Option #1:

I have just put Rainy down for a nap when the door slams and I know they’ve come home. I make sure her socks are still on her feet and place Señor Elephant in reach of her tiny fingers. I smooth her hair while our mother laughs like an afternoon drunk from the living room.

Option #2:

Option 1: Present tense is off-putting, so I “read” it in past tense; I liked it better that way. All the sentences start with “I” – you need sentence variation.

Option 2: You say the group project is how they met, but then you say they met at lunch. Which one is it? I’d suggest start with how they met – your line about trading food and falling in love is great – and then bring in the group project. And I thought Mr. Coolidge was a teacher on the first and second reads, perhaps the lunch monitor. The 2nd sentence is too long, but it’s easily solved if you remove the reference to Mr. Coolidge bringing them together. It would also allow changing the second “Rui” to “him”.

I met Rui in third grade when we did a group project on Calvin Coolidge. He was new that year, and I had just started reading the first of our library’s fifty-one Nancy Drew mysteries, so I hadn’t noticed him at all. He colored the president’s head with my crayons. That day at lunch, Rui sat with me. He traded his burrito for my peanut butter sandwich, and I fell instantly in love.

Rui met my mother when I dragged her to our class presentation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the year the school board fired Mrs. Henderson. I warbled the refrain in “Hard Candy Christmas” to a muttering audience and tried not to smear my red lipstick.

Mother stood talking to the other parents after the show. I

[This message has been edited by Yufae (edited December 03, 2008).]

I met Rui in third grade when we did a group project on Calvin Coolidge. He was new that year, and I had just started reading the first of our library’s fifty-one Nancy Drew mysteries, so I hadn’t noticed him at all. He colored the president’s head with my crayons. You need something else here, this sentence comes out of nowhere. Like "The first day we worked together he colored the presiden's head with my crayons" That day at lunch, Rui sat with me. He traded his burrito for my peanut butter sandwich, and I fell instantly in love.

Rui met my mother when I dragged her to our class presentation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I warbled the refrain in “Hard Candy Christmas” to a muttering audience and tried not to smear my red lipstick. For some reason the school board fired Mrs. Henderson that same year.
Mother stood talking to the other parents after the show. I