When I picked Karina up from school on Friday she came out not only with her super, all green faces behavior chart, but also the class mascot, a stuffed duck named Chucu. As our visitor, we needed to document our adventures with Chucu in his journal and return him the following week.

Two side notes before I tell you about our time together.

1. The teacher told us Chucu needed to be returned the following Wednesday to school. I thought this was a wonderful gesture to busy parents, to give them extra time after the weekend to get some pictures or drawings together for Chucu’s journal. It wasn’t until later that night or even the next day that I realized there was no school on Monday and Tuesday and therefore we had Chucu for an extended weekend. Chucu saved us from showing up on Monday morning to a closed school building!
2. When the teacher gave us Chucu she also gave us two journals. I thought that the older journal was just one that had been filled by Karina’s classmates already and instead of giving us just the new journal we would continue in, she was also giving us the first volume so we would have some guidance on what were suppose to do. Once we got home though I realized the old journal was just that, old. The dates were from last school year and the children weren’t even in Karina’s class. We had been given Chucu and his journal first. I see this in the following two ways.

1.She didn’t want us to be intimidated by all the writing from Karina’s classmates’ parents and made to feel bad that my Spanish wasn’t up to par. She therefore offered us the book first so we didn’t have to stress about filling the pages like those before us. She gave us the old journal so we could just copy some text and no one else would know.

or

2. She entrusted us with the new journal and Chucu first because she thought we will be excellent guardians and would complete an amazing entry in his journal that would set the tone, and the bar, for the rest of the families in the upcoming weeks.

Although now that I am thinking about it maybe I should add another possibility in that we got it first so all the families could see my level of Spanish and be reminded that there is a second language learner in their child’s class and they could all talk about us behind our backs. Oh well, no matter the case, he was ours and we got the job done, because of course I was going to try to set the bar high for the next family.

So what does one do with a stuffed duck?

Play at the playground

Make breakfast

Skype

Jump on the trampoline at the park

Paint in the park

Meet his twin, another Chucu from another school out taking pictures like we were

Go to church

Go to the ER because Karina had an ear infection and we couldn’t get a Dr. appointment

Hopefully our journal entry is what the teacher was hoping for by entrusting us with it first. I did leave out the ER picture though because if I was the next family and saw that the duck had been to the germ-ladened hospital I would quarantine Chucu in a bag and he wouldn’t have a very pleasant stay. Hopefully what they don’t know won’t hurt them, or make them sick.