recent posts
February 10, 2012
Back when I was a graduate student the first time around (working on my first graduate degree in creative writing), I lived in a very snowy, very cold part of upstate New York. I had arrived in Binghamton, NY at the beginning of January, deep in the heart of winter, and not long after a big snowstorm had blown through. The shuttle from the airport left me off at the bottom of a hill near the main campus building, and I had to make my way from there to graduate housing in the dark, just me and my suitcase, winding my way through what seemed like mountains of snow. I spent weeks and...
February 8, 2012
Each Monday I take both kids to T.’s gymnastics class. We get there about 25 minutes early and T. uses the time before her class to work on her homework. L. spends most of his time on his beloved iPod, despite my best efforts. There is no WiFi at gymnastics (why?), but we can usually poach off free WiFi from a nearby business. Usually. This Monday, though, for reasons we couldn't understand, L.’s iPod would not pick up the WiFi, while mine did.
This was what Scott and I call a setback. We started using that term years ago, mainly to lighten the mood whenever L....
February 7, 2012
And speaking of House Rules...
I've also been thinking a lot lately about House Rules of a different sort--or, namely, about how they are often not followed at our house, despite having many of them. We had a lot more success with House Rules when the kids were toddlers. Rules like don't touch the outlets, or no climbing on the tables, or don't walk out the front door without a grown-up, orno chewing on toys that don't fit into the end of a toilet paper tube. Those rules were all easier to enforce in the old days, when the kids wore diapers and...
February 6, 2012
I don't often rant about a book I don't like because, as a writer, a part of me is always sensitive to the feelings of the person who wrote the book, even if I will never meet them, and they will never read my rant. But I've been bothered by a book I finished this past weekend and sometimes when things bother me, they stay with me longer then they should--writing about them is often the only way to send them packing.
A few weeks ago a friend asked me whether I'd read this book by Jodi Picoult. I hadn't read any book by Picoult, actually, so I told her no. The...
February 3, 2012
I'm going to use this Friday post space to gush proudly here about how L. is on his school's Battle of the Books team. A couple of months ago in the van on the way to pick up T. he casually mentioned that he had gone to a BOB informational meeting at lunch.
"Oh really?" My heart jumped. Careful, I thought. Don't be too pushy. Don't get too excited or nosey about this. Sometimes L. trying something is like coming up on a wild animal in the bushes. If you make a sound, or move too quickly, he'll scurry away quick as a flash.
But L. continued to go to the...
February 1, 2012
Yesterday the weather was amazing--temperatures in the low 60s, and the smell and feel of spring in the air everywhere. Sometimes you can feel the change in the seasons in your bones, or on the ends of your hair as the wind lifts it up. The daffodils at the bottom of the yard have opened, there are purple crocuses along the rocky path in the front yard, and on the way home from work yesterday I noticed that some of the cherry blossom tree buds had opened up into flowers. Despite how springy everything is I feel a little sad about what might be a "false start" and can't quite...
January 31, 2012
We are starting the fourth week of the new semester, and I'm already horribly behind. The kids are both fighting head colds, and getting them up and going in the morning has taken double the amount of work (triple for L.). We can't seem to make a dent in the laundry pile. The stack of quizzes to grade doesn't seem to be getting any smaller, and the papers are piling up. Although I would love a day to stay in bed, I have been fantasizing lately about having a day to catch up--no students, no course prep, just me in my office, working my way through the grading, and crossing off...
January 30, 2012
Saturday was a rocky sort of day, in ways we hadn't seen in awhile, and so had been lulled into complacency. It started out rocky for different reasons, but peaked when later that afternoon, for a frightening twenty minutes I couldn't find L. in our Target store--not because he had absent-mindedly wandered away but--and this is the terrifying part--he walked away from me in a fit of anger while I was checking out, and disappeared into the yawning behemoth that is any Target store. One minute he was in line behing me kicking me in the shins, and the next he was gone. It is one thing, I...
January 27, 2012
T. had her first solo performance at school yesterday. She even slept in curlers the night before, so she could have real ringlets for the Big Day. Her class has been working on an "Expressions" project the past few weeks. The assignment was to pick a motto that best describes their values, write up a paragraph describing the motto, and telling why it is important to them, and then they could pick an artistic way to express themselves--through art, music, skits, dance, etc. T. saw the musical Annie (hence the wish for curly hair) on DVD over Christmas and fell in love with the...
January 25, 2012
If you ask T. what she wants to be when she grows up, she'll tell you "a scientist!" Then she will go on to qualify that and say, more specifically, that she wants to study marine biology. Awhile back I remember telling both kids that I had wanted to study zoology in college, but was held back from my aspirations because of math. To be fair, it wasn't math that held me back, but my reluctance to get my mind around it enough to push through the harder courses.
Math gives me a headache. I think I do have some type of learning disability when it comes to numbers...
10 Ways to Deal with Temper Tantrums
Allison McDonald
Jessica Efird
Family Education Staff