Celebration

Celebration is such a non-celebratory word.  It's so ... boring-sounding.  It's not like party, which is fun to say and even funner to say loudly.  Anyway.

Last night was Parent-Teacher Conferences.  Rob and I went together to all 3 conferences, one right after the other, rapid-fire-like.  And, pleasantly enough, they were all great.  We heard good things about our kids, which is nice, cause we think they're pretty good kids.  A short sum-up of how they're doing in school:

Miciah - 4th Grade

(As a side note:  Miciah loved that the picture captured the one zit on her forehead.  It's a sign of growing up, and she was kinda proud of that.  Funny.)

As always, she's loving Language Arts.  She's in an advanced Language Arts program, which means harder homework and higher expectations.  She's loving it.  She was so proud of herself for acing spelling tests 2 weeks in a row this month.  She has a lot of homework this year, but she does it without complaining most nights, and I hardly ever have to remind her.  That girl is a Get-it-Done Machine.

We met with her Math teacher who was shocked to learn that Miciah has never liked Math.  When she told us how well she was doing, I stopped and said, "Yeah, I wanted to ask about that.  What in the world are you doing in class?  Miciah LOVES it!"  And who knows what the secret really is, but she's tearin' it up.

About a month into school, Miciah brought home her first timed multiplication test.  I stared at the page, with the 100% circled in the top right corner.  "Was this timed, Miciah?"  She said it was.  "How long did you have to do it?"  She'd finished the whole page, which she'd almost never done in 3rd grade, so I thought she was going to tell me that they'd had 10 minutes to do it.  When she told me she'd finished it all (correctly!) in 5 minutes it was all I could do to not say, "Really?!!"

The teacher we met with, who is also her homeroom teacher, also gave her a very nice compliment.  She said, "Miciah is just so comfortable being Miciah.  She doesn't seem to care what other people think."  And it's true.  I don't know how long she'll hold onto that (hopefully forever, right?!), but it's wonderful.

Elijah - 2nd Grade

Our spastic child is also quite smart.  Which often leads him to believe that he knows everything.  Sometimes Rob has to hold back his I-want-to-smash-you-to-show-you-that-you're-not-all-that feelings cause, you know, Elijah is our son after all.  We don't want him to have a complex.

But he's doing great in school.  He's loving Math and often challenges himself at home with harder math problems.  He'll say, "Look, Mom.  I'm stretching my brain."  Love it.  The one "complaint" that his teacher had is that Elijah struggles with showing how he got his answers on Math tests.  That whole show your work thing.  She says when she brings it up with him, he'll just look at her as if it say, "Well, the answer is 8.  That's obvious."

We worked really, really hard with Elijah on his handwriting last year.  Well, that takes away from his achievement a little.  Elijah worked really, really hard, and we pushed him to do so.  He just didn't understand why his teacher should be able to read his papers.  He'd always say, "Well, I can read it."  So it's nice to see all that hard work paying off.  Now they'll start working on writing, which should be a nice challenge for Elijah.  Typically, he's the kid with less to say (see the above paragraph in relation to Math).  I'm interested to see how he does.

Teancom - Kindergarten

I've said this before, I think, but Tank LOVES Kindergarten.  His teacher is one of those genuinely nice people.  The type you meet only a few times in a lifetime.  He adores her (and truth be told, so do I).

It's funny.  Tank never was into coloring or reading or any of that before Kindergarten started.  I was worried that he would have no interest in what they were doing in school.  But his love for learning took over and is helping him overcome his desire to do nothing.  (The boy can lay on the floor for hours.  Not joking.)  His teacher told us that he really loves science, which isn't new information to us, it's just interesting that she noticed it, too.  They've done a few science experiments, and she said that Tank's eyes light up every time.  It must be genetic, cause that's totally his father.

Teancom is sounding out words like a champ, and is beginning to read.  He knows all his letters, can write his name correctly, can count to 100, and loves to color.  I list all that because these were all things that he couldn't or wouldn't do as of August.  AUGUST!  It's been fantastic to see his explosive academic growth.

Unique to Teancom's growing up experience (for my kids) is that he gets to go to a babysitter's house 2 mornings a week.  We are super lucky that it's our good friend, Rachel, who loves Tank and treats him like a king.  Teancom adores her and LOVES going to her house.  It's such a relief to me to see that, cause I feel just a smidgen guilty about not being with him, even though I know that me going to school right now is good.  He begs to go to her house and is disappointed when I have time off school.  That's a perfect arrangement.

Tank loves to do his homework.  He only gets just a little each week, but he begs to do it as soon as he walks in the door.  He's very self-motivated, like Miciah is.  (Kindergarten year was a struggle with Elijah.  We had to force him to do his homework.  That was true nearly the entire year.  It was brutal.)

Party!

Rob and I drove home and talked about how great it was that our kids are doing well in school.  It was nice to have the teachers all say, "You're doing a great job with your kid," and then honestly respond, "Well, we think you're doing a great job with our kid, too.  Thank you."  We arrived home, Rob turned off the engine, and then he just sat there.  I thought he had something scary-important to tell me.  He said, "We just had these great conferences with our kids.  We only heard good things about them.  Let's do something nice for our kids tonight.  Something to celebrate."  I thought that was a great idea!

So we ordered specialty pizza that we normally don't buy.  We got soda.  We bought 3 kinds of ice cream and let the kids eat it in a cone.  And we ran a fun little science experiment / craft project (folding paper and putting it on water.  Seriously fun).  The kids got to stay up late, and everyone had a great time.

It was a nice reminder.  Our kids really are fantastic little human beings, and they try so hard to be good.  That's definitely something to celebrate.

Here's a cool video about the folded paper on water thing.  Ours weren't this intricate, of course, but it's the same idea:

Flottille (detail) from Etienne Cliquet on Vimeo.