Well, well, well... a fairly stable internet connection today - I think I'm beside myself. For the last week, my internet and digital phone have been off more than they've been on. Intermittent service - enough to download a few messages at a time before it would lose the connection again. Today hasn't been too bad, but I'm still considering cancelling the whole deal and using DSL instead. I hope that doesn't become necessary.
This week, James and Molly brought home progress reports for the half-way mark through the first trimester. At their school, kindergarteners and first grade students are graded on a Satisfactory/Needs Improvement scale (though on report cards, students can also earn a grade of Outstanding), but letter grades are used beginning in second grade. Molly's teacher wrote that she has made a terrific transition to kindergarten, and that has met all the benchmarks so far. Since they aren't even being tested on sight words yet, I imagine that most children had similar comments. James received all A's except for a B in Social Studies. Now, I really, really hate to come off sounding like one of those parents, but I haven't seen anything in the work he's brought home, that would be considered as a social studies item, so I'm a little surprised by the grade, and curious about the criteria. But never mind it, it's a minor thing anyway - I'm super proud of him for doing so well! Especially since, behaviorally (ahem), he had a bit of a difficult start to the school year. Within a couple weeks, he'd settled down and has consistently had "green" days since then.
True to her nature, Molly is relentlessly pursuing her most current goal of learning to read. And I mean that - she writes words all the time, she asks what different words are if she can't figure them out, she is terribly frustrated that she can't read like she wants to... It is completely fascinating to watch someone who is so tenacious, so determined, so unabashedly driven to do whatever it is she needs to do.
James isn't like that, really. He's very bright, and readily and easily completes any assignment he brings home from school, but he's not self-motivated like Molly. He's a sponge, though; my neighbor has told everyone in her office about the time James was at her house to play with (my neighbor's) son, and James came over to her to chat, and casually asked her if she would like to know the lifecycle of a frog. He does that all the time - he just absorbs knowledge that way.
A couple days ago, we were doing subtraction drills at home. 19-12, 23-17, 14-5, etc., when I asked him, what's 2 minus 3? And he gave me this smiling, quizzical, "are you teasing me?" kind of look and guessed, "Zero?" "No," I told him, "it's negative one." "Negative one? Mom, you're teasing!" So I explained that negative numbers were the numbers below zero. "You mean, there are more numbers? COOOOL!" So I told him a bit about them, and he said to me, "Is there a -100? A -1,000? MOM! Is there a negative googolplex? Is there negative infinity?" Oh my gosh, he made me laugh! Well, inwardly - I'm not about to quash his excitement, but he is just eating up those negative numbers. And then he said, "I bet I know what 100-200 is: -100!" And on and on. We've been doing addition and subtraction, and he totally gets it. But what I find most interesting is how excited he was about it all. And I wonder if there's something more to this, and if I should be supplementing what he does at school with something at home, because he flies through his math homework so quickly.
And then, of course, there's Bridget. You know your 2 year-old toddler-raised-in-an-English-speaking-home is watching too much Dora the Explorer (and her cousin Diego) on TV when
1 - When she wakes up in the morning, she smiles and says, "Hola, Mami!"
2 - At any time she intends to express her gratitude, she says, "Gracias! Thanks! De nada!"
3 - In fact, nearly any time she says a Spanish word, it is followed closely by the English equivalent.
4 - She is just as likely to count in Spanish as she is in English. The only difference is that she knows English numbers to about 14, and Spanish only to about 10.
5 - If she sees an owl, she whispers, "La lechuza...owl!" and then breaks into song ("La lechuza, la lechuza, hace shh! hace shh! Hagamos silencio, hagamos silencio, por favor, por favor").
6 - When asked to return a lego to her brother, she gets this evil look on her face, tosses the lego over her shoulder, hunches over and, with a sinister laugh, says, "Ha ha ha! You're too late. You'll never find it now!" and slinks off.
7 - If she's gotten herself somewhere she shouldn't be (like pulling a chair to the counter, and climbing upon it), she is as likely to call out, "Ayudame! Ayudame!" as she is to say, "Help! Mommy, help!"
8 - She follows her "Bye-bye's" with "Adios!"
9 - While looking at a (non-Dora) book with pictures, she has been known to point out, "Pond...forest...grandma's house!" or otherwise make similar associations-in-three.
10 - If given something like chocolate soft-serve frozen yogurt, she will take her spoon, stir with it, and sing, "Bate, bate, chocolate! Mix your chocolate, chocolate!"
*11 - (This one's all Diego's fault) When the feline of the house reaches out to swat or nip a certain overzealously attentive 2yo, she comes crying to mommy and says, "Mommy, Baby Jaguar da ouch da B'idget!" Our cat is not named Baby Jaguar.
And last, because my aDORAble bambina needs her mama, I took this picture a couple nights ago. I was out walking Cinnamon when, in the middle of my neighbor's yard, and extremely noticeable thanks to a streetlight and a somewhat helpful moon, I saw this guy (if you are arachnophobic, I'd recommend not scrolling any further). It was pretty hard to get the kind of picture I wanted, which was taken just before midnight. Without the flash, it was just too dark for the camera to focus on exactly on the subject, even with manually selecting a focal point. And with flash, he's too bright. I really wanted to capture the scene a bit better - this guy had spun his web so that he was perfectly centered in the middle of someone's front yard, between a tree and a light pole (with a distance of about 12-15 feet in between the two). I tried to get close, but he kinda gave me the heebie-jeebies, kwim?
Have a wonderful weekend!
