Half-days, Sticky Notes, and Touching: A Public School Update

Warning: I may sound a bit snide, sarcastic, or cynical in this post. If that's not a departure from the norm, please don't tell me. :)

HALF-DAYS:  Perfect timing. A satisfaction survey from the public school system arrived today in the mail. It just so happens that today was a half-day. Why? Because of some parent-teacher conferences. Which is fine. Except... why today? This is the way it is done every year. We have a day off on Martin Luther King Day (which is fine by me), then they go to a full school day on Tuesday, and then we have this half day on Wednesday. Always in the same week as the Monday off. Hmmmm. Wouldn't it be great if we could have that half-day on the Friday before the Monday off? (I know what some of you will say--"But then the people who really need those mid-year conferences might not come because they could take that long weekend and go somewhere." Poppycock. Nobody's going anywhere. They just got back from Christmas Break.)

But I've gotten off track here. The real kicker about the half days is this: The schools are so crammed that my 2nd grader has lunch at 10:30 every day. But on the HALF days, he has lunch at 9:30. 9:30!! Seriously. They're being dismissed at 12noon--why are we feeding them lunch? So this morning he had breakfast, got his backpack together, got on the bus, went to school, and then...they read a book, followed by lunch. Crazy.

STICKY NOTES:  Does your child's school do this also? It's not so much an annoyance as a curiosity. Every once in a while, when there is some event (usually of the fund-raising type) coming up, Daniel comes home wearing a sticky note. Today's was a reminder of a fund-raising night at Chick-Fil-A. It just strikes me as funny that he is sometimes tranformed into this human bulletin board.

TOUCHING:  Although I opted my child out of all the "Family Life" objectives for this year (you know, that's when the school makes a somewhat pathetic attempt at doing the family's job of teaching proper behavior and morals to our children), so...although, I signed him out of these, they failed to take him out and he recently was taught about "good touches and bad touches." You may be thinking--harmless enough--but I disagree. When I asked him to sum up what he had learned, he told me that if a touch feels good, then it's a good touch, and if it feels bad it's a bad touch.

WHAT?!?

This is WHY I opted him out of these so that we could cover these topics at home. I'm glad I asked for a summary or I might not have known how he interpreted the information he received.

So I filled out that little pink survey and it is ready to be mailed tomorrow. I have to wonder, though, if my completed surveys end up in some discard pile because I sound like I'm frustrated enough to reach out and "touch" someone.

Going for the GOaLD



Here's a brief look at our top goals for the coming year:

TABLE MANNERS.  Dinner has somehow become a full-contact sport at our house. We have had injuries, time-outs, an ending buzzer, and even a penalty box of sorts. That's it. We've had enough. And we're cracking down on the major offenders. No manners, no dessert. Should've thought of that a while ago.

FITNESS.  We're going to begin a new healthy eating and exercise program. We'll probably start tomorrow.

MORE FAMILY TOGETHER TIME: This is the one that might kill us. But we want 2012 to be the year of less TV time, less electronic time in general, though the Wii is still going to be a big part of our lives. It's one of the only things we do together that keeps everyone pretty happy all at the same time. Here's a great insight from Nathan on playing Mario Kart: "I learned a trick so you don't hit the wall a lot. You slow down." Profound, hu?

I've collected a lot of great Nathan quotes lately. Here's one more. I came downstairs and found Nathan and Daniel watching a video of themselves that they had just made. In the video, they're screaming like lunatics and making crazy faces and, while watching this, Nathan says, "I feel so grown-up on the camera."

Happy New Year! And may your new year's resolutions be achieved this year.

HO-memade HO-liday. HUM-bug.

Okay. Here's how this works. I show you a picture of the hand-made gift I created for each of my children, and then you say, "Wow! That's beautiful! It's amazing! You made that? Your kids will love it! That will be a treasure they keep forever, and they will feel your love every time they look at it! Natalie, how wonderful of you to try doing a homemade Christmas this year, instead of just giving the kids more toys to treat like garbage in the basement."

It doesn't have to be those exact words, but you get the idea. Just say something that expresses the awe and wonder you would feel if your mother spent many back-breaking, yawning, late-night hours working secretly on a special gift just for you.

Here it comes. This is the one made for Nathan. His favorite color is blue.

That was your cue. "Wow! It's amazing, it's beautiful...etc."

And next we have the Daniel quilt. He loves holidays and seasons, so the blocks represent those.

CHORUS

And, lastly, the crown jewel of my efforts, Stephanie's pink quilt, which I made in less than 3 days. And I'm not a quilter, people. It's really sewn together with love (and I hope it holds up, HA!).

I felt a need to show the back of this one also because the fabric is just beautiful. SO beautiful, in fact, that THAT is really what makes the quilt and the real reason I could do it in 3 days--no matter what pattern I chose, it would have been lovely because of this unique fabric.

So, way back in July, I told the kids (or warned the kids) that they would not be getting a lot of toys for Christmas because we were going to do more homemade things instead. Who needs MORE toys? We have 3 bedrooms and a basement full of them. And they're not interested in parting with any of them. So I said they would receive homemade items and things they need, and a FEW things that were just for fun. Well, I forgot about grandparents and friends giving them things, so they still got plenty of gifts to play with. But my hope was that they would truly be wow-ed by these quilts and immediately begin loving them forever.

Now I'm not picking on my kids. They're great kids and they were thankful for all their gifts. They DO seem to like them very much, but these quilts are already being used for tug-of-war, for fort-building, for putting over the head and walking around like a ghost, etc. In short, they are just another blanket. HO-HO-HUM. But maybe, when they go off to college, this will be the one thing they insist on taking with them, right?  Maybe.