Author: Doris

We went to Edda’s back to school night tonight.  It’s a strange experience, we know so many parents at Vince’s school and we know no parents at Edda’s school.  It’s fine.  I’m OK with that.    Special ed teachers usually have only 5-10 kids in their class and since their students often are hard to find sitters for,  we are always the only parents that show up.  Oh, that’s not true, I remember one year, another parent showed up.  Anyways, I feel for the special ed teacher – they have to get all dressed up to go to back to school night and often they find themselves with an empty room.  We go to hang out with Edda’s teacher.  

Special needs education is a funny thing.  Edda is being taught the common core 2.0 curriculum. This means that she’s suppose to read the Outsiders this year and also dissect a frog.  OK, she’s not going to really read the Outsiders and dissect a frog, but they certainly are trying their best.  Instead of spending 4 weeks to read the Outsiders, they are going to spend 12 weeks and go chapter-by-chapter and talk about character development, setting, themes.  This is for a class that is mostly non-verbal. Is this a good thing?  I can’t decide.  I think I should go read the Outsiders – I’ve never read it before, maybe I’ll read it out loud to Edda as she falls asleep.  I hope she forgives me for having to listen to the same story twice.

Edda is also in art class.  As we introduced ourselves to the teacher, we apologized to her because Edda hates art.  I think she doesn’t mind looking at art (one of her happiest days I remember was at the Met. Museum of Art), but making art just pisses her off…

Happy birthday to Jeremy! The whole nation took off work to celebrate, which was very considerate of everyone.  Alas, we both spent the day working.  I’m not sure you can see it in the photo above, but we both have three monitors going at once.  The only real way to get anything done.

Vince and Edda enjoyed the last bit of summer.  This tub is getting too small for the two of them.  But somehow they manage to fit an hours worth of fun in there.  Vince is figuring stuff out this year.  He’s not been an organized, disciplined student.  Papers everywhere, not clipped in a binder.  Assignments lost and forgotten. Terrible spelling.  I kind of despaired.  I tried to not yell.  I always want to yell, but I try not to, but I often fail at trying not to yell.  Then I have to apologize because I almost always fail at not yelling because something else (not related to the state of his binder) is stressing me out.  But I can see he’s working it out.  Papers are starting to be organized.  There are a bunch of assignments due this week and we briefly talked about them on Friday and he worked a little each day this weekend and says they are all done.  I know, it’s only the first week, but it’s nice watching him learn to do this stuff.  It’s also nice that he still wants to hang out with his little sister in a tub of water in the front yard on a day off.

Jeremy and I got into an argument earlier this week about the state of our garden.  Technically speaking, we do divvy up the chores in the opposite traditional gendered way where I do a lot of the yard / house stuff and Jeremy does all the kitchen / cooking stuff.  But I think a neutral party would say that he does a better job at his stuff than I do at my stuff.  I try!  I try!  But the yard just keeps growing.  You leave it alone and it morphs into a beast with tentacles and then I bow down in defeat until winter comes.  Then I feel triumph and relief.  I bring this up only because we were invited to our next-door-neighbor’s kid’s 1st birthday party and the way between the two houses looked like:

If I won a bazillion dollars in the lottery, the very first thing I would do would be to hire a gardener.

A one-year-old’s birthday party is not really our demographic anymore, but Vince still seemed to enjoy the ball pit.

Edda napped in our folding chair and then woke up to wipe the sleep out of her eyes.

Here’s the birthday boy and a beautiful picture of his mother’s tattoo which I am fond of.  I don’t love many tattoos, but hers somehow I feel the slightest pull in my heart towards – California poppies.  

Right now, I’m listening to Vince and his three friends downstairs make a ruckus. Every weekend Vince wants to have a sleepover.  I should be grateful that my son has many friends.  I should be grateful that I get thanked for having the “cool hang-around house” by the other parents.  Do I admit we have the “cool hang-around house” because we are always home?  Maybe I don’t want to own the “cool hang-around house”.  Ah, who am I kidding?  I love being at home, I want everything to exist within a 2 mile radius of the house.  And almost everything does.  Depending on the mix of personalities at the sleepover, the activity level changes.  Most of the time they are quiet.  This week they are not so quiet.  I do not want to go downstairs lest I see a smashed watermelon, hear jokes about farts or just have to watch them eat.

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I took Edda to do a follow up blood draw on Lyme.  Reading the test is kind of complicated, the dr took some time to explain the meaning of each of the 12 bands and how it’s interpreted.  I’m glad she walked me through it because I had opened up the email earlier and then got all emotional and I couldn’t really figure out how to read it correctly.

I’ll give you a sample of Edda’s weekday hair done by Keyla.  She is my hair idol.

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I ran a race this morning.  I’m an infrequent racer, but a diligent trainer.

I paced it all backwards which I attribute to it being summer: 8:05 / 8:13 / 8:45 and then the last bit at 7:20 pace.  I didn’t hug every turn or straighten every curve, so I ended up running 3.17 miles – overall I ran 8:18 pace.  But no one cares about the fact that you ran too far because a race is a race from start to finish: my 5K  was closer to 8:30 pace.

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Edda and Jeremy and I escaped the insanity that was our house this afternoon (with the 4 farting boys and all)…

We went to go shoot some hoops and take a nap.

Back to school night for Vince.  We met all his teachers for ten minutes, they all seem great.  An exciting year full of writing, US history, earth science (Which I think is a snooze, rocks are so boring, the time scale at which rocks are exciting is too long – billions of years.  I can only pay attention to things on the order of one human lifetime.  Nothing really changes when you look at a rock for 80 years.), algebra, Chinese and sex ed is in there somewhere.

This is the year of the quadratic equation.  His math teacher admitted that that section was the hardest one during the whole year.  Oh, I hope Vince takes to the quadratic equation.  I’m trying to learn to let some things go with Vince, I’m going to be OK if he doesn’t love the quadratic equation as much as I love the quadratic equation.  Math is wonderful (at least 8th grade math) because there is always a RIGHT answer.  So many things in life are unsolvable because most problems in life involve other people, love and money.  All these things are unreliable and unpredictable.  But a quadratic equation?  That will generally unfold in a beautiful and satisfying manner with a clear answer you can put a circle around in the end. The math teacher quizzed us – gave us some 8th grade algebra questions on the screen and we had to pick the right answer from this little remote.  Our 3rd period math parents did better than the 2nd period math parents.

The Chinese teacher told me that Vince improved dramatically last year and ended the year on a high note.  I told her it was because Vince and I were learning to read and write Chinese together.  We are going to start again on Monday.

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I have not been very good at reading books ever since high school, but I’ve finally discovered how to borrow books from the library on my phone.  I figured out that I just don’t like spending money to buy books, nor do I like going to the library to borrow books.  But to download books to my phone and then just have them disappear when they are due has allowed me to read so much this summer.  I can tell after a few days if a book is going to take.  If I don’t want to turn to it while I’m waiting in line or for an appointment, I know it’s not going to stick and I promptly look for another book.  It’s fabulous. But my reading time is almost up.  School starts for me next week!

Edda’s off to middle school.  Her new bus driver is Ms. Susan.  Her bus arrives at 7 am!  Yikes.  I like to still be in my pajamas at 7 am.  Vince found his way to school too.  They delayed school by 20 minutes this year, so his school doesn’t start until 8:15 am.  Ha ha ha.  I love the first day of school <3…

A fitting end to summer, Vince went to Calvin’s 11th birthday party today and met up with Ben where they played laser tag and arcade games.

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Vince finished both his math packets and reading packets.

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Yesterday was our 17th wedding anniversary.  We celebrated by watching the opening scene of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and reminisced about our wedding banquet.   Jeremy is missing his wedding ring.  We are hoping to find it again soon.

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Here you go – Edda’s laugh.