Spelling and vocabulary tests are on Fridays. Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings we do quizzing to make sure everyone is ready. Often the instructions are to "use the word in a sentence that demonstrates you know its meaning." Both of my (gifted! ha!) children had trouble with this concept until we introduced The Puppy Test. The Puppy Test is simple: Can you replace the target word with "puppy," "dog-like" or some form of "barking?" If you can, you fail The Puppy Test and I do not believe you have demonstrated understanding. To wit: "I meandered" fails The Puppy Test. Maybe you barked....
There are many things which I believe it is my job to teach my children. I should teach them right from wrong. I should teach them to be kind to others. I should teach them how to get along in polite society and remember the Golden Rule and how to use their utensils properly and match their clothing and cook a decent meal and do their laundry without turning everything pink. It's my job to teach them the things they need to know so that they can grow up and become productive, useful members of the society in which they live. It is also my job to teach my children to take pride in the the...
I am going senile. Not only did I use "Meanwhile, back at the ranch" as a post title once before, I used it only about a month ago. I never would've even realized this, except that I happened to notice that the permalink for yesterday's post had a "2" at the end, and being the bright human that I am, I went, "Huh. I wonder why that is?" Now I'm afraid to title anything, for fear that I've just plain run out of titles. Please look for my next book, coming soon (and by "soon" I mean "never") to a bookstore near you. It will be called "Insert title here." It's riveting stuff, I tell you....
The children seemed largely unbothered by Otto's absence this weekend, but they were on him the second he walked in the door, yesterday, to fill him in on everything he'd missed. There was soccer! And Sonic! And some things they'd watched on TV! And look at this thing I built! And how loose my tooth is! And we tried to go swimming but it was COLD! Monkey hung from Otto's middle while he chattered on, while Chickadee hung back, far too cool to climb on him, of course, but adding bits to the conversation with authority. Also, Otto brought home free baseball hats for everyone. And that's pretty...
Well, I suppose we knew it couldn't last. Despite a triumphant victory last week, Monkey's soccer team didn't fare quite so well this week. Today there was a lot of parents on the sidelines saying things like "Good try!" and "Spread out!" and "C'mon, guys, you can do it" and "Try kicking the ball!" (Okay, that last one might just have been me. I am very helpful.) But they had fun and drank Gatorade and only had to be reminded that they were there to play soccer and not swap Pokemon cards about fifteen times, so it's all good. By the time we returned home (after several hours at the fields in...
There are things in this life I hope that my children will learn, but due to the various laws of parenting and physics, if/when I share these nuggets of wisdom with my cherished progeny, all they glean from it is "WAA WAA WAA WAA." While I hope to stick around on this mortal plane for a good long time, it is my one sincere and true hope that IF I happen to make an early exit, certain important lessons---those which just sounded like maternal nagging whilst I was still among the living---will finally seem worth learning through what I was able to leave behind. Plus, if these children don't...
Once upon a time, in a land far away and in a time not all that distant, I had the first in what I knew would be a series of talks with my children. Really, with my daughter. Monkey was, as you might recall, more interested in playing with his Legos than in discussing the miracle of life. When I wrote that post, I found it being discussed on another site, and someone had taken a lot of time to write a long, angry comment about how I had "flat-out lied" to my children and my response to the situation was completely lacking. I think I left a comment on that discussion pointing out that I try...
(This is just a quickie so that I can go back to this new thing I'm trying of pretending that I don't work on the weekends. Woo! Am not checking email! Am just, um, petting my MacBook for a minute!) My family is nothing if not triumphant. I mean, don't be jealous or anything, but we pretty much rock. First of all, Monkey had his first soccer game, and they pounded the other team. Just decimated them. This league doesn't keep score, but I'm pretty sure the final tally was somewhere around 25 to 2. And Monkey---you know I love that kid more than life, and I say this with compassion in my...
I don't think I've talked about Monkey much, lately, because we all know that my favorite thing to write about is ANGST, preferably the most anxiety-fraught, annoying angst I can get my hands on. (Fortunately there is no shortage of that in my life, generally speaking.) And while my daughter seems to share my proclivity towards "the glass is half empty and also has water spots, and a crack! WHY GOD WHY?!" my son rides on a much more even keel. I was prepared to fight the school district to get him comparable services to what he received last year, and they offered very reasonable...
