The days are long and the years are short

My alarm went off very, very quietly this morning, and I slept right through it. Sigh.

mrmoosie woke Emily and me up with just 15 minutes to go before the beginning of camp. Fortunately, on the first day, they have down-time built in for paper signing and collection.

The counselors were being a bit lazy, and not stopping a group of boys from throwing dominoes. But one boy was building with the dominoes and Emily sat and watched him. Soon, they will all go and ice skate.

International Night did not do well being late at night on the same day as the Valentine's Day parties.

The crowd would NOT be quiet for the presentations. And having them in the same room as the food made it worse. Having the whole event in one room was a mistake (and a big one). But someone (and perhaps it should have been me) needed to demand that people shut up and stay shut up. Grump.

I met up with the PTA president at a New Year's Day Open House. There was a lot of discussion of the cost of reserving rooms for activities at the school. It is much higher in cost for the weekend, than for weeknights. Our PTA is spending more than normal and making less than normal due to properly paying for the room reservations and other things that we are doing "by the book" that had once been done "under the table".

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.

My tutoring student will be taking his test on Dec. 30th. I will have NO students carrying over from 2009 to 2010. This makes me happier than you would think since it is just a date on the calender.

I am getting laundry done and put away. I am reading magazines and checking on the front that I have finished them. I am clearing up mental and physical backlogs of various types. I am washing dishes.

My compost pile is one-half full and decaying well. :)

It's really a challenge to do anything in the evenings. Either I am working, or mrmoosie can't come home early.

"WhizKids" is showing at the National Academy of Sciences on Wednesday, Dec. 9th at 7:00pm. It is an in-depth look at 3 competitors in the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Fair. It describes the genesis of their projects, their obstacles and support.

Stood in line for 2 hours and 15 minutes to get Emily the 2009 H1N1 FluMist. Spoke with the teenage boy (and his mother) behind me for a good deal of it. Emily rode on my shoulders for much of the wait. She enjoyed looking at the many maps of the school.

There are still some leaves to fall. The bulbs are all in the ground.

The compost is full of the innards of pumpkins.

The sheer number of events on Wednesday is excessive.

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.

Emily and mrmoosie went to the Girl Scout meeting. I couldn't stay for much/any of it really because I had to go to my Spanish class.

My goodness, it's hard. I just don't make myself speak in Spanish enough, so I am rustier than an old nail. On the other hand, my regimen of listening to Spanish nearly every day means that I can almost understand our teacher. And, believe me, some of my fellow students aren't understanding her. Sigh. We'll muddle through somehow. We have one new student and the rest have been together for years, some of us for 4 years at this point. We can be pretty social also.