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?
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