Stop the Presses!

I finally uploaded pictures! Not a lot (I haven't taken many the past few months), but they're all good. The link just goes to the Gaz set, but if you like pictures of clouds and trees, you might want to check out the rest of my photostream.

School and other things

School's been out for a few weeks now, but I wanted to recap some items from the kindergarten year:

• Having volunteered a few times both in the classroom and at mealtimes, I can say that Mrs. K. did a hell of a job in light of the kids and their various behavior issues, and that she was a much more fair judge of Gaz's academic and social situation than I was (more on this in a bit).
• The kids really don't have time enough to eat either breakfast (seven minutes) or lunch (12 minutes). I hope that Mayor Emmanuel's plan to extend the school day gives at least a few minutes more to either meal, preferably lunch.
• It only took me most of the school year to figure out that most of our after-school meltdowns were on days when I let Gaz play for more than 15 minutes on the playground after school. She needs to run and climb and hang out with her friends, but she also needs a substantial recharge period after the stresses of the day. Now I know to show up with a proteiny snack and get us heading toward home after 10-15 minutes of play. She has many opportunities to play with the neighbor kids, so she's really not being deprived.
• The final report card? Perfect.

I take back my grumpiness about Mrs. K. Having watched her at work, she constantly displayed more patience and demanded more correct behavior than I had expected. She didn't rule with an iron fist, more like a well-worn leather gauntlet. It was a hard bunch of kids. Some are very poor, and some clearly come from homes where they do not get much attention or affection. One little girl whose backpack I fixed continued to run up and hug me every time she saw me the rest of the school year--the wonders one safety pin will do. Some kids were clearly intelligent but lacked focus or were intelligent but obviously spent a lot of time around mean people. The children weren't mean spirited, even the the one kid who usually looked and behaved like a rabid caveman, but they clearly displayed their upbringing. This makes me all the more conscious of what I am teaching Gaz by my example.

Gaz has been promoted to the gifted class, along with a number of her friends. We are all excited and relieved. Two of the neighbor kids have already gone through this class with this teacher, so we know in advance that she's pretty tough and doesn't have much patience for silliness in the kids. I think this will be good, if difficult at first, for Gaz. She's smart, but easily distracted. With the whip being cracked on everyone, and the less-than-interested-in-learning being removed from the classroom equation, I hope she'll improve her focus and learn to reign in her own goofiness, at least at school.

Right now we're enjoying day camp. It cramps our travel plans, but she's having a great time, making new friends, and she gets to go on a field trip every week and has pool time every day, weather permitting. She keeps calling it school, though, and that's a bit strange to me. But considering that it runs identical hours to actual school, I suppose it makes sense. It's a little culture-shocky, despite its fun, though. At school she's the ethnic minority, but at camp . . . let's just say that there's not one but two Madisons in her age group. Strange that there's not more of the younger neighborhood kids at camp. We do see a number of her school friends after camp lets out, and they usually cavort together on the playground for a while.

And with that, I better post this before I forget again.

Travelin'

So, we're up at Aunt Emily's for the weekend, and the Intrepid Screaming Nieces (tm) are all clamoring to sleepover with Gaz. The two elder are going to be overnight with their father tomorrow, though, so they get priority tonight, while the youngest will have full run of Gaz tomorrow night. Whee!

The drive was... crazy. What is it about people on the highway that makes them bad drivers? I mean, we're all adults, someone changing lanes ought not to make the entire lane of traffic behind them stop. What are we, fresh out of driver's ed? Fully stopped in the fast lane no less than seven times (probably more) and only ONCE was there a lane closure, and no accidents or someone pulled over. I bring this up on the Gaz blog because we were not even out of Chicago, much less Illinois, before Gaz starts asking if we were almost there. Oh, no, sweetheart, we've got six more hours, because of this traffic. Time was, the trip would take six hours total, but not on this weekend!

She watched some stuff on the way up, though. A Kim Possible movie which she hadn't seen in months, and her favorite disc of Samurai Jack (the one that starts with the "Jump good!" episode). She got involved and excited about the story, which didn't help George's headache any (she's been under the weather a bit this past couple of days), but I liked the fact that she was staying interested in a narrative. That generally means a lengthening of attention span, and that's good! She was pretty quiet on the trip, though, so no gems to share.

Incidentally, we're also on FaceBook, if you're on there, gentle reader, and it's usually more convenient to share bits and pieces on there. Just FYI.

Report Card time again

And we were unsurprised by another good one. There's still room for improvement, but all her teachers were very excited about her work and her behavior. Her gym teacher thanked me as soon as we walked in the door for raising a polite kid. I am grateful that these lessons have soaked in, even if they aren't always obvious from her home behavior.

Our little Gaz is quite the athlete! She's jumping higher and farther than anyone else in her class, and Mr. S. says that she's got the natural ability to do well in sports, which is something that Pehpaw Charley has been saying for years. Ah, validation! :)

While chatting with her teacher, Gaz sat down with a dry erase board and wrote out some adorably misspelled sentences. But this is the goal: not spelling but just getting comfortable using words (that at least make sense to Gaz) to express thoughts and feelings and actions. And boy did she. I should have copied down everything she wrote, but I was also trying to carrying on a sensible conversation. Gee, and I wonder why teacher conference day always wears me out.

We're doing well right now. We've had some dramatic ups and downs this school year and some spectacularly bad days, but things are more or less leveled out. Even still, Gaz constantly complains that school is boring. She likes it, but it's really not challenging her. Many days she's got her homework half done before I get back to the table with my cup of tea. She does a good job of guessing at spelling, and she writes the best S's in the world. Mrs. K. said she plans to really advocate for Agatha to get into the gifted class (they did finally test the kids, but the results aren't in yet; Gaz said it was hard), so we'll see. Maybe soon we'll be hearing "Mom, it's too hard!"

And it's book fair time, too, so we've now moved into the world of Goosebumps and the Poison Apple series. So far she's not spooked by them, but it's hard to tell with her. She gave me one of those looks when I told her that my favorite silly song when I was a kid was "Go Get The Axe."

In not-Gaz-related, but still schoolish news, I've accepted admittance to a very fine (but not too fine) law school, and will be matriculating in August. I will try really hard to keep this occasionally updated, but after mid-August it might be more Mark than anything here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Gaz is intensely into Valentine's Day, and has been for at least a year; last year, she was building the buttons for her Box Batmobile, and she had a heart button that would tell her it was Valentine's Day, although we broadened its function to cover all holidays.

In any case, so I bought both of my ladies cards on the way home from work, and let me tell you, there's nothing sadder than a Walgreens Valentine's card display late on a Valentine's Day afternoon. But I found perfect ones, anyway. So, they, the two ladies in my life, realized I'd gotten them something, and they hadn't gotten me anything. So they "secretly" set out to make something for me. "Refrigerators!" they claimed. "Lasagna!" "Baby Poop," Gaz insists, though LovelyWifeGeorge vetoes this. "I'm right over here in the chair, people," I keep wanting to say, but I'm too amused by the whole process.

Well, at one point in this event, Gaz turns to LovelyWifeGeorge, and says "Mommy, can you cut out my heart?"

...

I admit, both of the adults in the room lost it a little bit there. I mean, immediately, I go to the Aztec place. I can only imagine LovelyWifeGeorge does the same.

And then Gaz follows up with "Oh! I mean refrigerator! Can you cut out my refrigerator?"

It's a laugh a minute, in this house.