49 posts tagged “kids”
Another tooth came out this morning - the bottom-left one over to the side. Wiggly teeth still make me squirm. I overheard E talking with his dad this morning. "I think I must have the old Tooth Fairy," he mused. "And my friends seem to have the new one."
"Why do you say that?"
"It's because I get a quarter for a tooth, and my friends all get a dollar."
(I wonder if he's playing us.)
E mentioned that he'd skied on a box. And a rainbow. That was fine with me until I found out that the box he was talking about is actually a steel platform that the kids ski on - and jump off. And the so-called rainbow is made of metal, too.
Ski lessons are different than when I learned to ski. It used to be about making smooth arcs, planting poles, leaning whichever way, etc. Now, just before they get poles, the ski schoolers head off to the places I thought were meant for teenagers on snowboards. I know I'm sounding really old and crusty here.
Today on a chairlift I talked with a mom skiing with her son (slightly older than E), who's also a fan of terrain parks. She said that she shared my discomfort with terrain parks - until she started doing boxes and jumps herself. Well, I've been an unwavering ski-with-at-least-one-foot-on-the-snow kind of girl till now, but her idea is intriguing. If nothing else, the sheer embarrassment of skiing with me in a terrain park should deter E from pursuing anything too dangerous.
Today S proclaimed, "Magic carpet is stupid." It's not like she could actually ski, but how can you argue with a remark like that? So Tim took her down the long run to the Village. She seems to have a knack for staying upright.
When we taught E to ski around the same age, we started with a training
pole and then worked our way up to skiing with a harness. She's not
fond of the harness and seems to be repelled by the pole, so it looks
like things will be a bit different this time around.
I'm looking forward to the rest of long weekend for Martin Luther King Day. I'm grateful that E's school honors the holiday in a significant way. On Friday, there were presentations by the first, fourth, and fifth graders during which each child spoke individually in front of the whole school. (This is one of the nice things about going to a small school: in under half an hour, you can hear every single kid across three different grades can say something meaningful.) The first graders each presented a wish starting with "I had a dream..."
E said, "I have a dream that people would be kind and make good choices, and that school would be good for everyone." (Tim thinks he must have picked up the "good choices" part from me ;-) I get all choked up with this stuff; it gets me every time. Other kids had wishes for saving the environment, helping lost pets finding their way home. One boy dreamed of having more math. Gotta love first graders.
Before we decided to send E here, I had concerns about chapel as part of school. Since I'm not religious, I was worried about time spent in someone else's faith, how E would fit in, what he would take home, and how to deal with things like communion (it's kind of nice but doesn't taste very good). Fortunately the school is quite progressive and is able to secularize. One story about miracles translated into a message about optimism and believing in possibility for change; it could have gone so many other ways that I might have found disturbing. But perhaps what I most like about chapel is that it's a gathering place for the whole school, where, over the years, the kids take small steps in becoming confident public speakers.
So back to MLK... I'm thrilled that the whole school gets involved, all the way down to the lower grades. But... E has spent the past few days asking questions about segregation, racism, bombings, and the assassination. He asks how people could be so cruel, how firefighters - the consummate good guys - could spray water into a crowd of black folks. To E, racism is bewildering, unfathomable. He's deeply bothered, as no doubt he should be.
He's six, though. And if had my druthers, I'd much prefer the subject be taught in terms of character, moral courage, and what it means to be a hero. I'm not trying to deny the dire human condition leading up to the civil rights movement, but, at least for my kid right now, it seems like too much info.
Anyway, I thought I'd post a Vox collection of some helpful books about gifted children and their education. I wish I had given this more thought a couple years ago, when E was in his last year of preschool. Whoops.
"A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children," by James Webb, is a great starting point and offers more thorough coverage of important issues than other books of this type. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, Deborah Ruf's book, "Losing Our Minds," was probably the most illuminating for me; she details five levels of intellectual giftedness and the implications for educating kids at each level, including the profoundly gifted. Susan Assouline's book "Developing Math Talent" offers some helpful ideas to take to schools; since math is taught sequentially, a child who is several years ahead basically gets driven crazy at grade level - unlike reading where the content more easily adapted for a range of abilities. Some schools give extra work to those who finish early - and this seems unfair and downright discouraging.
So with a possible school change on the horizon, the year ahead feels uncertain for us. On one hand E's current school is wonderful and in other ways it's a pretty bad mismatch. I just hope that any changes we make will bring enough good to make up for what we might be giving up.
Show us something that only occurs during winter.
Skiing hasn't been the same since the kids came along, but we're still hoping for snow!
I can't believe it's been about a month since my last post. We just got back from five days in New York. Tim had to attend a board meeting, so the kids and I tagged along. (As usual, the kid photos are all neighborhood-only.)
Highlights of the trip were:
- seeing the Radio City Christmas Spectacular - the Rockettes were amazing; they must be exhausted at the end of the show - and Roo's niece who danced the role of Clara was fabulous:
...and the Grinch musical, too - it was really fun and well done, great costumes and a huge cast of kids (I seriously wondered how good this would be, given the book takes about ten minutes to read - orry, no pics!)
- ice-skating at Rockefeller Center:
- eating a very yummy, reasonably-priced brunch - with beautiful, super-deluxe hot cocoa - at Nice Matin:
- and meandering through the enormous American Museum of Natural History:
The not-so-lovely parts of the trip included:
- having pizza for dinner two nights in a row (it was very good pizza, but we were in a major food mecca - will have to plan better next time...),
- having to share a single Ethernet cable, as we forgot to bring an Airport Extreme for wireless (not the first time, you would think we'd remember by now),
- not having gone shopping anywhere except the huge Toys-R-Us in Times Square (lots of fun for the kids, though!) - here they are on the indoor ferris wheel:
-
..and - the doozey - spending our last night in the Big Apple at a nearby emergency room. E started having a croupy cough with wheezing around 1 a.m., so we cabbed over to the nearest E.R. and spent the next three hours taking inhaled medicine and talking with various friendly folks who happened to be around. (IME, New Yorkers are really *nice.*)
From what we overheard, there were 60 patients in the E.R. that night. We came in right before a college girl who had O.D.'d on something. On the gurney next to E was a guy with an IV who was singing along to his iPod (a good thing to bring to the E.R.). In the adjacent room was a flamboyant, middle-aged man handcuffed to the bedrail. Apparently he was in the process of being arrested, according to one of the five police officers. E wanted to know why he was being arrested, but we didn't ask.
Despite the hospital visit in the wee hours of the night, we still (just barely) managed to catch our early-morning flight back to the left coast. BTW, Virgin America is my new favorite airline...
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