Holpineville

Koala Wizard

I had a very long and confusing entry written for you about Carl and his social issues, but I ditched it because it ended up being mostly about my maternal anxiety and some stuff about one of his pals that the pal's parents might not want all over the Internet.  But I have been thinking of you, dear readers.  

Do you know some people actually write on their blogs every single day in November?  Not going to happen here!  Nope, I'm busy preparing for the Thursday PTO board meeting by pretending that it doesn't exist.  I still have both the cold (hack, hack cough) and the TMJ (wanna laugh?  my symptoms: a little pain, slight headache, soreness that comes and goes, lost range of motion, teeth that won't close together in front, facial numbness, slight lisp)  but both do seem to be improving a little.  I love being me. 

To tell you some things about Carl that I can freely share:

His latest major obsession is playing D&D (Dungeons and Dragons, if you haven't been around any preteen boys since 1970).  I'm not sure that they're really playing by the official rules, but some pals and their dad got it started, and now all Carl wants to do is go to their house and play.  His (new?) character is a koala wizard.  He's trying to get enough points to do something to someone and reach some level.  Or maybe that's on his video game....I really should listen more closely to him, but he's hard to follow.  

His favorite foods lately are: caesar salad (he's been making them for snacks, even), Clif Z bars (thanks to the introduction by the D&D friends) and of course, kidney bean curry.  Remember how I was trying to get him to eat more sensibly?  Now I'm just trying to slow him down.  

His feet and his hair seem to be growing really fast right now.

He prefers the Elvis channel on satellite radio, and was telling me all about how Elvis and Michael Jackson are a lot alike, except Michael Jackson is blond.  He's also incorrectable when he's convinced he's right. 

 

Seven

That’s how many loads of laundry are sitting around the living room, waiting for someone (well, it’s nearly always me) to fold them. 

Today I am tired, though not as tired as I was earlier in the week, and I have a bonus cold, and a TMJ flare-up, which means my face hurts and I can’t close my teeth together properly. 

I must also say that I have misplaced Carl.  I believe he went home with a friend, because I had talked with Friend’s Mom about a play date this afternoon, but we never really firmed it up, in my view.  Friend’s Mom is one of two or three people on the continent without a cell phone, and they’re not home, so I can’t be 100% sure.  

To start to recap some of the things I wrote about last time:

Rod and I had a conference with Ruby’s teacher.  She is very nice, but oddly reserved and hard to chat with.  I think she may have Asperger syndrome or something.  Anyway, it seems that Ruby is turning in work appropriate to her grade level and despite what Ruby says, she seems to be keeping up pretty well.  She asked to be moved up a few notches on the reading comprehension work, and was, with apparent success so far.  The teacher thinks Ruby understands the math well, but is terribly unconfident, and that, combined with a slightly lower than desirable score on the first benchmarking test for the big state standardized test, got Ruby into the math tutorial group.   We will just keep on plugging away at those multiplication and division facts and trying to make her see that she really does know how to do it.  The teacher also noted the same thing I have, that Ruby has a terrible time finding and correcting her own mistakes, but she had no brilliant solutions for this. 

We asked about some accommodations that had been promised earlier in the year, but not yet provided – typing and handwriting instruction, for example—and the teacher is supposed to follow up, but I am not holding my breath.  I got Ruby’s spelling tests back; at best she scored 4 out of 20, and usually only about 2 out of 20.  The teacher explained that she corrects the tests, but doesn’t use them in calculating Ruby’s grades, as per our agreement with the school.  Again, we said we’d just keep trying.

We talked about some social problems in the class; two kids’ moms have told me about distinct episodes of bullying, and Ruby has made some comments about the class and certain older boys in it, as well.  Plus, she just generally doesn’t feel like she has friends in class yet, which concerns me and makes Ruby less interested in going to school.  The teacher says that it’s hard to police the bullying because kids do stuff behind her back, and they’ve had a lot of class meetings and discussions about behavior and how to treat each other.  The perpetrators have been dealt with, apologies have been made,  parents involved, etc., etc.  She says they’re now on a zero-tolerance plan in terms of handing down discipline.  I am only partially happy with that answer.  I think they need to work on team-building and group unity, at a minimum.  The teacher is going to try to encourage Ruby to buddy up with one of the other girls in class more, so maybe they’ll get to be closer friends. 

I asked about curriculum: what they were doing for science, writing, social studies, etc.  Ruby likes to read, but the school reading assignments  are all “SRA’s” and “RFUs” which are basically fragments or essays about which you later answer questions.  Don’t they ever read books?  I asked—like a novel, and then discuss it, or even write a book report?  No, was the answer, which depresses me greatly, even though I hated book reports, myself.   Sorry, kids: no art, no music, no literature for you.

So Rod and I walked out not much better informed than when we walked in, and not feeling  better, really.  I can see why Ruby’s depressed about school sometimes:  a big list of not-terribly exciting tasks to complete, in an environment without a close friend but with some potentially-mean boys, and always  with this extra burden of trying to convert phonemes to graphemes or ideas into words when the circuitry to do that isn’t necessarily there in her head. 

At occupational therapy two weeks ago, the therapist offered some constructive criticism of a paragraph Ruby had written, and Ruby didn’t take it well, which I think surprised the therapist.  Ruby is usually so sweet, after all.  Last week, Ruby brought in her spelling list and they worked on it a little bit.  Apparently Ruby threw a bit of a fit, just a little taste of what we get at home, and the therapist remarked that she gets it now, about the homework tantrums. 

On a happier note, Ruby’s musical performance went well.  Carl got to be in the show and play the xylophone, and two of Ruby’s pals did, too.  She’s working on a Christmas composition now.  And, she loves her drumming class.

I will update you on Carl, and the Festival!  And the Bake Sale!  And the Reunion!  Later, after I find Carl and face the eternal dilemma of What the Heck are We Having For Dinner.  

 

Baby Tomato Edition

 

 

 

 



Can you see them?  My baby tomatoes? 

Like a flirtation with a cute, funny guy with whom you know up front it will never work out, I know these babies are doomed to failure, but I’m enjoying watching them just the same.  Until the drought finally wins, or the bugs arrive, we have real, honest-to-God, live, growing in the ground, tomatoes! 

The pepper plants are also starting to produce a little, but, to drag out the analogy, they’re a little like the guy you’ve been married to for a while: largely predictable, dependable, tolerant of some minor neglect, but with the occasional spicy surprise.

You’ll thank me to skip the rest of the garden briefing, right?

Rod and Ruby are freshly back from a weekend Girl Scout camping trip.  They say it went very well.   They had Frito Pie for lunch one day, Rod found a place to charge up his cell phone/camera, and everyone went to sleep before Rod had to get really and truly grumpy at them.  The big highlight of the trip was horseback riding, which Ruby apparently loved, as she babbled long and incoherently about her horse, Dusty, who is as tall as me, and the “spur” who I think was her guide/coach.  The girls also tried archery.  Ruby reports it was fun and proudly told me that she was the only one who made two bulls-eyes!—just not on the target she was aiming at.

For my part, I decided that hanging around alone with Carl all weekend, while delightful in some ways, might get a little tedious for us both after a while.  So we invited one of his friends to stay the weekend, which also helped the friend’s parents, because they both had to be away on business trips.  I was nervous because the last few times this kid has tried to sleep over, he’s ended up having to go home in the middle of the night, he’s high energy, and when he and Carl get along, they are best pals, but when they fight, it’s pretty ugly.  I think it went somewhere between well and okay.  The sleep thing was a bit of a challenge  and there were a couple of fights (but they made up quickly).  I think the hardest thing for me was just doing it alone, without Rod for backup and having to make the plans for what to do (although I’m sure the boys would have been happy to play the Wii until their thumbs bled) and feed them and move them along. 

During the weekend, we walked/scootered to a Mexican place near my house for lunch.  Ruby doesn’t like it, so Carl doesn’t get to go there often.  While we were eating, the owner and another woman were discussing some rather unremarkable photos on the wall, of historical sites in Mexico.  Carl told me he liked the photos, and his friend said he did, too.   Then Carl launched into a long, casual talk about how to really see a place, you need to visit it more than once, at different times of day.  Suddenly I realized I’d heard that before, when I’d been in his classroom and his teacher was giving a lesson Monet.  “Oh, “ I said, “like Monet!”  Carl happily confirmed that.  He really loves the art instruction his teacher does.  She talks to them about one artist every few weeks, their lives and techniques and famous works, and she has the kids make art inspired by their techniques.   Carl will come home and drop into conversation that he really likes Picasso, or he’s working on a Degas picture.  Right now, he says he’s ready for his teacher to take the Monet-inspired works off the bulletin board, because the other kids keep telling Carl his stained-glass window picture looks like a spider web and it irritates him. 

I am a little surprised at how much Carl enjoys that sort of thing, because he’s so darn literal the rest of the time.  You affectionately tease him or make some little jokey comment, and he either cries or gets angry.  At best, he yells “that’s not funny!”  and pushes you.  I hope it’s an age thing that he’ll grow out of, and not some sort of personality or brain defect. 

Going through Ruby’s mind right now: the state-mandated standardized test she has to take in another week, her upcoming dance/drama/drumming performance, why one of the Brownies was wearing perfume and makeup at camp, Harry Potter (4), the report she has to do on water buffalo, why I ‘never’ let her cook (this is fiction, people, I relinquish the kitchen whenever I can), and loading up her new iPod. 

Oh, yes, the iPod.  A couple of her friends recently got iPod Shuffles, the base model.  One won hers, the other spent her reserved allowance.  So naturally Ruby desperately wanted one, too.  She was ready to spend her saved funds, but then Rod decided to just give her one of his, an older Nano model he got as a souvenir at a conference.  They haven’t had time to really load it up yet, but Ruby has a few CD’s (like the ones we got free in packages of Indian food) and tracks from my iTunes library on it, and suddenly she’s walking around the house with her ear buds in, swiveling her hips and then holding one ear bud out so that I can hear the groovy tune she’s listening to.  She likes Green Day and Billy Joel and of course, the scary free Indian CD’s.  She’s shown little to no interest in pop music before this, so this is a little amusing and a little scary, in the My Little Girl is Growing Up Sense.  First an e-mail account, then a bra, now an iPod….before long, it’ll be a driver’s license, a box of condoms, and a cell phone she only answers every fourth time I call.

On my mind: I'm taking charge of the PTO this week.  I am trying to just see it as a lonely one-year, part-time, two-hours-or-so-a-day, job.  It should be quieter over the summer, but there's a lot to do at the end of school.  I'm reading a good book, knitting a baby sweater, and planning an Easter brunch, somewhat against my will, but who else was going to host it, and we needed something to do that day. 

Last Week, All Stitched Up

I remember when I would write here and I would have a story, or a point to make.  Now, you’re just getting news bulletins and general updates.  I don’t know what to blame the decline on.  Is it that the kids are older? Are their accomplishments now somehow less interesting, amusing, or amazing  than when they were tiny?  Am I really and truly busier?  Surely not. Is it that without a Real Job I’m just not writing as much anymore, and therefore I’m not as good as I was? 

I don’t know, so on with the news update:

The dinner I was organizing at school turned out okay in the end, but there was plenty of drama that day.  It turns out I know way more about feeding 200 people dinner than the professional chef mom who was handling the food.  She was awesome in many ways, and there were enough volunteers to save the day, but we weren’t ready on time, I was afraid we didn’t have enough (and we ran out of food).  But the guests were mostly happy, the volunteer crew was amazing, and apparently what food there was, was sufficiently tasty.  We made a profit, although not as much as I was hoping.  For me, it was a little like being sucked through the time vortex back to my protocol job, where I planned and worked lots of special events.  The stress of it and then the relief after felt like old pals to me, and I was very nostalgic for a good half hour at least.

After that, I should have jumped right into finishing up our taxes, but I’m still procrastinating on that, so instead I made five or six doll garments, sewn, not knitted.  Sewing, when it’s going well, is so fast compared to knitting!  It was the first sewing project I’d had in a while that didn’t call for some really difficult to handle material or super-complicated construction, so I was amazed that I finished without heartbreak.  Let’s be clear:  my mom, the ex-home-ec teacher super-sewer, whose voice echoes through my head whenever I pull out the sewing supplies and set to work, would not have been impressed.  My seams are not properly finished; in many places they’re not even straight.  Nothing is lined, and Ruby says I made the necklines too low on a couple of the tops.  But it was just the thing to distract me for a couple of days.

Ruby bought the betta fish she wanted, and has kept it alive for about ten days now.  His name is Lillian, and he’s blue with a touch of red on his her fins. (Ruby's reassigned him to the female sex.  Surely fish don't care, right?)

Ruby is very busy these days with her upcoming performances, school work, and piano. She has been reading a lot lately.  She’s discovered some magazines aimed at pre-teen girls.  I have to admit I sort of screened them first; I hate to censor, but it’s a little early, in my opinion, for her to get sucked into the advertising cesspools that are teen girl magazines.  These are pretty innocuous: all about pets and kids doing admirable things like raising money for charity, and advice columns about friendship dramas and pesky little brothers. 

Ruby is also is an avid reader of Rod’s comic books and she’s halfway through the third Harry Potter book.  We decided the kids were finally old enough to see the first Harry Potter movie last weekend, and Carl keeps playing his Lego Harry Potter Wii game, so they both have Hogwarts on the brain.  As I was putting them to bed last night, we had what I am sure will be the first of many debates on the topic of Professor Snape:  Good Guy, or Bad Guy?

The leader of Ruby’s Brownie troop is stepping down.  There’s been a lot of discussion about who could take her place, or could the girls join a different, existing troop, and oh, no, what to do?  It’s not such a big troop, and none of the other parents seems an obvious choice to take charge.  Chez Holpine, Rod has been handling of Ruby’s Girl Scout activities, partly because he has talents in that area, partly to give himself something to do with his lovely daughter, and partly so that I don’t have to deal with the difficult personality of the soon-to-be-former troop leader.  So I know you’ll be not surprised at all to hear that Rod’s probably going to be the next troop leader!  He’s very reluctant about it, though.  He thinks the symbolism of a man leading a program that’s supposed to be empowering for girls is just wrong.  I don’t have such a big problem with that, and instead I think he’s crazy because of the time, training and paperwork commitment.  But no one else seems to want to take it on, and I sure as heck can’t right now.  Go, Rod, Go!

Last weekend, we went to the beach with some friends.  It was overcast and the water was a little cool for my taste, but the kids didn’t mind. The surfing dad was giving lessons again, and Carl actually managed to stand up and ride on the board this time.  Rod helped them all building a big system of pools and ditches in the sand, too.   We weren’t there more than a few hours, but it was a nice break, and there’s really nothing better than a shower after you get home from a trip to the beach. 

This week should be pretty dull.  I absolutely have to do the taxes.  I need to start ramping up on my PTO job.  Rod just had a hectic couple of weeks finishing his quarterly work goals.  Now he has a cold and is therefore not much fun. We're trying to decide whether or not to go camping again Easter weekend, and debating some summer vacation plans.

Children are Weird and Many Fears are Irrational (but not mine, of course)

Last night I was reading to the kids at bedtime.  The last book (why yes, there are multiple books involved!  And comics!  And magazines!  And sometimes Lego catalogs!  We consume whole libraries in an evening!) is traditionally read by flashlight as the kids snuggle down in their beds in the dark. 

So there I was, somewhere near the end of Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great.  We started this because it was handy and I remember liking Judy Blume when I was Ruby’s age and a little older.  The book is fine, although I am kind of wondering what I liked about it so much, and it certainly brings back memories of being a child during a certain era (They played with yo-yo’s! For fun, they listened to “records”!  Someone uses a mimeograph machine! A dog runs loose routinely and gets another one pregnant, and no one is very upset! The kids are brutally honest to each other in a very un-PC way!).

Sheila is an egotistical twit of about ten, who is frightened of a good many things, but not willing to admit to any level of fear, ignorance or inability.  Anyway, in this particular chapter, she goes on a hayride in the dark and freaks herself out thinking about Ichabod Crane and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which is set in the area.  Trust me, it is NOT a very scary chapter (rather dull, really) and it concludes with everyone safe and sound in dad’s child-safety-seat free station wagon. 

But somehow this spooked Ruby, and especially Carl, and he “super please!!!”  begged me to read a little of something else.  So I picked up one of our other on-going chapter books, Fever 1793, and somehow a few pages of teenagers being snobby to each other at a tea party, and then one kid dropping unconscious to the floor with a mysterious deadly epidemic disease, calmed my children down.  I kissed them goodnight and told them to sleep well.

I have a terrible fascination with, and have done a lot of reading, on epidemics, so I think my fear of them is pretty well-founded.  I was afraid this book would be too scary for the kids, but I wanted to read it.  Maybe it’s just too scary for me.  I guess that’s the difference between having seen a Sleepy Hollow cartoon or two, and already knowing something about people dying in large numbers of formidable diseases?

Ruby seems to be on the mend.  She still is oozing an alarming amount of snot, but her fever is gone and she’s back to eating and going to school.  Carl is looking puffy around the eyes, though. 

Negotiating Skills

Carl doesn’t seem to like Halloween costumes terribly much.  I think it’s related to how he generally doesn’t like stickers, temporary tattoos, face paint, or name tags.  He plays dress up at home sometimes, but he’s always been a little iffy about Halloween. 

Which explains why, four days before Halloween and two days before the Storybook Dress-up Day Parade at school, we still hadn’t finalized his costume(s).  For school, he has to be a book character, preferably one that’s not also a movie or TV show character.  I offered tons of really great ideas.  Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III --- or even Toothless, the dragon (oh, how we love those books!).  Calvin!  Stillwater the Panda!  But no.  He rejected every single last brilliant inspiration I had. 

Finally Carl agreed to be Percy Jackson from the Lightning Thief, a book he’s been listening to with interest, even though it frightens him from time to time.  But see, Percy Jackson is supposed to look like a normal twelve year old kid.  He does have this cool pen that turns into a sword, but no weapons are allowed at Storybook Dress Up Day, so Carl will wearing normal clothes, carrying a ballpoint pen, and maybe holding this shoe horn made-of-real-horn (standing in for the minotaur horn in the book).  Rod wants to get him a Camp Half Blood t-shirt, but Carl says he won’t wear it.

Today, we were discussing the Halloween costume situation, and Carl changed his mind about what he was going to be for the fifth time.  He went from “saber-toothed tiger” to “vampire.” Carl, I said, there are only a few days left, and since you don’t seem so excited about being any one thing, why don’t we just go to the store and pick something out, while Ruby’s at her piano lesson?

So we did.  But on the way, Carl asks if we can also buy some more Mighty Beanz, the latest really stupid toy he’s all excited about. He and one or two of his friends have an informal competition about getting Cool New Stuff, and this is what they’re fixated on this week.  I say no, I don’t think so, we only have money for a costume. 

So Carl tells me that he thinks he doesn’t want to trick or treat this year. He’d rather stay home and hand out candy.  No, he’s not scared, he just thinks it would be fun to do that, and he’s not so interested in dressing up.  And, well, if he’s not trick or treating, he doesn’t need a costume, and we can just buy Mighty Beanz instead, right?

I was pretty impressed by Carl’s powers of reasoning and the casual, off-hand, yet entirely logical way he presented his plan.   But it just didn’t feel right to leave my six year old unclothed for Halloween.  So we compromised on buying a highly affordable costume ($5 ninja jumpsuit with hood) and a small package of Star Wars themed-Mighty Beanz.

 

Notes from the Back to School Week

The kids’ re-entry to school has been…smooth.  Weirdly.  There haven’t been too many tantrums or episodes of I-Don’t-Want-to-Go! Yet.  The worst part was the parent homework-- giant envelopes of forms that must be filled out for each child, all of which are somewhat redundant yet not exactly duplicative, so that I had to write my address and phone number 52 times, for example.  Surely someone could figure out a way to put all this on the Internet somewhere and we could spare some trees?

Rod and I had “date night” last night, consisting of the PTO meeting and school open house, plus dinner that wasn’t as good as we had hoped at a really loud place, followed by an early return home to clean up the kitchen and pack school lunches and collapse.  Wow, the romance.

Teachers, and maybe Montessori teachers in particular, are much braver and more patient than the rest of us.  Ruby’s teacher explained to the parents last night about the time she spends with the class at the beginning of every year, talking about expectations, classroom routines, behavior, and setting up the Rules for the Community, and how it’s very important at this age for them to discuss this in great detail, feel like it’s something they contributed to, and write it all down (see the signs they’ve made, posted around the room).  Suddenly, I realized that if I were her, I would be fidgety and cross by the end of the process the first year, and stark raving mad the second time I had to do it.

There was also a tense moment, when someone asked the teacher if she needed anything for the classroom, and she said she was thinking of replacing the rug.   In the Montessori world, most group lessons are done sitting in a circle on a big rug.  The rug in the classroom is 1) really too small for 25 kids plus the teacher, 2) old, and 3) ugly.  Immediately, there were four or five parents talking, each with firm opinions about what kind/size/color of rug it should be and where to get it for the best price.  The people who felt it should be a natural fiber rug, made of sustainably-produced organic materials, to better to avoid exposing our children to formaldehyde/BPA/flame retardants/other toxic fumes were squaring off against the “my child gets an oozing rash if he’s anywhere near wool , and we need something affordable and easy to clean” faction, and thankfully the teacher found a way to end the discussion gracefully before I had to freak out and leave.  How I made it through law school and am still this bothered by confrontation, I just cannot understand.

For her part, Carl’s teacher valiantly described the classroom routines and pep-talked the parents about how to make their homes more Montessori-ish and by extension, their children better citizens.  We had heard it all before and I would think maybe my child was a little too advanced for this class, except he’s not.  This year, I pledge that we will try harder to actually do the kindergarten homework, how’s that?  Kindergarten homework is mostly reading and keeping a log of things your kid ought to be doing (but in our case might not be): getting outdoor exercise, helping around the house, performing acts of kindness.

As part of my Fall Initiative to Improve Holpine Child Nutrition Practices, I ordered a couple of books (because that’s how I approach all of life’s problems, with research materials).  One of them is about vegan lunches for kids, and Ruby’s been going through it, marking things she’d like to try.  Last night, we made a vegetable stew for today’s lunch.  I was surprised she chose that one, so let’s hope she liked it.  Rod and I talked to her about how we could add more protein to her high-carb diet.  We decided to buy some different vegetarian proteins (quorn, TVP, seitan, tempeh, tofu, etc.) in various forms and see if she couldn’t work in some of that once in a while. Finally, I’m trying harder to get some calcium into her, if only by supplementation.  She’s not fond of milk and will only have yogurt or cheese every so often.  

With Carl, I’m trying to get him to eat a wider variety of things in general, vegetables in particular.  Sometimes he surprises me, but it’s not easy.  It’s one thing to say you have a two-bite rule, but another to enforce it.  I’m also trying to figure out a way to manage the Carl is Ravenous Hours—the time from about 4 p.m. until dinner is ready, when Carl wants to eat, eat, eat.  This is understandable, but tends to screw up dinner because by 6 or 6:30 he’s not that hungry anymore.  Ideally, I would feed him dinner at 4:30, but then there’s no family dinner.  “One nutritious snack,” is the official guidance on what to give him, but it’s never quite enough and then I have to physically pull him out of the refrigerator and pantry just as I’m trying to cook dinner and that’s not really conducive to family harmony, either.  The best days seem to be when we’re busy away from home until really close to dinner time, and then I give Carl some fruit or something while I frantically pull dinner together.  Not fun for me, but at least he’s participating fully in family dinner.

Looking ahead, things get even busier next week.  Ruby is already back on a regular piano lesson schedule, and her creative movement/drama/music program starts soon.  The kids start a four-week course of after school swimming lessons next week. 

Also next week, Rod and I are going to a “504 Meeting” at school about Ruby.  This is apparently where the principal and teacher and school psychologist tell us whether she’s learning disabled, stupid or just lazy, and what we can expect the school district to do about it, if anything.  I have been told the official label she’s getting is “dysgraphia,” or maybe “disorder of written expression.”  One benefit to the label is that she’d get more time on the writing portion of standardized tests.  Personally, I still believe there is something weird and unexplained going on in Ruby’s head.  The testing has ruled out a few big things, though, and I am a little more at peace with maybe not knowing exactly what the trouble is for a while.  I’m still toying with the idea of an OT evaluation.  Primarily, I think we’ll focus on trying help her more with schoolwork this year and see if that doesn’t help, painful as it may be for Ruby and for me and Rod.   

Carl’s birthday is approaching.  He doesn’t seem so excited about it yet.  He wants to have a small party at home, more like having some friends over to play than any planned activities. He wants a kitty litter cake like Ruby had a couple of years ago, not a traditional one with frosting on top.  The only gifts he’s mentioned wanting are the ones he won’t be getting yet (a Wii and a treehouse), so I’m worried about managing his expectations on that.  What’s another really cool gift for a six year old? 

Dabbling

It’s harder than you might think to coordinate your lipstick shade to your pink eye.  Or, I guess we should say, Carl’s pink eye, that he so lovingly passed along to me. It made me feel better about cadging some of his eye drops before I finally asked the doctor for some of my own.

Carl seems largely better, and I think I am starting to get back to normal.  Luz is getting through her strep throat.  Of course, that means Ruby’s nose is starting to run again, so the cycle can repeat.  But mostly it feels like I have lost a lot of time being just slightly under the weather the past couple of weeks.  Or, it could be I’m anemic, or my thyroid medicine is off, or I’m depressed but don’t know it. 

Carl is really and truly reading now, if you count BOB books.  He is also writing at school: not just copying letters, but putting thoughts down on paper phonetically.  It is so exciting and he acts like it’s no big deal.  His latest report card is duly impressive, too: lots of 3’s, the highest you can get in pre-K.

Rod also says he was very impressed by Carl’s skill and diligence in circuit board assembly one recent weekend.  Carl also dedicated himself to a 10-drawing series of artworks recently.  Each had three little mice (I think they wear sunglasses) and a giant animal of some kind threatening to eat them.  And all weekend, Carl kept asking us “what would eat a mouse?”  Go ahead, think about it.  Once you get past “cat,” and “owl” and “snake” it starts to get a lot harder to answer.  Plus, Carl insists that he cannot draw an owl, and therefore it is a useless suggestion. 

Ruby is also quite brilliant and charming and perceptive, but lately she is kind of a pain.  Is it possible, to be clinically depressed at seven? And you experienced parents, how do you possibly process, contextualize, and understand the blather that comes out of the mouths of second graders?  Ruby has a new refrain going on about how she didn’t get to go recess because she didn’t get her work done.  Or she’ll tell me she’s lonely during work time and that makes her slow.  Tonight, she was telling me she’s just a slow worker, which is completely not true, according to what I’ve seen in her classroom.  I can’t decide if 1) she just likes to complain, 2) she’s having some social problems at school, 3) the revamped workload this semester is really a challenge, or 4) there’s something else entirely going on.  I am trying hard to listen and be a sympathetic sounding board and not rush in with useless solutions, but then I reach my breaking point and deliver snappy one liners like: “Ruby, that’s not like you, and I expect you to get your work done.”  Imagine, the stern, cold, heavy, parental, tone of voice.  I know, could I lay it on any thicker?  But at the time, I thought being tough might motivate her. 

Ruby has also been telling me that she doesn’t get enough attention, that I pay too much attention to Carl and I do too many things for him.  And Carl gets everything and she doesn’t, and so on, you get the drift.  I pulled a vague memory of a section of Siblings Without Rivalry from the back of my mind, and told her I try to give both her and Carl what they need, which are probably different things, and if there’s something she needs from me, she should tell me.  Her big response to that was “more snuggles,” with which I am happy to oblige.  But Ruby’s very down on Carl in general now, which gives him a sort of emotional whiplash: some days, Ruby loves playing with him and they happily collaborate on any number of projects, and some days, she’s picking fights and being downright mean to him, and he’s not sure which Ruby to expect when.

It’s the Holiday Season

And a whoop de doo. Why, there were two holidays today: Groundhog Day, always a favorite of Carl’s, and the lesser-known 100^th Day of School.  It was also Ruby's "Invention Convention," but alas, poor Ruby seems to have a little fever and a snotty nose, so she had to stay home and miss it.  We heard through a friend late today that Ruby’s invention didn’t win any particular prize, which seems like a great injustice to me, and Ruby had been very optimistic about her chances of being chosen to go on to the next level of the competition, but she didn’t dissolve into tears at the news, so I’m happy enough.

Two years ago, Ruby made a 100^th Day of School poster with 100 resistors hot-glued onto it.  Not to be outdone, Carl worked with Rod to make a poster with 300 resistors on it.  That’s three panels of ten groups of ten resistors each, with counting and labeling by Carl in silver Sharpie. It wasn’t done without pain, either.  Ruby just had to tell Carl that he’d written 300 wrong on his first one, prompting Carl to have a long dejected sobbing freak out until finally he allowed Rod to come up with a solution to rework it. 

Carl was so sad that he personally didn’t get to see the groundhog that we decided to watch the groundhog news reports on the Internet tonight, and then we read our groundhog book, one of Carl’s long-time favorites.  If I'd been a good mom, I'd have made groundhog cupcakes or something.

Carl reports that at school today he made a double-sided groundhog that pops up out of a Styrofoam cup.  He also did “match the sentence to the picture” work, and he thought it was hilarious that one sentence said the rat sat on the cat, when really the cat sat on the rat, and he also did “take-aways” (subtraction).  That’s academic progress, yes it is.

Ruby spent the morning with Rod while I took my friend to the cardiologist, and then Ruby spent the afternoon with me while Rod was at the dentist, and then we ended the afternoon by meeting with the psychologist who’s going to do Ruby’s dyslexia evaluation next week.  I felt bad bringing in a sick kid, but the appointment had been on the books for months.  Anyway, Ruby seemed to like the psychologist and we’ll see how it goes.  I still think there’s a good chance I’ll be told she’s fine and I’m crazy for worrying at all.

Ruby is frankly a bit of a pest this week.  She has been fascinated by the news lately, which is fine, but she asks these deep follow up questions that you can’t answer simply, nor can you just not answer, usually at some awkward time, like “why has Haiti always been such a poor country?” and suddenly I am giving her the Cliff notes on Haitian history and the failings of colonialism while I’m washing her hair.  The same evening, she also wanted to discuss the Mars rover and the Challenger explosion, and between earthquakes, explosions, and a book we’re reading with a bit of a dark side, I was sure we’d be 100% sure of her having nightmares. 

She and Carl are having more than their usual share of disagreements this week, and she had a sobbing hysterical episode, something to do with her work at school, one night at bedtime.  Rod swears she purposely saves these kinds of deep thought discussions and emotional crises for bedtime as a delay tactic. I know better, however, because I have done the same many times:  the stress and worry builds up during the day, and then it’s evening and you’re very tired and then some little straw of stress or annoyance pushes you over the edge into crying, and suddenly you’re sobbing about Just Everything, or maybe nothing, but it feels horrible and you can’t stop.  Yes, I have been there. So I try to be sympathetic, but when I’m in the thick of it with Ruby, I also just want her to calm down and go to sleep, as she clearly needs to.  Not my favorite way to spend an evening, people. 

This week is very busy, and if Ruby has to stay home more days, it’s going to be even worse.  Saturday is looking completely crazy. I have two big volunteer gigs, the kids have nature class, grandma is dropping through town, and Carl is going to take the qualification test for genius kindergarten, even though the chances that we would actually enroll him in it are extremely slim.  We signed him up because it’s an extra shot at getting the “gifted” sticker on his file, and I don’t think he’s going to prove very cooperative at standardized testing so I thought the experience would be useful if nothing else.  But now that I think about it, the only thing having that sticker on Ruby’s file has gotten her is a lot of extra work, so I’m not terribly emotionally invested in the outcome this time. 

 

Things Can Only Get Better

The party was okay.  The food turned out and the kids behaved and the people were nice.  The crowd was a bit smaller than past years, but it was plenty.  The house got trashed, we're all tired, and I'm still not done washing the champagne flutes. 

On New Year's Day, the kids and Rod had a traditional (well, they've done it two years running now) play date at a park with some friends.  I took the opportunity to sneak away to Target for Christmas clearance goods and random necessities, followed by a trip to the local yarn store's annual sale.  Because, you know, filling up all the cabinets, drawers and under-the-bed space in my room with yarn just isn't enough, and I had a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket. 

Apparently, I did not need all the stuff I pulled off the clearance shelf, because while I was dithering and choosing, some ________ (insert your own obscene noun) was busy breaking my car window and shopping the interior.  Sadly for him/her, there was nothing worth stealing in there.  The yarn ladies thoughtfully called the police for me, who didn't bother showing up over the next two hours, so I finally packed it up and went home and filed a report over the phone. 

I didn't really have time to be dealing with this sort of mess this week, but I guess I will make it.  Do you think it will cost more than my deductible?  Imagine, I thought I was broke before it happened.

One good thing has finally happened: the bookworm has bitten! Ruby has taken to reading for fun for extended periods of time.  Since we got home from vacation, you can't tear her away from Diary of a Wimpy Kid, books 1 and 2.  I am told they are quite possibly the best books ever written. And we started reading Harry Potter to her on the car trip, and she's pretty involved in that, too.  I think we'll pause for a long while after the first Potter, though, because she and Carl have trouble handling anything even remotely scary.