Somehow, this morning, the kids and I
had a discussion of their favorite fruits. Which led the Bee to compile a list of her top ten favorite fruits. Why am I putting it on my blog? Who can say?
The Bee’s top 10 fruits:
- raspberries
- watermelon
- mango
- cantaloupe
- bananas
- apples
- clementines
- grape tomatoes
- strawberries
- grapes
can you delurk on your own blog?
Still crazy at work, but I thought I’d stop by & talk a little bit about the transition to middle school.
The Bee has been having a fairly successful year, so far (knock wood). The transition to middle school has some fairly steep hills–for one, it starts at 7:50 a.m. Yes, you read that right, seven-freaking-fifty in the morning. Thank god the Bee is a highly driven girl, because she actually gets herself out of bed, makes herself breakfast, and gets dressed and is walking out the door by 7:25 most days.
She’s been playing field hockey this year, which has practice or a game four days a week after school, so she’s been getting home at roughly 5 or 5:30 every night. And then she has generally an hour to an hour-and-a-half of homework to plow through. It’s a grueling schedule for an adult, much less an eleven-year-old!
Field hockey ends this week, and I think she’s looking forward to the opportunity to just hang out with friends after school, and to have a more leisurely time to do her homework.
The other thing she’s had to get used to was going from having one main teacher to having different teachers for every course. It surprised me, somewhat, that the sixth grade teachers don’t seem to spend much time coordinating with each other—in the second or third week of school, two different teachers assigned big projects that were due within a day of each other—and knowing that I have a highly-driven kid, who is struggling with that work, makes me wonder what it’s like for other parents.
The social elements of middle school also seem to be not terrible from her perspective at this point, although there have been incidents of cyber-bullying that have made me not regret my decision to keep her off Facebook for a while. landisdad and I are extremely unhappy with the way that the school (and the parents of some of the kids involved) seem to be handling it, and I’m not at all eager to have her in that hot mess. Texting seems to be going well, and while she has IM capacity, I’m pretty sure that I’m the only person she routinely IMs.
I’m hoping that the social world will continue to be easy. It’s good that she has a larger pool of friends now, though she seems to be hanging on to her best friend from elementary school still.
I’ll be back post-election to post more about the Potato’s life in second grade.
thank you therapy, maturity, whatever!
This has been the easiest back-to-school week of our lives. I confess, I spent the whole summer dreading what the Bee would be like, as the start of sixth grade loomed closer & closer. But you know what? She handled it like a champ.
There was anxiety, but it felt like normal-grade, pre-adolescent girl anxiety—not, “if I make one mistake I’ll live in a gutter forever” kind of anxiety that she has had in the past. Between last night and this morning, she had several different iterations of wardrobe—but not one of them caused her to sink into a melting puddle of girl.
I’m not sure if it’s the year-plus of therapy, or her getting older and growing out of it, or what—probably some combination of all those two, plus something I don’t even know about. But I spent months dreading a thing that really wasn’t that bad. What a relief!
Scenes from the Potato’s birthday party
We had to relocate the Potato’s birthday party from the pool to our house, due to a rainstorm. This involved letting the kids have a huge pile of Legos in the family room, plus we told them they could watch a movie.
The kids got a little out of control during the movie, so I told them they had to go in the backyard (rain had ended). As they were putting on their shoes, landisdad overheard the following exchange:
Potato: guys, there are mosquitoes in the backyard
Best friend: we don’t care, we’re men
Boy down the street: men aren’t afraid
Potato: the mosquitoes want to suck our blood!
summer doldrums
We’re back from our vacation, and now there are long hot weeks of summer to get through. The kids are back in camp, the garden is weedy as hell because it’s too hot to weed, and we’re spending most weekends at the pool, trying to stay cool.
What have you found to do this year to get through the summer doldrums?
does anyone else
occasionally want to charge their children for their services rendered?
Sooooo tired of the Bee treating landisdad like her personal chef, and then pouting or storming off when he won’t cater to her.
Happy Father’s Day!
to landisdad and all the other dads out there who are engaged and active in their children’s lives.
end of school
I realize that we had the #snowpocalypse this year and all, but it feels like they added three weeks to the school calendar, not three days. The end of this year is very slow in coming. And the end-of-year events, they are many.
Feeling pretty overwhelmed by it all.
reflecting
When I started this blog, the Bee was about halfway through kindergarten. In just a few weeks, the school year will be over and I will be the parent of an entering middle-schooler.
The Bee is definitely ready for sixth grade, but I’m not sure I am.
We visited a friend today, who just had a new baby. I was kicking a soccer ball around their yard with the Potato and my friend’s daughter, and I told the Potato, “it’s hard to remember that you were once that little.” He looked at me in disbelief—I’m not sure if it was to say, “Mom, of course you remember,” or “Mom, I was never that little.”
in the neighborhood
This week, the Bee has her play, so I’ve been working at home a lot, in order to get her an early dinner and to tech rehearsal on time. Today, as I walked the Potato home from school in the afternoon, he told me about his day at school, showed me his library book, and waved to a girl in his class.
It always makes me laugh, how excited first graders are to encounter each other outside of the classroom. Even though they just spent a whole day together, there’s something about being outside! on the sidewalk! with your mom! that makes it a totally new thing.
Our kids go to a neighborhood school–we only live four blocks away. But those four blocks can be filled with some interesting encounters, some days.
