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.
Comments