Monday, May 26, 2014

Ewwww....

Connor and Jamie still love their woobies, no question about it. The other night, I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of their room as I sometimes do. I thought Connor was asleep when suddenly he proclaimed, "Dad! My woobie smells like a mixture of French Fries and throw-up!" Oh, I said, OK, we'll wash it tomorrow. He yelled "NO!!!!!" Got it just the way he wants it apparently.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Let's go Mets!

To my infinite delight, yesterday at about 6PM Jamie said, "Oooh, is the Mets game on soon?" A few things have gone into this. Generally speaking it's been hard for the boys to get into a pro baseball team. To some extent Jamie says he likes the Astros, but frankly they're so bad it's pretty hard to get really into them. And, just like the Mets until very recently, we can't get any of the games on TV, so there's just not much chance.

We've been settled into a really nice pre-summer ritual. I get the boys from school and we've got a half an hour before swim team practice at 4:30. We get back a little before 6, and then the boys practice cello while I make dinner. Then it's about Mets time. Being able to watch just a few nights in a row has suddenly made fans out of them. They also don't quite conceive of a 162-game schedule, so they get really into each and every game.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Little bunny

A quick note from Connor's classroom. Apparently, every child in the room can pick Connor up. I've seen a number of them do it, so it seems to be a bit of a thing. Connor can pick a few of them up he says, but that seems to be a lot less fun for everyone involved.

Project time

Every year, just about the time we are feeling done with school, after all the standardized testing...comes the dreaded project. Connor's teacher, to her everlasting credit, determined that they would do everything for the project at school, which was fantastic. Jamie had to do his at home. They had to design a three-dimensional house, using at least three geometric shapes. Interestingly, the guidelines for size only gave two dimensions. But Jamie, with a lot of help from Sarah, got pretty into it. I think some of the travels to the classical world have had an effect. I think Jamie's was the only project that involved "Squinches."

Here they are talking about them:

Connor's was a team project, to design and sell "I am..." t-shirts. His team did "I am wacky and cool."


Thursday, May 8, 2014

Curve breaker

OK, I try really hard here not to be braggy, so don't take this that way. Really, it's just funny. At the boys' school they have some kind of points system for reading. Every book has a certain point total, based on length and difficulty, and as the kids read they report their books and accrue points for their class. Inevitably, the school has a competition for the class with the most points.

James reads a lot. It is literally impossible to keep him stocked with enough reading. So a couple of weeks ago he came home to report that his numbers were no longer being counted for his class's total. How can this be?, we asked. It seems that James was single-handedly demolishing the other 4th grade classes to the point that the competition had ceased to exist. I think it may have actually discouraged reading among his classmates, because they figured James had it in the bag for them anyway.

In the midst of all this, I joked with him that he should read War and Peace. He looked it up the next day and it would be worth 110 points. He was on about 550 for the year so that should give you a sense of the volume we are talking about.

The problem is that he is also rather picky about what he reads and once he takes a set against something in his mind, he will not relent (at least he's consistent!).