I suddenly cried, big, wet tears of joy.

Am I happy to be in this study writing while Isobella is at school and Greer at kindy? Yes. Am I happy for Isobella who loves school and is very excited about her cross-country race tomorrow? Yes. Will I keep a couple of shelves here and maybe even a box in the kitchen for homeschooling things? Definitely. Is the dream still alive? Absolutely. Do I know what it looks like? No! But I’m dreaming on…

Sometimes dreams are works in progress. Sometimes we know what they feel like but not what they look like. Sometimes we don’t even know that much, yet we sense the longing for them deep within us, and are compelled to grasp for them, blindly. Sometimes in our grasping we reach out and find nothing but air, but still we reach out again. I’m convinced it’s all part of living the dream. Every failed attempt, every disappointment or change in plan is all living the dream.  And every moment we put words to our longings, let them live and breath out of us even when it hurts, we are living the dream.

Twenty Years

This morning.  How can I get up at 6:30am and not have enough time to do everything that getting ready for school and kindy entails?  I only have to get myself showered and dressed, feed four mouths, pack two lunches, oversee personal grooming, the packing of bags, morning chores, and get up to the walking bus by 8:25.  It's not like I'm running a marathon or anything.   But could I do it?  No.  We finally got in the car at 8:28 (I thought it was five minutes earlier than that) and raced up to the walking bus, yanked the buggy out of the car, popped the baby and Greer in the seats and dashed across the road to lead the waiting group down the hill to school.  We were embarrassingly late.

The problem is that we are often late by at least a moment.  Mornings are a mission. I've tried tick charts, motivational sticker charts, showering in the evening, changing the order by which I do things... and some of those things help some of the time, but I've found no magic formula.  Every morning is just so different.

I saw Isobella off to her classroom and walked back up the hill with a heavy heart.  I was wracking my brains, trying to lay the blame somewhere.  Was it just my slackness?  Was lateness somehow tied up with one of the seven deadly sins and should I be going to confession?   Should I abandon the walking school bus, even though it allows me just to drop Isobella off most mornings, and usually only walk it once.  Or should we just pack up and sell our house and move nearer the school, right next door preferably, ideally on the side her classroom is on so I can just hoist her over the fence in the mornings....

On the drive back home I got thinking about a news item I saw last night.   A woman who has been partially disabled for twenty years following a brain haemorrhage and appears to be confined flat in her bed, has been refusing to eat for eleven days.  Her estranged husband was shown tearfully expressing his grief that the rest home she is in seems to be supporting her death wish.  As I was driving it suddenly dawned on me that this woman, who was once an attractive woman, full of life (we saw a photo of her in her thirties, perhaps), has for the last twenty years been lying in a bed barely even able to communicate.  For her, every day of the last twenty years has been identical. 

In the last twenty years I have finished secondary school, completed two lots of tertiary education, travelled overseas several times, worked in three completely different jobs, got married, had three children, bought two houses and sold one, been a landlord, started writing a novel, dreamed, longed for, wished, and made many things happen, and mostly, grown up.  From sixteen to thirty-six.  While this woman has done not much more than exist.

I am so grateful for this life.  This life with its crazy unpredictable-ness and with all its responsibilities and the rewards that follow.   How lucky I am to have things to be late for...  to have a (mostly!) sound mind and a very able body that can coral children and buggies at high speeds, that can walk down steep hills breathing in crisp nearly autumn air and then bend to kiss my daughter as she enters her classroom.  Not one day of the last twenty years has been the same.   Every day a new day, each one full of possibilities and challenges.   But who has faced the greater challenge, in those twenty years?  Me, with my jobs to do, deadlines to meet, events to arrive on time to, relationships to negotiate and children to care for, or that woman, lying in her bed, living in that strange, unknown space between this world and the next, not fully in this one, and yet not released to enter the next?  She is the hero.

Empty Nest Syndrome Here

I've been Homeschooling ella since March. Homeschooling wasn't something I ever planned or even imagined I'd end up doing. In fact, I once said quite emphatically to a friend that I could never do it. But a year ago it came into my brain almost from out of nowhere, and I couldn't get rid of it. And the more I thought about it, and the more I read about it, the more I liked the idea. We talked a lot about it, and ended up deciding to give it a go. Kids don't have to be enrolled in school until they are six, so you kind of get a "free hit" before you have to apply to the Ministry for exemption from school. We thought we'd give the year a go, and then decide before she turned six what we'd do from there.

I was captured by a dream - of a family life where time together is not ruled by school hours, where holidays can be taken whenever, where learning happens organically - with the world as its resource room - the museum, the library, the zoo, the bush, the internet, family and friends, and all the good fun and exploring that happens when you hang out at home. But mostly I loved the idea of learning alongside her, and exploring the world together. And for 8 months that has been our life, more or less. Homeschooling was pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Basically, it made me happy. As cheesy as this sounds, it made me the mother I'd always wanted to be. And as far as ella was concerned, homeschooling was great. She was happy to learn with me, and would tell everyone from the dairy shop-keeper to the lady at the library that we were homeschooling. She loved the homeschooling classes we did, and the other families we met. And she got to do plenty of playing.

Then two weeks ago I decided we should start talking about next year. I thought I already knew what I wanted to do - continue homeschooling. But I found myself saying that we should be open minded in our decision, and look at some schools other than the ones we had looked at originally. And from there I found that suddenly I couldn't get school out of my head. Just as homeschooling had come from out of nowhere, suddenly School was doing the same thing. I found myself talking to ella about the idea of going to school, and although at first she said she wanted to keep homeschooling, pretty quickly she got quite excited about the idea of school. And I realised that if ella went to school, I would suddenly have the opportunity to have time alone. And I knew just what I would do with that time.

So Isobella is starting school on Monday. She is more than excited. As far as she is concerned, Monday can't come soon enough. I'm happy for her. But I'm also in complete shock at what I've done, and how quickly it has happened. I've cried a lot. You see, I think there are two women inside of me. One of them would be quite happy to be surrounded by her chaotic brood all day. The other one, the quiet one who doesn't ask for much, is craving an empty house. Right now I'm torn between them both, and wishing I could make them both happy at the same time. Maybe I can?