Happy Birthday to Patrick!

Patrick is now an adult. He's going to register to vote and for the draft very soon. First thing he mentioned this morning...

At the Club

Emperor is not so happy about having his game interrupted by me. But Rose? Rose is THRILLED to be allowed to go to the Kansas City Chess Club for the first time. Not to mention, she LOVES having her photo taken. She did participate in most of the exercises (with help... lots of help). The only thing she wasn't even slightly interested in doing properly were the pencil and paper tactics exercises. In those, random chess pieces were circled and, instead of a line and arrow indicating the "best pin," she drew lines that would seem to indicate that they wandered off the page and went AWOL.

Dinner

Patrick is reallllly tired of my making peanut butter sandwiches or frozen foods for dinner. I told him fine, you can make dinner if you like, but you have to clean dirty pans and that sort of thing. Here is his creation: fritos, strawberries and bananas. For non-allergic children, a covering of cheddar cheese and the dish is heated in the microwave. Ok. Verdict: this food is amazing.

The Playdate

Well. Elf had an actual friend over all day Sunday. It was the weirdest thing. Apparently they have a lot in common because they have lockers RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. It's almost fated that they would be friends.

I went to pick him up and Elf and I saw that his subdivision is entirely Civil War-themed. Jackson, Stuart, McClellan, all those guys and many more as we're driving over. Elf's very favourite Civil War guy is Stonewall Jackson. We asked the friend what his was when he got into the car.

The answer we got was oh, he didn't wear regular pants but cargo pants because he needed some pockets. Also, he is getting "a bit wider" and needed more room.

Ha ha ha! Wellll, at least I thought that it was interesting that the streets were named for historical people...

"Mom," Elf chided. "If I were (friend), I would think you were being very rude right now. He's talking about his pants and you totally ignored that."

The whole afternoon went rather similarly. You could *sort of* see where this kid made the jump in conversation. And he fit right in because the conversation almost invariably popped back to Pokemon characters and related whatevers. Though there was a bit of an argument over Parcheesi. Actually, it wasn't the Parcheesi. It was over "may the best man win," and they all had a fight over who was the best. And whose foot was the biggest and smelliest.

I settled it. First off, feet off my table and all of my children who were in this "contest" are going to de-stinky-fy their feet sometime before bed. And I let them know none of them were men, so you can't be the best at something you're not.

I left for a bit but thennn I could hear them discussing who was the best preteen and trying to exclude poor little Emperor because Emperor is not a preteen, what with his being only ten. I hopped right back in there and settled it.

Um, "pre" means "before" so Emperor is just as much a preteen as you are. By the way, I am the best "post-teen," just so you know.

That shut them up! Well, not really. Elf made some whispered comments as I left the room about just go along with it because she's getting us Oreos and if we say something NOW...

Took him back home at the end of our visit. Elf INSISTED that he MUST see his friend's house. The friend took him on a tour and explained the linen closet in very great detail. Elf listened attentively and asked specific questions. Then they looked at the cabinets in the kitchen. Well, ok then. :)

How We Act in School

Mrs. F:

Elf has had a *revelation* yesterday. He has been informed that attending school is a privilege, that the right to an education is not outlined in the Constitution, and that he is to do his best work at school out of respect for himself, his family, his teachers, and the taxpayer. (And so on and so on. The Mom lecture.)

I understand that he received a 70 on a recent math exam. If he did his best and tried to make up the work and/or do additional work and strive to understand the concepts, I would have to be ok with this even though it is a poor grade. But he has gotten the idea that a 60 is passing, that anything over 60 is good enough, and he didn't bother to take the scheduled makeup. That's his fault and I'm not writing to ask for another. I'm writing to tell you that I can't "fix" every problem behaviour or poor grade my son may have, but I certainly am not going to neglect to have some consequences at home if I'm made aware that this is a continuing problem. He's been told if something bad like this happens again, he will miss his fun activities for a whole week. We do our best work or we find there is no playtime.

Oh, you will love this part. He said he'd like to homeschool again because he'd love to have a break. I told him great but that if he came home, that he would just study everything little brother is doing. You should have seen his face crumple up because Emperor studies chess for two hours a day and Latin and grammar are regular parts of his life. Ha ha ha! Suddenly, he is *quite* motivated to do things your way. Isn't that nice? He's also been told that I would be emailing you (and I am cc'ing Mrs. G and Mrs. P so they are in on this!) so that you would feel free to drop me a note any time you feel there is a concern. He cringed a little, hearing that one. Making his life hard should be a team effort! :)

Hopefully he's left with the idea that we'll be communicating with each other and he's not going to get away with being a slacker.

Happy Elf Mom

Rose Update!

Rose can now set up the board if you remind her that the queen goes on her colour and king goes on the e square. Here are the chess pieces and how they apparently move:

Knight: Just take a guess and then let Mom show me.

Bissip: goes diagonally, but I lose track of where I'm going.

Ponn: hops forward. Takes diagonally! I'm starting to get this one.

Qwweeeeen: Queen does whatever she wants. Do not touch my queen.

Keeng: hops one spot.

Wook: I want to move this piece out early in the game, but Mom will not let me. I wind up moving my Knight. At the end of the game, Mom helps me with Wook to make "ladder checkmate." I always win!! :)

Yet More School Stories.

Elf isn't doing so badly. I'm letting him flounder and figure it out for himself. It looks like every now and then, though, he might need a little hint about what to say and do.

I've been asking him to do things like tell me the names of two other students this week, and tell me what people are talking about in the lunchroom, and tell me about what you are saying in class, and all sorts of things like that. It worked very well in Mr. McC's class last year. He eventually learnt the names of six other children and was able to even tell me a little bit about a few of them. This year, not so well.

At least he does seem to want to talk to me about things. But he's making more than a few social mistakes. One of the teachers had an "icebreaker" sort of conversation a bit ago and went around the room asking each of the children what they were doing over the weekend. Elf's response? "None of your business."

Yeahhh, he has been coached that next time, "I'd prefer not to talk about it," or "Can I please skip my turn?" would have been better answers. The teacher also had a "discussion" about "respectful behaviour" as well.

Or this. Elf has figured out that table "18" has the best conversations. They don't have very interesting chats at 15, Elf told me. It got pretty boring there, and Elf wanted to (I guess??) talk about something else.

"Could you please spice this conversation up a little bit?" he asked them. "My mom wants to know alll about the things we talk about here, and I don't want to have to give her a bad report."

Can you believe this approach didn't work?? Can you? Things just don't work out for this kid and he's trying to figure out why. So. He can go to "table 18" on W days or something like that. They have the best conversations. One of the things they do is play some sort of "pass the expired milk carton" game and another is to discuss which food is the nastiest and plan a large "last day of school" food fight. I'm now cluing Elf in to the fact that the last day of school is NOT a good day to sit with the people at "table 18."

Patrick is trying to teach him to say "Yo Mama said so" at the table as a good way to socialize. I dunno, I guess that's what the high school kids do, so maybe it will be avant-garde at the middle school. I remember hearing this "Your mama" thing in college. One fellow from the 'hood just threw, "Yo mama so fat she breaks chairs" or somesuch into the conversation. MYYYY, was I insulted. I told him he didn't know my mother, and how dare he? He thought this was all HILARIOUS and started in on other Mama being fat jokes. I told him for his information that my mother lost QUITE A BIT OF WEIGHT on Nutri/System, so that just shows how much he knows.

Rolling, he was.

More School Tales

Here's a story Elf told me, pretty much verbatim:

Something exciting happened at school yesterday. It was awesome. In Communication Arts (English), Mrs. P is really really scared of SPIDERS. And guess what? There was a big egg sac under her cabinet and we got to see all the spiders come out of the eggs! It was AMAZING. And Mrs. P got upset because there were HUNDREDS of tiny li'l baby spiders and they all crawl everywhere, all ways at once and under things. Some of them went into her desk and lots went around the room and into our desks and some were going into her supply closet and getting into the books.

Mrs. P gave everyone paper towels and rulers and told them to squash the spiders instead of reading today. We didn't see any mommies and daddies spiders but these spiders were light brown. (Listening to the story, they sound like poisonous BROWN RECLUSE spiders.) Mrs. P called the custodian RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS and he moved projectors and other things around. They found lots of dead mommy and daddy spiders and they were brown, the big kind you are scared of. (Brown recluse? Oh yayy.)

I know Mrs. P had a bad day but it was SO FUN to watch all the spiders hatch and then go hunting for them in class.

(Here I asked him about the bus.)

On the bus, I know I am the last stop. The bus driver told me when to get off after I got lost that first time. I am listening to all the words everyone says because I want to hear *swear words.* So far what I hear is a lot of yelling and someone said "crap." They're yelling about something I don't get. They are also talking about things I don't know about. I sit in the front and the bus driver talks to me a lot but I don't understand what he is talking about. I am trying to be polite and listen carefully but everything is confusing.