For some reason my body thinks it's a good idea to wake up at 4:00 in the morning and spend an hour or so worrying about things--some realistic, some less so. Then I have to get up early to get Kevin ready for school. The last couple of days have been a little better, so hopefully I can break the pattern, because I'm awfully tired.
Overall I feel happy about Kevin being in school. He is really learning a lot. It's true that kindergarten is the new first grade, at least when it comes to reading and writing. By the end of the year all of the kids are supposed to be able to sound out words and know several sight words (and spell them), and they are supposed to be able to write about a book after they have read it. Some of their methods seem a little weird, but mostly it's fine.
The school has a behavior system that is based on the acronym CHOMP (Care for others, Have respect, Offer peer support, Make good choices, and Practice safety). When the kids are caught doing these behaviors they get CHOMP tickets, and when a class has gotten enough tickets they can earn rewards like extra recess, wearing pajamas to school, etc. This is a research-based program and I think it's good for the most part. The one thing that annoys me is that the rules are a little fuzzy sometimes--basically anything that doesn't fit in any one category just gets lumped into Make Good Choices. But they are usually good about understanding that these are just little kids and they're still learning the rules. It's harder for kids like Kevin who don't really fit the cookie cutter kid mold because some of those behaviors don't come as naturally to him as they do to most of the kids. Just as an example, Kevin is a very curious person. He's always observing the things around him, and if he sees something interesting he wants to touch it and figure out how it works. That's certainly a positive characteristic, but hand-in-hand with that characteristic is a tendency to get up and wander if he sees something interesting. Sometimes it feels like they miss the positives because they're so focused on making sure he's sitting down. I understand that they need to do that because if they don't tell all the kids to sit down then things will go crazy (and sitting down at appropriate times is a skill he's going to need to figure out), but I worry that they'll see the kid who won't sit down and miss that he's also the kid who's great at seeing how things work. Make sense? I don't worry too hard about it because we do plenty at home to encourage his talents and he's a confident person, but it does still worry and frustrate me.
Speaking of how things work, we've discovered the How It's Made videos on youtube, and there are a lot of cool ones. I've been letting Kevin watch them as a treat sometimes, and the nice thing is that I don't have to feel very guilty about letting him watch videos because he really learns a lot from them. We've enjoyed the ones about sugar, noodles, erasers, and chocolates, just to name a few.
I feel like Heidi is working on finding herself. She copies a lot of the things that Kevin does or says. She is really talkative at home lately. Sometimes I just have to go in our room for a couple of minutes to get a break because she chatters so much. It's cute, but after a while it can kind of wear on you. In other places she is more shy. She's obsessed with nonsense words. A lot of the time she'll just call things a "da-nya-nya" or a "gonch" or whatever else she feels like calling it and then expect you to give it to her.
We've signed the kids up for soccer. Kevin is doing a great job participating and following directions. It's really cute. Heidi is pretty shy and has to have some time before she's willing to play. Last time it took Ryan about 25 minutes to even coax her to kick the ball, and then finally in the last 10 minutes she started standing in the vicinity of her team.
Ann Marie is getting more social and more capable of grabbing things and putting them in her mouth. There was one evening this week when she was really upset during dinner, and finally I went and got her a baby spoon to play with and she was delighted. It was like she just wanted to have an eating utensil like everyone else. She can grab things and put them in her mouth.
We had well-child checkups for Heidi and Ann Marie this week. Heidi is 29 pounds and 37 inches tall, and Ann Marie is 14 pounds and 24 inches long. As I recall, they're both around the 25th percentile for height and weight. The nice thing about having three kids is that the doctor assumes that I know what I'm doing and isn't as pushy about some things. It was a rough day for Heidi. She got a flu shot and thought it was horrible, and then on top of that we found out she has an ear infection, so she also had to start taking yucky amoxicillin twice a day, which she also thinks is horrible.
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