November Crept In
So that night of the disastrous bedtime routine was an anomaly, apparently. It has been pretty smooth sailing since then, I am glad to say. I don't know what was up that night; maybe the pipsqueak did not feel well? I suppose I will never know.
How did it get to be November? I feel like October flew by. And October did not feel as warm as it sometimes does, which is too bad, because I love a balmy fall! But now there is turkey and stuffing and pie to look forward to. It seems that my brothers and sisters and I are fairly ritualistic; we love anticipating the beach all year long, and we love love love Thanksgiving. I think we could take or leave Christmas, with all its stress and high expectations. Thanksgiving is just food, wonderful glorious food, and it is having mom and dad cook for us, which we all love. I think we all take great pleasure in getting to feel like kids again.
My boys have been listening to the sountrack for The Nightmare Before Christmas nearly nonstop. They adore the movie and the pipsqueak will sing the songs with vigor. He is surprising attuned to the way the music and the visual story interact. When he hears only the music, he'll ask, "Is this the part when Jack steps through the door?" Or "Is this when Oogy Boogy tilts Santa Clause??" He phrases it as a question, but the truth is that he knows better than we do. He definitely has a musical sense that is far superior to the squeaker's. Whether that's just because he is more interested in it or whether it suggests some kind of facility with music, I do not know. He does have musicians in his family tree on both sides! If he does have some kind of natural ability, I would like to help him cultivate it. However, I am not interested in being pushy about it.
The squeaker seems to have warmed up to the idea of school a bit. He has a friend now, and they play together every day. It's hard to tell how mutual the friendship is (the squeaker does have a way of latching onto kids who are perhaps less enthusiastic about him than he is about them), but he seems much happier. I am still somewhat concerned about his level of focus, though. His work in math is absolutely dismal. I can see his utter disdain for addition and subtraction problems; they clearly strike him as entirely pointless. At least I can appreciate his perspective. But his writing is also a concern. It is frustrating that such a smart child produces nearly illegible scribbles when he writes. Though he knows how to spell many words correctly or nearly correctly, the writing he does in school suggests otherwise. He'll spell words he knows completely wrong. It's almost as if he hasn't connected the idea of those words with the notion of writing them, as if he doesn't understand the application of his knowledge of spelling and word families. If you ask him to spell "car," he's likely to spell it right. But ask him to write the sentence "The car drove fast," and he's quite likely to write "cr" or "cir." It's very frustrating, not because I'm afraid that he'll always be a poor speller but because his underperformance is going to be an issue at school. I don't need him to be the star student in the class; I would just like him to meet the basic expectations.
The boys had a good Halloween, though the pipsqueak really doesn't like dressing up. We had to be very minimalist with his costume. For trick-or-treating he wore his skeleton pajamas, a batman cape, and a batman mask. My brother called him a "skele-bat." The squeaker wore his dinosaur costume. We also went to three parties, and the boys dressed as pirates for two of them. For the third, the squeaker was a vampire and the pipsqueak was a skeleton pirate (the skeleton pajamas got a lot of wear).
I have been doing a fair amount of travel for work, and it definitely wears me out! Because DC area traffic is so intense, I leave very early in the morning when I have to be anywhere near DC. It seems that I need to do that about once a week, which is a little more often than I had hoped. But I am doing a huge number of mediations, and I do think I am (slowly) becoming more skilled at them. And now I need to get to work...
How did it get to be November? I feel like October flew by. And October did not feel as warm as it sometimes does, which is too bad, because I love a balmy fall! But now there is turkey and stuffing and pie to look forward to. It seems that my brothers and sisters and I are fairly ritualistic; we love anticipating the beach all year long, and we love love love Thanksgiving. I think we could take or leave Christmas, with all its stress and high expectations. Thanksgiving is just food, wonderful glorious food, and it is having mom and dad cook for us, which we all love. I think we all take great pleasure in getting to feel like kids again.
My boys have been listening to the sountrack for The Nightmare Before Christmas nearly nonstop. They adore the movie and the pipsqueak will sing the songs with vigor. He is surprising attuned to the way the music and the visual story interact. When he hears only the music, he'll ask, "Is this the part when Jack steps through the door?" Or "Is this when Oogy Boogy tilts Santa Clause??" He phrases it as a question, but the truth is that he knows better than we do. He definitely has a musical sense that is far superior to the squeaker's. Whether that's just because he is more interested in it or whether it suggests some kind of facility with music, I do not know. He does have musicians in his family tree on both sides! If he does have some kind of natural ability, I would like to help him cultivate it. However, I am not interested in being pushy about it.
The squeaker seems to have warmed up to the idea of school a bit. He has a friend now, and they play together every day. It's hard to tell how mutual the friendship is (the squeaker does have a way of latching onto kids who are perhaps less enthusiastic about him than he is about them), but he seems much happier. I am still somewhat concerned about his level of focus, though. His work in math is absolutely dismal. I can see his utter disdain for addition and subtraction problems; they clearly strike him as entirely pointless. At least I can appreciate his perspective. But his writing is also a concern. It is frustrating that such a smart child produces nearly illegible scribbles when he writes. Though he knows how to spell many words correctly or nearly correctly, the writing he does in school suggests otherwise. He'll spell words he knows completely wrong. It's almost as if he hasn't connected the idea of those words with the notion of writing them, as if he doesn't understand the application of his knowledge of spelling and word families. If you ask him to spell "car," he's likely to spell it right. But ask him to write the sentence "The car drove fast," and he's quite likely to write "cr" or "cir." It's very frustrating, not because I'm afraid that he'll always be a poor speller but because his underperformance is going to be an issue at school. I don't need him to be the star student in the class; I would just like him to meet the basic expectations.
The boys had a good Halloween, though the pipsqueak really doesn't like dressing up. We had to be very minimalist with his costume. For trick-or-treating he wore his skeleton pajamas, a batman cape, and a batman mask. My brother called him a "skele-bat." The squeaker wore his dinosaur costume. We also went to three parties, and the boys dressed as pirates for two of them. For the third, the squeaker was a vampire and the pipsqueak was a skeleton pirate (the skeleton pajamas got a lot of wear).
I have been doing a fair amount of travel for work, and it definitely wears me out! Because DC area traffic is so intense, I leave very early in the morning when I have to be anywhere near DC. It seems that I need to do that about once a week, which is a little more often than I had hoped. But I am doing a huge number of mediations, and I do think I am (slowly) becoming more skilled at them. And now I need to get to work...
posted by Blue Moon Mama at 7:16 AM
1 Comments:
T's spelling issue is very very typical. I think by the end of first grade you will see much improvement. The illegibility and math? . . . can't reassure you much there, except that some kids just take longer to develop number sense. I would try as often as you can to apply the skills he is learning to his world. And he may just be a messy writer. Not like he would be the only one in the world. Jeff's handwriting is completely illegible to me.
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