The days are long and the years are short

I think that the more exposure that a child has to the tricky parts of their environments, the better the child learns to be safe in that environment. Perhaps, this theory needs more work.

I took two rambunctious girls on the Metro to see a museum in downtown DC. I used moral persuasion to get them to sit down only after several stops. It was a quieter time of day, not rush hour, for both the downtown trip and the return trip. I hope that the investment of the effort to corral them teaches them to behave on a train in the future. Someday, i will need to take her at rush hour.

It is snowing. Wet, slushy snow. It's falling in wet, sloppy, big drops flakes. The ground around here (particularly at Emily's school) is saturated with water, so even when it melts, it has a difficult time draining.

The low tonight is supposed to be 27°F. All that standing water/slush will freeze in interesting shapes and lots of slippery sidewalks. At some point, I will have to dig out the salt to put over the driveway and sidewalk to minimize the slipperiness of our sidewalk.

Emily went to "Breakfast with Santa" this morning, followed by ice skating. Both events were loaded with children who were very happy to see all the snow.

I am making stew for dinner tonight. I realized too late that I didn't have an onion, so I used onion powder.

mrmoosie and Emily are making sock puppets.

I came home from teaching last night to a computer loaded with pictures of the Millennium Falcon. Emily and mrmoosie printed out a floor plan, and we had to look for the bathroom (it's there) and the chatting room (not to be confused with the chat room). Emily fell asleep minutes after putting the floor plan on the nightstand.

Emily's school had an open house today. Since the federal government has the day off, it's easy to schedule a day for parents to visit at the school. It's not that every parent works for the federal government, but they do set the agenda around here.

It was reading time for first grade. First the children had a warm-up with the words of the week. Then they had independent reading time. So they grabbed a parent (not necessarily their own) and read to them. I listened to four different children read (one of which was Emily). Then the children sat on the carpet for word work. They went over those five words and then words with 'it' in them. They also learned about homonyms, since pit has two meanings (and something else, but I can't remember). Then they each had an assignment to work on at their desk. Emily's was to read a narrative book and summarize the plot in three points. Emily tried "Wilber wins a prize", a separated chapter from Charlotte's web, but it was too hard for her. She then found "Little Louie, the Late Bloomer", which was hard (she kept reading bloomer as brother for the sense of the story), but doable. Then she wrote some of the information. Then her small group was called for a small lesson in "parts of a book (text features)", like the table of contents, chapter headings, and the index. Then she finished her page about Little Louie, the Late Bloomer, Then it was time to get ready for recess.

Those few parents who had hung out that long, went out to the playground with the first grade. After the recess, the parents headed home.

Edited to remove actual reading levels of other children for their privacy.

I'm a little sad in many ways.

Several people I know are mourning the loss of an SCA fighter to H1N1.

I yelled at my daughter today. Our disagreement just kept escalating.

mrmoosie 's plane doesn't get in until 12:30 tonight. He'll be exhausted.

My studying time was spent on tasks for my PTA committee. I won't get that back.

I was afraid that I had overstepped the levels of privacy appropriate for a blog in my comments on another person's blog.

I got a rejection from the job I applied to. I know it was a long shot, but it's still a rejection.

Our oven is still broken. It's just a low-level background annoyance.

Grump, grump.mrmoosieis refusing to use the phone. What a wimp!

Emily was bouncing gracelessly into various things all day. Breaking a few of them. Sigh. She would not calm down her energy or use caution to express it where there was no danger.

The technical difficulties were pretty severe, so they only *saw*, not *heard* the speech. I'm not sure that it was worth it for them.

Would it be too cruel to leave the house and leave mrmoosie (who is very tired) to Emily's mercy?

And a slightly shorter way to Cantler's. Emily fed the ducks with crab gills she saved from dinner.

The totem pole has been left in a dangerous--ish state. One heavy limb is one-half sawed-through. I will have to finish that very, very soon. starstraf 's sweetie needs his own LJ id suggested a way to cut it quickly.