Gifted

Andy's school sent something home a few months ago saying that they'd already picked who they thought from his class was academically gifted, but that if I wanted, I could have him tested. I usually opt for things like that mostly because I'm curious to see the results.

Last week, the results arrived. They were interesting to see.

Ability
CogAT- 93 percent (gifted is 95 percent and higher) (note to self - figure out what CogAT stands for)

Acheivement
Reading - 65 percent (yeah, that one's way below 94 percent)
Math - 96 percent

Then we move on to the Qualitative where he had "0 areas" in the Standard Score teacher survey (he would need two areas out of five to be in the gifted range).

We did get a nice note that he's "not recommended for placement at this time.

I'm glad I had him tested though. It's interesting to see that he does have an aptitude for math, which naturally made Bjorn thrilled and me glad that he's got Bjorn's genes on this one. His reading isn't great, but then again, he's just started reading so it makes sense. I have known kids who were reading chapter books at age three so he's definitely not there.

Still, I really dislike that schools label kids with advanced aptitudes as being "gifted." Something about it doesn't sit right with me, as if the others aren't gifted, too. Course, it could be partly because my kid is just above average.

Tube top weather

After two weeks with consecutive ice storms, this week has turned out to be gorgeous. High temperatures in the 70s, partly cloudy and breezy. Hard to argue with that. The water in the pool is probably still 40 degrees, but it's warm enough that I'm thinking of a time where I might actually get to use the back yard again. Jubilee!

Meanwhile, in rant mode here, what's with Texas's crazy conservatives these days? I find some of this stuff just absurd. So they don't want kids to have access to information on preventing pregnancy in schools and they don't want kids to have access to family planning clinics outside of school and they want to take away access to abortions.

It seems their only advice is "don't do it," but when that fails (because it will), then they want kids to also have babies, thus likely limiting their educational and financial prospects. It seems to me the best way to avoid abortions is to teach kids how to NOT get pregnant in the first place. This is going to turn me into an activist, I'm afraid.

Super Bowl/Winter XLV

Hey, did you hear, the Super Bowl was in Dallas this year? I know, right? Who knew that? It also managed to coincide with the worst winter storm that's hit the area since the local TV station started covering meteorology in 1989. So that was last week, complete with four missed days of school. Cue this week and we had another, albeit more minor, ice storm that led to another missed day of school yesterday. My current work from home situation is handy for days like that in that I'm set up to do work already and can target special Yo Gabba Gabba sessions for times when I have a conference call. What's less than handy is having everyone home and in my space.

We are truly lucky to have a great neighborhood though. Last week and yesterday, we called each other to let the kids take turns playing with each other and our respective houses to give each other a break and keep the kids busy. I knew Southlake had a good community and was really family oriented and in this respect, it's absolutely true. We picked right and it's so far been pretty awesome.

Several dramatic things have been happening in the kids' lives. Andy has had his first break-up with a girl. That's right, he's six, but his school girlfriend gave him a talk last week about how she wanted Bart (Andy's BFF) to be her boyfriend instead. It was rather crushing for the little guy. He's clearly not really emotionally sophisticated to get all of this, but he likes her and doesn't really get it, especially when the break up means she and her new boyfriend can play blocks together and he can't. I'm trying to be cool, but it's hard to see his feelings hurt.

On a positive note, this kid is really putting the pieces to reading together. My children's author crush on Mo Willems continues as we love reading the Elephant and Piggie books. I didn't really get them before, but now that he's reading them to me, they're actually pretty clever and far, far better than most of the other early readers out there. If you have other favorites, bring 'em on. I need variety.

Margaret is also growing leaps and bounds. She's a bootiful princess and prides herself on getting dressed by herself (some days) and wearing a variety of shoes, dresses and hair accessories. It's adorable.

Both kids are getting into bike riding, which is awesome except for the subfreezing temperatures here. Andy has a bike with training wheels and we love riding the figure-eight of our block around and around. He's got the training wheels on still, but I love to watch it. Plus, I get some exercise myself and I tote Meg in the bike trailer and we ride with him. I just love that.

The great Texas snowpocalypse of 2011

So we've had some unusual weather here in North Texas this week. Freezing rain, thundersleet and snow on Monday night created a frozen ice rink throughout the area -- too much for the one salt truck in town so school has been closed since Monday. I finally got out yesterday, Thursday, after several days and it was still icy everywhere, like at Andy's school below. Yeah, I think they made the right call.

Last night and this morning, we then got four inches of snow which has been a lot of fun as the temperatures warmed up a little and it's been soft and beautiful unlike the frigid teens and ice of before. All the school holidays have taken its toll, mostly on me trying to keep everyone entertained and fed. Poor Meg has come down with a good cold in the middle of this though.

Bootiful birthday princess

I have no idea how it happened, but I have a very girlie girl, a very girlie girl who just turned three. Both are shocking facts for me right now. She got tons of clothes and dress up items for her birthday, including two poufy dresses, patent leather shoes and wings from my mom, a whole trunk of dress up clothes from Jennifer and fancy plastic jewelry from Tia. Just adorable. I need to count my blessings that I can get away with giving her a bunch of clothes for her birthday this year. She got a few toys, including some Play-Doh from Fafa, Candy Land from me and a wand from Mary, but by and large it was clothes and new bedding for her bed (not that the new bedding kept her in her bed overnight; she still ended up in my bed sometime between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. this morning....)

I am loving that she's turning to be so interested in girl things. Certainly I gave her plenty of opportunity to play with Andy's Thomas the Tank Engine trains and Hot Wheels cars, but she's very interested in clothes and princesses right now. I did get her Beauty and the Beast which we watched last night. Musically, it's not my favorite Disney show, but the message is clearly a good one. Belle is strong and smart and the Beast (eventually) seems to truly care about her and her happiness and not just be into her for being beautiful or having a pretty voice. That Prince Eric from the Little Mermaid is such a wuss and it's all about Ariel giving up everything for him and he's barely even interested in her as a person so long as she can sing.

Two weeks later

With Meg's birthday in TWO days, it's time to finally upload the rest of the pictures that are suitable for public consumption. Mom has also told me I need to update the header on here so I need to catch the kids in a picture together looking as adorable and un-evil as they can be. 

See? Wouldn't it have been great if they actually sat on the floor and watched the movie for more than 10 minutes? I would have been a genius.



This is how the party really was.

This is his buddy Barrett at school.

There are his other buddies and his part-time fiance. Note the kid in a three piece suit complete with a tie. Apparently there wasn't any particular reason for it, just because. Man, I love little kids for that kind of stuff.

Civics lesson

So I've gone and gotten involved in something political. Funny that Bjorn who loves politics doesn't get into this while I who mostly hate it am all in the throws of it. What's happening is Southlake is doing some school rezoning right now. They have built a new elementary school on the other side of town and they're moving the elementary school kids out of a joint elementary/intermediate school into the new elementary school and making the other just an intermediate school. That makes perfect sense, but while they're at it, they're also looking to "rebalance" the enrollment at some of the others and apparently my block is low-hanging fruit so they're looking to move our 27 kids who are currently within walking distance to one school to another, bigger school down the road. Both are excellent schools, but it would stink to have just started here and have to move. A bunch of neighbors have met and we've started a petition. Take a look and see what you think. Don't sign it unless you live in Southlake (I know you were dying to, right?) Also, yes, I know there is a typo in it. It kills me that it's there and I can't fix it. Something about how it's unfair to change a petition after folks have started signing it, but still.

Next up is attending school PTO and school board meetings. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure. Let me know if you have good advice for this stuff. I've contacted the local newspapers and we're starting a letting writing campaign, but I am sure there are lots of good ideas out there.

Party pictures

Andy at school wearing the crown they gave him. I gave out cupcakes to his class and everyone sang Happy Birthday with the phrase "Eat more chicken" from Chic-Fil-A at the end of every refrain. Why? Because they're five and six year olds. His teacher said it was totally organic so the marketers should be thrilled.

Mom got him a fireman outfit. Awesome! Excedpt the bullhorn actually makes awful noises. It may need to "break" her shortly.

Here is his party before I totally lost control of the group.

Well, that went...okay

We had Andy's birthday party yesterday and it wasn't quite a Bataan death march with eight screaming six year olds, but perhaps not that far off. I had this great idea that we'd have a half-sleepover, which we'd be to at another kids' house before where the kids come over for a few hours in their pajamas for pizza, cake, games and a movie. I scheduled three hours thinking all but the movie would take 1 1/2 hours, then they'd graciously and happily watch the movie for the remaining time. Their parents would show up and the children would graciously leave having had a wonderful time.

It mostly went according to plan, however, they had no interest in the movie. That meant I had another 1 1/2 hours to entertain kids while were getting increasingly tired and rowdy. Uh-oh.

So here's what worked:
1) Having a party at home was nice. I had all my stuff and didn't have to schlep it somewhere else.
2) There was a little more room for error. When a kid claimed he was allergic to tomatoes, I could substitute yogurt. Course, I had to do that for eight kids, but that was fine. I was home; I had it.
3) I invited the parents to stay for a glass of wine. That was nice to get to know them a little better.
4) Lots of outside help. With Bjorn, Mark, Margareta, Dad and Elizabeth, we almost had enough adults to go man to man on the children.

Here's what didn't work:
1) It was at least an hour too long. If it had been over at two hours, everyone would have been happy (mostly me). But that last hour was where the problems started.
2) I bought Costco pizza because it's good, but the kids had no interest in good pizza. They wanted plain cheese Domino's/Red Baron pizza that looks and tastes like cardboard.
3) Eight kids was probably too many (10 really if you factor in Meg and my niece Emma who are three). I had 100 percent acceptance which I wasn't counting on. Six (four?) probably would have been better and more manageable.
4) Make it a single sex party. I invited my nieces and our good friend whose daughter is also in kindergarten. They played nicely with each other mostly, but there were two little girls from Andy's class and one in particular seems to play Andy and his BFF Bart off each other. Andy was in tears at one point because they said he wasn't their best friend anymore. Course, Andy did refuse to play the game they wanted to on the Wii.
5) No Wii should have been allowed. Only two kids can play at once and there was competition for it (see no. 4).  
6) It actually rained yesterday so we couldn't send the kids out with a flashlight to look at the creek or anything and blow off some energy.

Meg's birthday is in 10 days. I am totally doing something more low key than this for her. And next year? I think I'm going to Chuck E Cheese.

The sleep monster

Hey, look! Another post about my kids' sleep habits!

Little Meggie is my challenge in the sleep department right now. We have a nightly ritual of fighting with her to go to bed -- she's liking to stay up late and we're trying to make her go to bed earlier. After frequent requests (demands) to "rub my back!" and other things that she shouts from her gate, she eventually goes to bed. But this whole thing can sometimes take hours. I read somewhere that it helps if you let them think they're pulling something over on you, like sleeping with a toy they're not supposed to or sleeping in a chair (see picture above).

Of course, she starts out sleeping in her own bed and then sometime between say 3 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., the little sleep monster comes down the stairs, goes to Bjorn's side of the bed (thankfully) and climbs in with us. The worst part about breaking that habit is that we love it. On the one had, wouldn't it be nice to get an uninterrupted night of sleep? But then, she's just so adorable and cuddly! And on weekends, her climbing into bed with us means she'll stay in bed dozing until sometimes 9 a.m. Over New Year's weekend, both kids slept until almost 10 a.m. Seriously, Intranets, I haven't been able to sleep that late since sometime in 2004. It's heavenly.

Santa

My cousin had a fancy Christmas party and sweetly invited the children (nice as she was to invite them, I won't do that again. Far too fun of a party to waste it keeping kids from smearing mustard on the white bookcases). She even invited a Santa who was adorable and so totally gay. Of course, he also totally relished the part he was playing and seemed to really enjoy himself. Here's a picture of all four kids together in one frame with Santa.

So Blogger is still giving me trouble uploading through Internet Explorer. I had to go to Mozilla to get the picture upload function to work. On IE, it keeps trying to make me go through a Google "Cloud Picker" and then tells me my photos failed to upload. Weird.

Nice

Well, hello there, Internets. Meet my new friend, Damn You Auto correct.

(Thanks, Frances!)

Photo fail

I have some cute pictures to upload, but Blogger has changed it's format to some sort of "cloud" and it's rejecting all my file upload. Is this happening to anyone else?

My boy can read, ya'll

I know! How awesome is that? It's exciting! And, dammit, is shortly the end of spelling what we don't want him to hear.

Andy was sent home with a few very short books to read to us over Christmas vacation. That ends tomorrow so naturally I pulled those out tonight (along with his lunchbox from 2 1/2 weeks ago including some moldy apples. Yum!) He had a very short book on building a snowman, but he read it. He'd never seen it before and, sure, he struggled with a few of the words and had to sound them out. But he actually sounded them out (normally he gets frustrated with me and quits) and finished. I am so proud.

In less than two weeks, my boy turns 6. Dang, time hasn't flown necessarily, but six years? Come on, universe. That does seem awfully fast. I've made the executive decision to host a "half sleepover" for seven kids. The idea is they come over in their pajamas, play some games, eat pizza and cake, tear apart the house and watch a movie. My sister pointed out that the other parents should be psyched about the party since they might be able to go to dinner and a movie in that time.

So now that I've got to come up with some games. Ideas?

And now, I present some unrelated holiday pictures.

Cousin Frances et al with Mom, Dad and Elizabeth.

Dad and Margaret.

Dad presiding over a family meeting. Note the thing on his head along with the wine on the table. We know how to do a business meeting right, people.

Things that make Bjorn cringe

Jennifer gave Meg a dress up set for Christmas. She absolutely adores it. And so does Andy.

Oh, the loot

Here are the kids on Christmas morning. Note the matching pajamas. When Dad and I went shopping, we got four pairs for all four little cousins that matched. They are more boyish than girlish, but while the girls can wear blue, Andy would cry and whine (more than normal) to wear pink.

Here is Meg attempting to ride her balance bike. This is about as far as she's gotten on it. See the cookies and milk for Santa in the background. Santa was too tired (and maybe even a little drunk) after cooking his beef stew all day that it was actually a struggle to make sure to consume the cookies.

Bjorn's new shoes that despite my best efforts, were not exactly like his old ones.

Here's Dad in front of their house attempting to ride Mom's pogo stick. As you can see, he's wearing the back brace and suspenders he got for Christmas (I imagine he picked them out himself) as well as his Christmas sweater. It's a miracle we didn't end up in the emergency room.

Merry Christmas!

Wow. After weeks of planning, plotting, purchasing, stressing, listening to the whining choruses of, "I want it right now," and , "But what if I don't get any presents!" Christmas is over. Bjorn made his Julia Child beef borgonionne for everyone on Christmas Eve, and damn, it was amazing. Bjorn was a champ in that the recipe calls for about 25 different steps, including cutting and drying about 100 different pieces of meat, and takes about eight hours to make start to finish. Damn it was worth it though. I consider that one of the Christmas presents to me!

We had 12 people all together for dinner, including four children. It was awesome to get to use the full range of our house for entertaining, complete with using every dish in the house. It took four loads in the dishwasher to get everything clean. So fun to have room to get out all that wedding stuff and entertain on such a grand scale.

Dallas did get like two inches of cold rain that day, the first precipitation of any kind all month. I was insanely jealous of all the snow throughout the rest of the South and blizzard warnings on the eastern seaboard. Fortunately good wine, good food and good family eased my jealousy.

It was a lot trying to keep our family traditions from Virginia and merging them into the new world order here complete with my cousin from Sydney, my sister on crutches from knee surgery and my uncle in a wheelchair. Like I made the mistake of hauling all our presents to my parents which meant Christmas morning was more bare with just a few Santa gifts. We also tried rushing over to their house to open presents after stockings and Santa, but we managed to annoy them by being late and I annoyed my own family by rushing them. We'll figure it out.

Of course, what works this year most certainly won't work next as we are thrilled that Bjorn's two brothers, his mother and all the kids are planning to come for the holiday. That would be the five of us (plus or minus Jennifer who isn't sure), four siblings and their spouses, four kids aged four to 15, plus Bjorn's mom. I am glad to have a year to get enough sheets and towels for everyone, but that's a good problem to have!

So far, winners for the holiday:
Bjorn's homemade Swedish glogg
Meg's new Yo Gabba Gabba bath toys
Andy's Nerf basketball hoop
Bjorn's beef stew
This iPad from Dad (Bjorn is insanely jealous)
Mom's egg nog
Dad's wine selection
Meg's dress up clothes (Andy also uses the shoes for "tap dancing"
Meg's new kitchen
Super Mario Galaxy
All the new puzzles

Surprisingly, the biggest duds are what I considered the biggest presents for the kids. Andy got a remote control helicopter that's harder to operate than it seems. Meg also got a cool "balance bike" that she can't figure out at all.

P.S. I have discovered Boardwalk Empire. Damn you, HBO. That's good stuff.

The bike I spent weeks researching. I was so excited to see her take off on it and she just can't figure it out at all right now. They did spend an hour fighting over my uncle's stocking stuffer, an old school magnetic toy. Typical. I am so getting these kids a box next year instead of the toy that goes in it.

Enough, now

 

As if the Christmas season wasn't enough, Andy went and lost a tooth (his third) last night. We were already at a party too late and then my niece, Megan, was coming to spend the night. After I'd read three stories and was tucking them in, finally, at something ungodly like 10:30, he pulls his tooth out. The going rate this time? Two dollars.

Damn you, NPR

I listen to a lot of NPR these days. Part of this is because the local radio stations in Texas seem to want to lynch all the Democrats and Obama himself. It's not like there is a legitimate debate here, but people screaming at me through the radio about how evil Obamacare is, how he's not a citizen, etc. etc. So I listen to NPR.

A few weeks ago, I heard a review of a book, "As Meat Loves Salt."

I remember when I first idly opened this book over my morning coffee. I had other plans for that day, yet after about 10 pages, I put those plans aside. Indulging myself, I curled into the living room armchair and galloped on as the sun rose high. I don't, alas, often say this of any novel as an adult, but I could not put it down.

High praise, right? So I checked it out of the library. I went so far as to ask for an inter library loan (which is friggin awesome. Seriously. Any book in the country except new bestsellers is available for this inter library loan. If I work this right, I may never have to buy a book again).

So I read it and it's terrible. Well, I'm sure it's got artistic merit, maybe even be a classic, like Faulkner. But by golly, it was dark, sad, depressing, violent and, unbelievably, erotic, if you consider gay rape erotic, that is.

In a change of subject, my sister survived her knee surgery and is recovering slowly and painfully, but recovering. My mother returned to Dallas with my Uncle Bobby who is also recovering from his stroke slowly, but at least he's here where we (well, my mom) can look after him and his care properly.

Also on the health front, Andy and I are recovering from the stomach flu. Fingers crossed we are better by tomorrow as the party circuit starts tomorrow night and goes through Christmas. I. Can't. Wait. I hope to start feeling better so we can properly enjoy the merriment of the holidays in our new hometown.

nothing good can come of this