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.

Gingerbread Prison

There are a lot of interesting things about 12-year old boys. I'm keeping a list, and this is the most recent.

It all started with my clever little plan of turning a 1-gingerbread house recipe into a 3-gingerbread house recipe so that each child would have their own house to decorate. I foolishly skipped the important step of creating a triangular shape on the tops of the walls to support the roof and ended up making an executive decision that this year's houses would be Adobe gingerbread houses. Flat roof. I was worried the kids would be disappointed, but they really took it in stride and got right to work. Nathan asked for the pretzel sticks immediately and set them as bars in the windows, announcing that his house was going to be a gingerbread prison. So sweet. "How does Santa get in to bring the inmates their gifts?"

"They don't get gifts. They have to stay back from the windows so they don't get shot. And there's barbed wire all around, so if they try to escape, they'll get cut up."

Fa-la-la-la-la....la-la-la-la.

After a while, we stopped asking questions about the prison because there was just no way to bring it back around to the happy topic of Christmas. He had a blast decorating and was very proud of his creation. So we chose to find it memorable and humorous. And it really is.

Here's Daniel's. His gingergread man is wearing mittens so he won't get too cold going out to get the firewood:

 And here's Stephanie's. About 20 minutes later, it was bare adobe again.

 Here they are creating their masterpieces:

And here's Nathan, meticulously setting the security measures in place in his holiday house of pain and suffering:

You just can't predict these moments.

Forensic Evidence (and some more tears)

Exhibit A. Hair. Stephanie's hair. Found disembodied on the family room floor. Clearly, a miniature crime had been committed. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time to collect as much of the hair as possible and put it in a bag. So I did. And it's still in the bag. (What should I do with it? It's beautiful rich brown, curly hair. Yes. Natural curl.)

At the time of the crime, I was preparing to cut her hair myself. Well--trim it really. I had given the boys their haircuts the night before and she wanted her turn. So I set the kit down (did NOT know she could open it) and came back 5 minutes later. She was not there, but the hair was.

I tried not to show sadness. I didn't want her to feel TOO bad about it. I think she figured she could put it back on whenever she wanted, and when I looked sad, she started crying. So I told her she looked so pretty and I loved her hair. But really, how could I? She had given herself a mullet. A bad mullet. Wait... is there any other kind?

Just for context, here are a couple photos of her beautiful hair BEFORE the self-do:

See? Didn't I tell you? It was Bee-you-tiful! (Yes, I know. It will be again. But still... this cut came right before the visit of both sets of grandparents.)

And...here's the mullet:

And here's the result after a friend fixed it for us. I say "us" because it hurts me as much as it hurts Stephanie to have this hair gone. Probably more.

She's still pretty cute, though, isn't she? And the curl is still fabulous. Lucky little thing! Now she keeps saying things to me about her hair that let me know she's sad about it. She asked me later in the day of the fix-it cut, "Mommy? Can you see my hair? I can't see my hair." Another day, she told me, "Mommy, my hair is not working. It needs to go down." Then this morning she asked me for braids.

Clearly, this is my first girl. I can just feel some of you sneering about how idiotic it was for me to leave her alone with the kit. But I'm an amateur girl mom. I honestly didn't know. Still... I guess there's no use crying over cut hair.

Bloody Trail (and some tears)

      This was the sight that awaited me outside my bedroom door on Wednesday. Drops of blood in various sizes, along with a couple of blobs of some other unidentified liquid. The bloody trail continued down the stairs, so I followed it, wondering why there was no yelling coming from anywhere nearby. At the end of the trail was the cat, sitting under the kitchen table and trying to shake off the blood-soaked fur on his left cheek.

      Mako is a fighter. He defends his home territory and his beloved family with ferocity and great courage, but he does so without front claws. So he is also a loser. I'm guessing that, amongst the neighborhood animals, he is something of a joke. Another cat seeing him approach would be a bit nervous--he weighs 15 pounds and is "big-boned" (if one can use that term for a feline). But the moment the yowling turns into paw-batting and claw-striking, the other cat realizes Mako is an easy target. Let me take a moment here to say for any PETA people out there that we did not declaw him--he came to us that way.

      About a week before these photos were taken, Mako had been in yet another neighborhood brawl and had a good-sized puncture wound on the side of his face to show for it. We were "keeping an eye on it" to see that it healed properly. Translation: we didn't want to pay for a vet visit unless absolutely necessary. Nathan kept telling us Mako really needed to see a vet. And we assured him we had the situation well in hand. Monday, his cheek started to get swollen and I said, "If it's not better in a couple of days, I'll take him in." (Eric, I think, preferred to let Mako take the risk of infection and death, rather than go the vet route. Death of the cat is the ideal solution in his mind.)

     While I called the vet Wednesday morning (two days too late), Mako sat by the front door itching his face and waiting to be let out. When he rubbed his cheek with his paw, fresh blood splattered over the area. The photo below looks like it's from a crime scene.

       I wish I could have gotten a good photo BEFORE the vet visit and resulting clean-up, but I had to settle for just the AFTER photo, which is this one:

      The vet informed us that Mako's original wound had resulted in an abcess, which then swelled until it literally burst out the side of his face (because we didn't take him in when we should have). So now, for the tears... we had to pay for a vet visit that included his clean-up, an anti-biotic, a cream for the wound, and some kitty pain medication. Next time, we'll know better, I guess, right?

Happy November 1st

You can tell a lot about people from their garbage. Go ahead. Guess my weight. Just kidding.

What I love most about Halloween... wait... let me re-phrase that... what I love about Halloween... wait... one more try... the ONLY thing I really love about Halloween...is the candy. I do not get excited about any other aspect of Halloween. No, coming up with costumes doesn't thrill me. The mess of carving a pumpkin is something I dread (and skillfully avoid, by having Eric take charge of it--"But you're so much better at it than I am, Eric!") Trick-or-treating always seems like it will be fun, but then the youngest inevitably wants to be done before the other kids and is whining to be carried, the oldest wants to go it alone--where's the fun in that? And the poor middle child has a malfunctioning costume (once again), so he's walking like a penguin while his mummy bandages droop closer and closer to the ground. And then, of course, there's the sugar-induced mood swings, not to mention what the sugar does to the kids. :) But I sure do love all that free chocolate.

So it is with a substantial amount of sugar-induced glee that I say to you, "Happy November 1st!" Halloween is finally over and we can move on to the classier adornments of autumn.

Oh--and here are my adorable children, loving Halloween against my better judgment:

And here are their pumpkins:

The above is a mummy with crazy eyes, though it bears a resemblance to a sort of free-form artistic owl, in my opinion. Below is Nathan's, which he carved pretty much by himself.

2011 Halloween. Done. Check it off.

It starts...

Last night, when I heard a car pull up, I went to the front door to welcome Nathan back from scouts. I stood looking out through the storm door while he gathered his things and thanked his ride. He turned and smiled at me, but as he approached, his smile quickly faded and he started yelling to me, "Mom! Get down! Get down!"

I thought, "What does he think is going to happen? Are we going to be shot at? Is there someone lurking in the bushes?"

But then he said, "Why are you in your pajamas? That's so embarrassing! Get down! Don't let them see you! Oh my gosh!"

I, of course, started laughing and assured him that everyone has pajamas and these people had certainly seen them before. But he continued to shout commands at me and act as though I had a negligee on rather than just ordinary pajamas. I kept laughing, but I also started thinking back to those good times from my youth when my parents found new and creative ways to embarrass ME. You know, things like--making conversation with my friends, or wearing pants with an elastic waistband, or those funky glasses that change from regular to sunglasses as you go from inside to outside (now I think those are awesome). Nathan also recently informed me that my new pair of white Keds (that I LOVE) look like "old person shoes".

I'm reminded of a great Cosby routine where he talks about this very phenomenon with his own kids and says he had to drop his kids off at the corner because they "wouldn't want anyone to know they had parents!"

Nathan turns 12 next month. So I guess...it starts.

In Memoriam

Few things say, "It's going to be a great day!" like 12 dead tadpoles. Yes, that's right, we are officially down to 45 amphibians to raise. The price for all this glee is a few sad children. But I can live with that. I've tried to reassure them that it's not their fault and that tadpoles often don't live to adult froghood, while inwardly I'm celebrating and hoping soon to reclaim my tadpole-free life. I've grown weary of having containers of pond water on my kitchen island.

Our owl pellet lab went well. Once they got over the smell, the kids loved discovering all the tiny bones hidden in their pellets and then trying to identify the skulls. We were also able to clear up a few misunderstandings about owls. Some of the kids figured that since owls regurgitate these pellets, they must not have a "back door" for other waste products. Not so. They have a dual exhaust system.

Next Tuesday we will be dissecting earthworms. I wonder what extra rules I will have to create while we are using scalpels...

So this post is dedicated in loving memory to the creatures who, by being dead, allow us to have interesting science labs.

Last note. While writing this, I have been informed that we are now down to 44 tadpoles. So sad.