Holpineville

Things Carl is Afraid Of, But Won’t Admit To

1)      Clowns.   There’s a cafeteria near here that has kids eat free night, and on kids eat free night, there is a clown who hands out balloon animals.  It’s an older lady wearing face paint, bright colored clothes, a frizzy wig, and pink Crocs.  We have seen her driving up in her SUV and pulling her rolling suitcase full of supplies into the restaurant; she looks like everyone’s grandma and she's always been kind to him.  No matter.  Carl is terrified of her.  We have friends who like to go to kids eat free night, and even though I’m not a fan of the food at this place, for a chance to see my friends and not cook, I would go once in a while, but Carl firmly says No Way.  

2)      Going upstairs by himself, if no one else is up there already. He’s very insistent that someone go with him when he’s going up to get ready for bed, say, or to retrieve something from his room before we leave for school in the morning.  It’s a little annoying, but I can’t fault him for this; I used to long-jump into my bed at night, to avoid being slurped up by some threatening, vague miasma that was on the floor or under the bed. 

I was going to add “staying home alone by himself, even for a few minutes” but this week, he decided to stay on the sofa playing video games for the 20 minutes or so between when Ruby and I left for the occupational therapist’s office and when Rod came home from work.  It was a big step for him, but thanks to the distraction, he barely even noticed.  

 

Dispatch from Behind the Dryer

I’m stuck at home today, because the line of thunderstorms! and tornadoes! is rapidly approaching, and you know, I get freaked out about street flooding.  The TV weather guy said I should stay put, so I am.  I just hope it hurries up so that I don’t have to abandon the kids at school at pickup time, and I’m secretly hoping Ruby’s drumming class gets canceled this afternoon.  It’s a lovely class and I appreciate having time to sit there and read or answer e-mail while she’s in it, but Carl gripes about having to take her and so I end up having to entertain/discipline/distract him instead.

Date night Friday was an utter disaster.  Let’s see, we spent about $175, I think: $65 for the babysitter, $20 for the kid/babysitter pizza, $10 parking, $80 on dinner, $15 or so on after dinner beer…all so that Rod and I could make each other miserable.  If you had seen us at dinner (the one bright spot: good Indian food!) you’d have said, jeez, people, next time skip the reservations and book the couples counselor instead, because you’re a mess. 

It was infuriating, sad and depressing, although the more so because neither of us intended it to be that way.  And it took me until the next afternoon to buck up and decide to move on from the pain, by sheer force of will.  But by Saturday night, when the kids went to a sleepover at their pals’ house, everything was all kissy-kissy and Rod and I went out again and had an excellent time.  Truly, I swear.  Lovely.  So, if you are a person in a long-term romantic relationship and have ever had a rotten evening together when you intended the opposite, well, now you know you have company.  And if you can’t identify, that’s great and you are lucky, but don’t tell me about it. 

Moving on:

Ruby is almost done with occupational therapy.  Despite the massive expense and considerable hassle of getting to and from therapy, I wish she could keep going.  The therapist feels like she’s done what she can and that Ruby is doing okay, that she just needs to keep doing the exercises and techniques they’ve been working on.  I think am going to try to find her a tutor, someone with some dysgraphia/dyslexia experience, to try to cheerlead and keep Ruby organized and moving forward.  There are days when Ruby seems like a nice bright normal kid, but I am not good at dealing with the times when she’s not, and Rod isn’t, either. Having a third party helps us all maintain a little more perspective. 

I got some new software that I am hoping will help Ruby manage her math homework a little better and free me up from having to scribe for her every night, but I’m still sorting out how it works.  She also needs to practice her typing more and I want to get her some word prediction software, but it’s expensive, and she’s very negative about anything having to do with writing, so I’ve been holding off. 

Ruby just doesn’t seem very happy a good deal of the time.  She has a couple of close-ish friends and a huge pile of acquaintances, but not as many close girlfriends as she would like.  She likes her teacher, but not her class at school, and I don’t sense that she’s as captivated by what she’s learning as I would like.  Sometimes she’s very adult and perceptive and wise when you talk to her, and sometimes she’s so goofy and moody and clueless about social cues that I worry for her.  She enjoys her after school activities, but being so heavily scheduled also stresses her out.  She needs more sleep (despite our being fierce defenders of bedtime) and more exercise.  I am in so far over my head with her.

 

Waste

Yesterday, I went to a long, contentious, and very draining meeting of this school district committee I am on.  It was all about being $43 million dollars short for next year, even after all the horrible budget cuts this year, and how everyone just loathes the new teacher appraisal and development system I spent most of last year going to meetings about and working on (oh, no, we’re not all getting 5 out of 5 ratings anymore!), and how the graduation rate is only 74% (but that’s better than it used to be!) and some people are just crazy, is all I can say.  Driving home, I listened to a news item about the horrible state of public education funding and the huge gaps between the haves v. the have nots.  Then, I helped Carl finish his homework, lice combed Ruby’s head, and read to them for a very long time, because we were at a pivotal point in the bedtime book de la semaine (actually, they have about five separate bedtime books going, which is a little much even for my variety-loving tastes, but they aren’t complaining.) 

Then, after I thought I was off duty for the night, Ruby had a big hysterical crying fit because she was suddenly afraid the house was going to catch fire and burn down while she was sleeping.  Later, there was a long string of PTO emails about exciting things like supply fee reimbursements (more of the crazy people) and gala invitation dimensions, and how many t-shirts to order in which sizes.   Naturally, the burglar alarm went off at 4:15 a.m., scaring the bejeezus out of Ruby, and after I got everyone back in bed, Rod snuffled or squirmed every time I got close to being asleep.  

You won't be surprised to hear, then, that tonight is the night I have finally managed to secure a babysitter, in an effort to reinject some joy and romance into the marital partnership, and I will be such! Fun! to date!  There is definitely a 4 p.m. coffee run in my future.  Also, I have no grand plan for the evening Fun & Romance and I hate to just default to dinner and a movie.  Gah.  I know, I wouldn’t want to date me, either.

Anyway, back to my main point: wasted resources.

If, like my household, yours shops Amaz@n.com very often, you really must always due it via an affiliate link to a charity.  What, you say?  You see, if you start at www.wilsonpto.org/fundraising, you’ll find a link to Amazon.  Shop like normal.  Use Prime, redeem gift cards, get free shipping, download to your heart’s content.  Whatever you spend, our little PTO will get a donation of 6% or so.  It’s anonymous, so you can buy underwear, tampons, gas remedies, marital aids, or whatever, and you won’t have to worry that we’ll know who has the addiction to romance novels or how much your new washing machine or camera cost. 

If you’re not into supporting my kids’ school, fine.  Go find the link at the website of your public radio station, or local museum or symphony.  Everybody’s doing it, and it’s free money!

More free money: 

Do you recognize this:

It’s a Boxtop for Education.  They show up on many, many products.  Here’s the list.  You may think, as I did, that your household doesn’t really buy that much processed food, but I bet you’ll find a few as you look through your cabinets.  These little puppies are worth 10 cents each to a school, sometimes more when there are bonus deals.  Don’t throw money in the trash!  Pull them out of your neighbor’s recycling bin, too.  Then give them to a parent of school aged kids, mail them to the school down the street, give them to the preschool at your church. 

 

See this: 

It’s a Label for Education. Same deal—the list of products is here.  They are valuable, and schools go to a lot of trouble to collect them.  It drives me nuts when people tell me it’s too much trouble to save that stuff. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do it, because I can't find $43 million (really, we probably need five times that to educate children in the still-modest style I would find appropriate), but I can make sure the school gets my 6% commissions, and those little ten cent bits of paper, and so can you.  

Rhymes with Nice, But It's Not

Rod returned from his trip just in time to find me discovering lice on Ruby’s head, a joyous homecoming if ever there was one.  I think we have the little critters on the run, but the hour spent combing every evening is brutal, given the already tight schedule.  I have my suspicions about where Ruby got them, and yet you can’t really go around critiquing people’s combing techniques and how they treat their kids’ heads, right?  Just please, don’t let them find my head….

 

This week is just an ongoing slog of after school activities and PTO meetings and work on the school’s fundraising gala, which is coming up.  Rod had a day trip to exciting Ft. Worth, and I stayed up late several nights stuffing envelopes, which lends a glaze of exhaustion to everything else.  Today I had the great honor of talking with one of the Early Childhood classes, in Spanish, no less, about the joys of volunteer work and why one would be crazy enough to be the PTO president. Apparently the teacher is moving on to other parents with more impressive jobs to talk about professions and the importance of higher education.  So, there was a minor sting to my pride when I was invited to talk about volunteering, but I smiled and said yes and refrained from explaining what an important person I used to be before I retired early.

 

The meeting with Carl's teacher was okay.  She's trying to figure out what to do with him when he gets so mad he's not interruptable, which is rare, but scary.   He's so big and strong she can't physically remove him.  She wants him to work on recognizing when he's upset and stepping back from the situation before he can't, and to build his emotional vocabulary so that he can talk about what he's feeling instead of clamming up or lashing out.  Which all sounds lovely, and exceedingly difficult bordering on impossible, but I'm trying to chat him up about it at home, too.  The teacher is also concerned that some of the other kids have figured out how to make Carl mad and are starting to do it for sport, or to get him in trouble...even though they're friends, which sounds a little like what his sister does, even though she's his sister.  

As for the grade skipping, the teacher seemed to think we should go for it.  She says his writing might not be completely second grade, but otherwise, he's a year ahead, he doesn't seem to see himself as a first grader at all, and she worries he'll be lonely when all his third grade pals move on to a new class next year.   

Tomorrow, I’m hosting a big ol’ coffee for people who might do some work on that fundraising gala, which means I’ll be spending the evening cleaning the house, baking muffins, and snapping at my family.  I think Rod is having a little geek party on Sunday, along with his Girl Scout meeting, and then the kids are off Monday.  I am toying with the idea of taking the kids around the neighborhood to clean up trash in honor of Martin Luther King, which would make it a tradition, since it’s the third time, or we’ve been invited to a party to make packages to hand out to the homeless guys at the intersections around here.  Really, could things get any more exciting?  

 

It's Sole Authority Weekend!

Rod is away for the weekend, bonding with his brother and his high school and college pals in Las Vegas.  He had better be having fun, and I imagine he is, but the whole thing just sounds tedious and exhausting to me.  I really must be getting old. 

Rod’s departure coincided neatly with the beginning of the Girl Scout cookie sale, thus dooming me not only to a weekend of single parenting, but also to door-to-door sales, my Least Favorite Thing Ever.  But Rod spent a lot of time last week dealing with his troop’s cookie sales paperwork, plotting out meetings, planning the father-daughter dance, and chatting up parents of prospective members.  A born leader of Girl Scouts, he is. 

The kids are back in school; the re-entry following winter break wasn’t as traumatic as I feared it would be, until Friday when Ruby had a 6 a.m. crying fit about how she was dead, just dead, because she hadn’t finished her work for the week and there was just no way she ever would.  Every effort I made to cheer her up, strategize about the situation, or calm her down was met with utter negativity. She's very frustrating to me when she gets in that mood.  For the record, when I picked her up from school, she was still very much alive and had managed to finish all but one thing. Next week will be the real test of mood and endurance, when Ruby’s after school schedule fills back up.

The kids’ report cards came out Friday.  They are very vague and not informative.  Ruby’s was great last time, and it still is now.  Carl’s was okay to good last time; he was marked down a little for not getting enough work done, and some  (but not all) of those grades were up this time.

Children, and What to Do About Them, continues to baffle me.   Carl:  will he go on to invent some geeky thing that transforms the world, or will he be arrested for ignoring and then shoving some peace officer who dares to ask him to move along while he’s playing Angry Birds?  It really seems too close to call most of the time.  More important, I can’t see how to make the former more likely than the latter. 

Here are two intertwined Carl problems.  Problem A: A couple of people separately suggested we should try to have him skip second grade.  I believed grade-skipping in our district to be impossible, but it turns out it is technically possible, if you apply by February and make your child take tests in June.  However, it’s extremely rare that anyone passes all the tests.   The rationale in favor of skipping second grade would be 1) Carl is one of the oldest kids in his grade so it’s a close thing that he’s not a year ahead anyway, 2) he’s physically very, very big, 3) academically he could probably cope fine,  4) he prefers to hang around with older kids anyway, and 5) if we did it this year, he would keep the same teacher because his class is first/second/third grade.

I’m not entirely in love with the idea, even if Carl could pass the test.  I skipped a grade, and while it may have spared me a year of academic torture-by-boredom, I’m not sure it was all for the long-term best, either.  Third grade here is where all the standardized testing pressure and insanity cranks up, and I hate to take away a year of Carl’s innocence.  And while he’s generally well-behaved, he has moments where he loses control, and there are some kids he has a tough time tolerating. 

On to Problem B: So on the one hand, I have people telling me how brilliant and mature-seeming Carl is, and then I get an e-mail from the teacher, inviting me for a conference next week because he’s having trouble controlling himself when he gets angry.  There was an incident just before Christmas when Carl got sent to the office and had a nice long conference with the principal.  They made a deal that Carl would be the one to tell me about what had happened. 

So guess what?  Carl said nothing at all about it.  Finally, after the principal dropped a big hint, and a little girl in his class came up and told me he’d been sent to the office for hitting, I asked Carl about it.  He seemed appropriately remorseful and downright embarrassed, but clammed up and wouldn’t give me any details at all. I asked if he had apologized to anyone who needed an apology, and he said yes, and that was that.

The teacher says he’s not generally a problem, but apparently there are enough times when he is, or maybe he’s scary enough when he gets enraged, that she wants to talk to me about it.   So, what do I say? 

Moving on, this week I took the kids to check out a karate school nearby.  Carl has been asking for a long time to take lessons, and of the options around here, this was one of the more feasible.  Let me just say that karate is so not my thing: you have to practically shovel the mumbo-jumbo BS in those places, and the actual class looks like a really dull exercise class, only with the counting in Korean.  But the kids liked it, and the old lady with a black belt instructor, and the older kids in the class who helped teach it, were welcoming.  Carl seemed to catch on fast and punched and kicked with a certain amount of power and coordination.  Ruby is too busy to sign up just now, but I promised to find us some tae-bo to do together instead.   I will probably enroll Carl, although I think he’ll find the whole thing less charming once he’s signed up and has to follow orders.  I’m hesitating, because we were also talking about signing him up for the local equivalent of Little League, and I don’t think the schedule will bear both. 

It’s late and I’m rambling.  More news later.

 

 

Merry Christmas from the Family*

I just thought I should check in.  We’re fine.  Christmas (and poor Rod’s birthday) was very good.  Santa came, we are rolling in an embarrassing number of presents, we reveled in moments of wonder, awe and holiday spirit. We ate a lot, drank a lot, shared the joy, loved each other and generally felt luckier than ought to be allowed. 

And yet, it’s Christmas as an adult: Even the sweetest parts have their bitter undercoating.  I was sick and sleepless the whole week before Christmas, and really, I am still not quite out of it. I gave the virus to Rod; he seems a little less sick than I was, but he still sounds awful.  During that week, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to make things festive, partly for the kids, partly for me.  Partly, I succeeded; partly, I didn’t.  And it feels like I lost nine days in the frenzy and now I'm trying to pack two weeks of vacation into one. 

I find, too, that I miss my old tribe.  It just seems wrong, it being only the four of us on Christmas Day.  My in-laws are averse to holiday travel, for which I don’t blame them at bit.  My dad would love to see us, but he’s far away and long remarried, with another set of schedules to juggle, so we don’t have every Christmas together.  And at holidays, I miss my dead mom, my dead grandparents, the dead uncle and the dead aunt and all those cousins, and even the relatives I can’t quite figure out how I’m related to.  It wasn’t that things were so perfect back in the day when it was a given I would see some large fraction of them all at holiday time, but it was a kind of built-in celebration system and bonding opportunity, and it evidently set my expectations for what Christmas is supposed to be.  It could be worse: my sisters got stuck doing the working spinsters thing alone together this year, for instance.  And yes, we could have hit the road and imposed on someone, but it just wasn’t feasible, schedule-wise or money-wise this year.  Sigh. You don't know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone….my life really is a series of pop music clichés, people.

Now in Holpineville we’re getting ready:  planning for the New Year’s Eve party we nearly always have, even though (or maybe because) I hate New Year’s Eve; getting some PTO stuff ready to go, because school starts right away after New Year’s and the spring agenda is packed; wrapping up some year-end bills and paperwork and cleaning out some long-term household messes.  Carl is nearly done assembling his Christmas Legos (all five big sets) and Rod is obsessively printing giant Lego minifigures (or would that be, Maxifigures?) on that damn 3-D printer with some silver plastic Ruby lovingly bought him for Christmas, just for fun and to make the kids happy. I’ve also given him a list of things to fix around here, and I think he wants to brew some beer, and did I mention, he’s not feeling so hot?

 

 

*Beloved local-color holiday song traditionally sung each year at our friends’ Christmas Eve caroling party; a wonderful mish-mash of hymns and popular songs and kids and dads volunteering to play piano, guitar, recorder, tambourine, maracas, and sing solos…it was glorious as usual this year.   If you celebrate Christmas or Hannukah, I hope you had a moment or two of transcendental joy and peace, too. 

 

In the Waiting Room

The waiting room at the occupational therapist is surprisingly low-key, in terms of the emotional energy.  The parents don’t chat with each other as much as you’d expect.  Some of them have other kids to watch; some of them are catching up on work; some just want the forty minutes or hour of peace.

But we all know why we’re here.  We’ve all been down a path that starts with wondering if something your child does, or doesn’t do, is just a little personality quirk, or a sign of More.  We moved on, probably, to other people noticing things about the child, to someone suggesting or even insisting that we get the kid “evaluated.”  And then there was the either a sad day when your kid got a really big label, or maybe the verdict was less clear: a series of “well, it could be this,” “there are indications of X,” “s/he seems to have an issue with Y,” “you should probably consider Z,” “let’s try ABC and see if it helps…” 

These parents are learning the same hard lessons you are about which therapy does what, public v. private school, what’s a disability and what’s not, accommodations, 504 plans, IEP’s, advocacy.  They, too, know the stress of dealing with tantrums and all stripes of impulsive, antisocial and age-inappropriate behavior.  You know they worry, just like you, about their “different” child making friends, getting through school, and navigating adult life.  How, you wonder, will this kid ever make it through college if she can’t write more than a simple paragraph?  How, that dad wonders, will my child ever hold down a job when he can’t make eye contact and screams when he’s frustrated?

But it’s not as depressing as all that.  Here, at least, people get it.  You don’t have to explain the weird thing your toddler is doing in the corner.  And the therapists are gurus, counselors, guides… angels, really.  Finally, there’s another adult who not only can understand what you’re dealing with, she’s in a position to offer those rare gems: useful opinions about your particular child!  You can ask all those questions that occur to you in the middle of the night, you can get a sense of how your kid compares to others, you can have a plan.  You don't have to worry about boring the therapist, or annoying her with your own brand of crazy, obsessive worry, like you might with a friend or your kid's teacher.  The therapist gives you a break:  a time or two each week when someone else takes on the burden of dealing with the Big Furry Problem you live with.  We hang on their words, when they emerge with our kids: “He had a good day today!  We worked on X,Y, Z.  He told me about ABC, and we talked about how important it is to try hard at DEF, and this week he’s going to work on doing J.“ We can go home, knowing we’re Doing Something, having a plan to attack, or tame, or at least co-exist with the Big Furry Problem.   

___________________________________________

I’ve been stewing over that bit for weeks, and it’s still not meeting my exacting Blog Standards, but I’m ready to move on.  As for the household update:

School is out: we had the groundbreaking for the new school playground/soccer field/etc.  and the class parties and the “winter songs” programs and general PTO meetings.  The Girl Scout campout went well; Rod and Ruby are tired but everyone seems to have had a good time and somehow they made it down the freeway and back with the minvan-dwarfing U-Haul of gear.    Carl had a sleepover with a friend one night, leaving me to go to a party by myself for the first time in probably a decade.  The next day we played ball and read books and he resisted my efforts to get him to nap, and we went to another party that night, ‘tis the season and all.  Yesterday, there was a big impromptu pack of kids at my house. Supposedly they were here to make Christmas cookies, but the kids mostly played and fought with each other while the organizing mom and I did some baking….not really the satisfying parent/child bonding activity she’d envisioned, and honestly, the cookies weren’t so hot. 

I still don’t have a grip on Christmas/Rod’s birthday/New Year’s.  Amazon Prime is my only friend at this stage, and Rod is trying to gently action on various fronts.  Santa is very uninspired this year and I hope my little brats aren’t too disappointed.  I need to figure out what to take to a Christmas Eve party and then what to eat on Christmas Day, and I need to get an invitation out for the New Year’s Eve party we’re having  (no better way to celebrate your least favorite holiday than with a big party at your house!).  To top things off, I’m keeping up a proud pre-Christmas tradition by contracting a Huge, Rotten, Sleep-Impeding Cold complete with sinus pressure, drippy nose and hacking cough, which makes me look and sound lovely and I am undoubtedly passing it along to everyone else in the house and the neighborhood, so I’ll get to deal with it again, even after I recover.    

 

Not Jolly Yet

I keep trying to think of nice happy things to tell you, but I’m just not in a good mood lately.  I’ve never been medicated for depression or anxiety or anything else, but there have been times it might have been a good idea, and it’s possible this is one of them.  I’m neglecting my sweet husband; the kids alternate between the extremes of marginal parenting (Clearly Raised by Wolves, or, Hopelessly Overindulged by Helicopter Mom); I don’t exercise, eat right, or sleep enough; I am completely unprepared for Christmas or the end of the fiscal year; the house is a mess even by local standards; no knitting or reading or anything else is happening; and I’m not really getting my all-consuming PTO work done, either.  In short, I’m not coping well in any of my life’s roles and my hair is falling out (seriously, it is, big time, and I don’t know why.  To think, I was worried about Rod’s scalp showing through…)

Things are going on, however, despite my mood.  Rod is busy at work because he'll be off while the kids are on vacation (yippee!) and he is completely obsessed with his 3-D prototyper machine when he’s not.   A friend of mine refers to her husband’s hobby as “that goddamn guitar,” and I am beginning to relate to the sentiment, if not use the same tone of voice.  Rod’s even got Carl interested now:  he taught Carl how to use Google Sketch Up, and then they made some of Carl’s designs.  Carl had to do a special project for school about Hawaii, and they came very close to making a 3-D poly-lactic acid model of the whole archipelago. 

When he’s not doing that, Rod is still busy.  He humors me, mostly, during this phase of depressive angst of mine.  He rescued a friend from a plumbing disaster and is fixing the oven that had the nerve to break on me last weekend.  He deals with these kids who live here.  He took them both shoe shopping last weekend.  What they came home with was not what I would have bought in terms of size, style, quality, type or price, but I was spared the trip and the stress and arguing that always ensues when I do it.  He is doing a fine job as Girl Scout troop leader:  he organized a super-fun pottery-making meeting, he recruited some new members, he went to a long training class, and he’s taking a pack of girls camping this weekend (yeah, right before Christmas, what’s your point?). 

As for Ruby, she’s been very busy.  She’s had a lot of sleepovers with one particular friend, which is nice, but she’s having a hard time expanding her list of buddies beyond that.  She has been making things:  remaking t-shirts by chopping parts off and adding embellishments, and sewing very basic patternless clothes—a tunic for Carl, and a polar fleece holiday dress for herself. 

Ruby was a spur-of-the-moment shepherd in the Christmas pageant at a friend’s church.  It was great; the show was outdoors, with a real camel and a choir and everything.  Ruby did fine, but she was disappointed that the live goat she was supposed to tend got rowdy at the last minute and was removed from her care. 

Under the influence of an animal-crazy friend, Ruby decided that she wanted to get a class pet for school.  In Montessori, class pets are encouraged as a way to teach children responsibility, respect for living things, biology, etc.  But in practice, some teachers just don’t like having them and don’t do it after an initial try or two.  Ruby’s class didn’t have one, and I suspected that was per the teacher’s choice.  But the teacher said it would okay to have fish, so that’s what Ruby got.  It’s a little female betta named Pearl, with an enormous and over-decorated tank that Ruby and Carl and I had a big cranky fight about buying, and the poor tortured fish has been back and forth to school three times in two weeks already. 

Carl is growing again.  His hair is longer and his clothes are too small.  He had one of his best new buddies sleepover last weekend, which was really fun.  His teacher says he’s doing a little better at getting his work done at school, and she’s having a hard time keeping ahead of him in math, because he’s moving through the curriculum so quickly.  He’s had the second grade homework the last couple of weeks, which does seem to challenge him a little.  He got in trouble at school yesterday for something, but I’m not supposed to know about it; the principal only said she made a deal with him that he could be the one to tell me about it.  And so naturally he hasn’t said a word, and therefore I don’t know what happened.  Frustrating little twerp he is, sometimes.

What else?  We got a Christmas tree, and it only took two weeks of boxes strewn all over the house to get the decorations unpacked and up.  We went to some parties last weekend.  I have done no shopping at all yet, and I thought I had time, but suddenly everyone is telling me it’s the very last minute and ack! Ack! Ack!  There won’t be much shopping this weekend, though, because Rod and Ruby will be Girl Scout camping and Carl has only a limited tolerance for that sort of thing.    Out of town relatives:  look for a nice Memorial Day gift, okay?

As for me, well, last week there was a teacher appreciation luncheon and a PTO Mom’s Night Out, and the school book fair, and a bunch of other lesser meetings.  This week, I have a newsletter to write, two PTO meetings to host this week, two “winter performances” to attend at school, a budget issue to resolve, and so on.  Tomorrow morning is the groundbreaking for a huge park/renovation project at school, for which we need only raise to another $100K or so, preferably in the next three weeks.  I used to do a lot of event planning for work, and I am going completely crazy from the lack of planning that’s gone into this groundbreaking.  Apparently we’re just all going to show up, and someone will have fancy shovels, and we’ll play it by ear.  I will have anxiety hives by then—there’s no timeline!  No script!  No props!  What if it rains?! Of course, everyone else involved thinks I’m a little kooky for worrying about that stuff.

I have to get some presents for the teachers and staff by tomorrow, and I have to acquire food for the kids to take to their class parties, and I have to go to a big deal committee meeting this afternoon, and I have to help Ruby pack for camping, and, and, and.  

All I really want is vacation…time on the sofa with a book or a movie or some knitting, a little holiday spirit to creep in.   Which it will, but I had hoped to be there by now.  It’s taken me three weeks to write this for you, and I see that it’s not very good.  I promise to come up with better material, once I make it through Friday.  

 

Report Card

Would I copy a truly bad report card here?  I might.  But this one was okay, even reading between the lines, past the polite words:

"Caril is making progress with learning how to choose and complete work independently, but still needs some guidance on a daily basis to accomplish his work goals.

In Math, Carl is using the Golden Beads to solve multiplication problems but can often solve them in his head abstractly.  Carl is also practicing his subtraction facts with various manipulatives.  He knows the names and values of coins, can tell time to the quarter hour, and has been introduced to fraction addition and quadrilaterals in geometry.  Carl is a very strong reader and has advanced rapidly in his reading comprehension work in class.  He did very well with his first High Frequency Word Evaluation, and has already mastered the list of words that first graders need to know by the end of the school year.  Carl has been working with nouns and articles in grammar and alphabetizing in word study.  Carl has grown more confident in his writing and seems to enjoy journal writing in class and our Empowering Writers lessons.  In Cultural Studies, he has studied the names of landforms and will be researching a country in North America before the holiday break.  

Carl continues to be a pleasure to have in class and is working on being a kind and helpful member of our class community.  He is an active spokesperson for community concerns and problem solving."  

 

I used to worry that he would never learn to eat solid food

Me: Carl, I'm coming to school tomorrow for the Thanksgiving Feast. Is there anything special you'd like me to bring, to go with the school lunch?

Carl: hmmm. A Z Bar, okay? And some Caesar salad. Maybe a sandwich. And oh yeah! A Lunchable!