Interesting New School Problem

by beagooddad on January 26, 2012

Believe it or not, there is a little school problem brewing and it has nothing to do with Pookie’s education.

Geetle has been invited to take a test in a couple Saturdays that will be used to determine if she will be invited to the district’s gifted program in 4th grade. If she doesn’t take the test (or we decide to not send her for 4th grade), the next opportunity would be during 6th grade for 7th grade placement.

Yes, I understand all of the pros. I was a borderline gifted student despite my greatest attempts to pretend to not be and to avoid any and all expectations the teachers had for me. I hung around the gifted kids and did homework with them once in a while and see what they went on to do with their lives. Some amazing, some sad. To this day, I’m sad about a few opportunities that I turned down or didn’t get a chance to do starting in 1st grade all the way through college.

But there is a real con to consider. No, the con has nothing to do with social stuff. That all balances itself out. Most of the gifted type of people that I knew back in the day have great social lives now. Just like most of the kids that took the regular classes.

The big con is that in our district, the kids get cored into one school (or maybe two) in the district. No more attending our home school. After BeAGoodMom and I had to fight in IEP meetings before Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and finally winning in 3rd grade before Pookie was allowed to come back to our home school and seeing how much more amazing things at school are for him, it is very difficult to imagine sending Geetle away from the home school so quickly.

It isn’t a deal breaker. We will have her take the test and see if she gets accepted before worrying about what we want to do about it. But it does annoy me how much schools try to group kids at such a young age based on their perceived future learning potential. We have such a strange desire to learn so much so quickly so we can get into a decent college. That’s all everyone really seems to think about is getting into those elite colleges and using the degree from there to get jobs that make more money…but I digress.

I also received an email today talking about the Spanish immersion type program they do in our district starting in Kindergarten where you go through school being primarily taught in Spanish. The twins were a year too old when the program started so we never had to think about it. It is definitely something we will have to think about for Giggles when she goes to Kindergarten in a couple years.

Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if a few years from now, Pookie is the only one of our 3 kids getting a “regular” education in a traditional classroom.

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Not an expert on autism

by beagooddad on January 24, 2012

I am definitely not an expert on autism. I’m barely competent at dealing with the flavors of autism that manifest in Pookie. I have tried over the years to talk about things as we are going through them which frequently helps me when I look back through the archives. There is quite a lot of his development buried in those posts. There are quite of lot of examples about ways to push Pookie to advance and a lot of examples on laying off of him to give him the space he needs. So at least all of those posts have been useful to me.

I pretty much took off all of last year to try to make sure I had time to do my job, take my classes, and be a decent parent and husband. I still have a job with a minor promotion, I am closer to getting my degree, my kids still like me, and BeAGoodMom has kept me around so I must have had some kind of success.

As I’ve started writing again this year, I’ve noticed a lot of ideas pop into my head for post ideas. Some are big enough that I will never get around to preparing them, some of them fluff enough that I guarantee they will show up, and one that would make a very…well, some kind of book. Part memoir, part autism parenting, part silly maybe.

I have never really wanted to write a non-fiction book and am hesitant to write a “book about autism” because I don’t want to end up sounding like a crazy Jenny McCarthy pretend know it all. But I do like to write. I have a fair amount of structure of potential chapters (but not all of the details of what will be in those chapters). A surprisingly complete picture of what I could do with it. And a desire to try to publish an e-book on the Amazon Kindle.

Again, with class just starting up and some things that I am working on with my career, I’m not sure if I’ll have much free time to pursue it but it does seem to be nagging around in the back of my head in an interesting way.

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Meet the newest member of the family

by beagooddad on January 23, 2012

In ten days, the twins will be 9 years old. About 9 years and a month ago, we ditched SoonToBeAGoodMom’s Cavalier and bought a 2002 Mazda MPV.

We drove all three of the kids home from the hospital in that sweet ride. We’ve driven the kids to emergency rooms, vacations, our for ice cream, to basketball practice. We’ve stopped in random parking lots to make kids sit on the naughty chair…more like naught concrete in those situations, I guess. We’ve stopped in random parking lots to clean up the kids throw up on the way home. Two of those times were different trips home from the Wisconsin Dells.

BeAGoodMom have used that car for anniversary trips, date nights, and for one of us to sneak out for ice cream after the kids go to bed.

So today, when we left the MPV in the parking lot at Carmax and drove home in our new to us 2009 Ford Flex, you could probably imagine me being sad. You would be wrong.

The Ford Flex is way more comfortable, way quieter (assuming kids weren’t in it), smells way less like the faint aroma of up to 8 year old milk, and just looks way cooler. Plus, the Ford Flex is making BeAGoodMom happy.

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Trouble With Kids Growing Up

by beagooddad on January 20, 2012

On Monday, I take the big kids to their drum lesson from 6:30 to 7:30 while BeAGoodMom goes to the gym. Afterward, she brings them home to put them to bed while I go to the gym. On Wednesday, Geetle frequently goes to church with her best friend and normally isn’t home until slightly after bedtime and ends up needing to go right to bed. On Friday, the kids have a play date at our house that breaks up at 8:30pm and our kids go straight to bed afterward.

Then it seems like we frequently have weird stuff pop up where we need to go look at new cars to decide which one we might maybe think of possibly buying sometime soon…or soonish for BeAGoodMom who is still driving the car we bought back in December 2002 before the twins were born.

But I digress.

It seems like there is never enough time for the bedtime routine and now that the kids are getting older I have noticed myself getting lazier about doing anything but pushing them through the bedtime tasks so they can get to bed and I can get back to homework or trying to stay awake on the couch before I actually go to bed.

Which means that I have been doing a poor job of reading bedtime stories to the kids and an even worse job of reading with Geetle. Some of my favorite time with the kids is reading to them at bedtime. They are always so calm and quiet and not complaining about vegetables or homework other atrocities we have forced upon them.

I’ve been working on it the last couple weeks and doing a fine job with Pookie and Giggles. They are like clockwork with their routines. Geetle is normally last in the tub, last in the bed, most likely to stop making progress because she needs to tell us about that one thing that one kid in class did to that one teacher before getting sent to the principals office and then that other girl threw that….she gets sidetracked easily and ends up using all our free reading time.

It is easy to force myself to read with Pookie at bedtime. It is part of his homework. We alternate pages and are reading lots of different books out loud. It is easy with Giggles because she is first in bed so I’m not feeling the call of my own homework or chores quite yet.

I am working on forcing myself to put in the extra ten minutes or so with Geetle. We are reading Peter and the Starcatchers which has the benefit of being funny, has plenty of action, and has a ton of short chapters. No matter how little time we have, it is easy for us to read 5 pages, sometime less, and get through another chapter.

The problem comes when we have no reading on Monday, none on Wednesday, none on Friday and frequently none on another day of the week. We lose the momentum and it can sometimes be a couple weeks until we get it back. I guess it is a good little snapshot of what life will be like as they get older and have even more interests outside the house and even more friends dragging them places.

When I happen to make it through a few days in a row and then miss a day, I always wonder how people get a streak going like in The Reading Promise. Guess I might have to add it to my library list for a little research.

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Language Developments

by beagooddad on January 18, 2012

So Pookie and I were sitting around after his drum lesson waiting for Geetle to finish her lesson. I took a break from my Geometry homework and decided to log my dinner in the most excellent LoseIt! app but ran into a problem.

I couldn’t remember everything we had.

So I asked Pookie, “What did we have for dinner?”

He ignored me at first so I asked, “What did we have for dinner? Pork chops. Sweet potatoes. And what else?”

He didn’t look up from the notebook and I was just getting ready to figure he didn’t understand or that he was ignoring me when he said, “Bread rolls.”

Which was correct. We had crescent rolls with our dinner.

There was a day a few years back where I couldn’t imagine getting that kind of an answer. Now we are at a stage where I’m slightly annoyed that he didn’t answer more quickly or that he didn’t call them crescent rolls.

I remember a post a wrote ages ago where he was playing with a ball and I asked him what he was doing and he answered “ball” and I was blown away.

Tonight was a question about something that happened earlier in the day. I asked it while he was busy doing something else completely unrelated to what the question was about. Constantly little glacial improvements that are adding up faster than we notice sometimes.

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