Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Kindergarten - bring your parents to school day

I love these days. It's so much fun to go into his classroom and see what he's been doing and how it's done.
Today he showed us how to use the stamp game to do addition.
I wish I'd learned this way when I was a child. It would have made so much more sense to me!
Of course, I forgot my camera, so I had to make do with crappy cell phone pictures...

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Niall shows John the tiles. They are divided into ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands.

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He does a math problem for us. Let me see if I can explain it...

First he got out the number of tiles he needed for each part of the problem and laid them out.
Then he started at the ones, and would pick them up and count until he reached 10.
Once he had 10, he would put those back into the box and get out 1 tile for the next highest group.
(So when he counted up 10 of the ones column, he put those back and got out one of the tens tiles.)
If he ran out of tiles before he got to 10, that was the amount he had for that column.

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His answer. I love the backwards 5 that he crossed out and made right.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Since I was busy on Friday the 13th, it hit me today

Some of you might know my history with Friday the 13th. This year, I had my first job as a doula, so I was a little busy and then a lot tired for it.
Friday the 13th knew that, and saved it for today. Thursday the 19th seems to do just as well.
______________________________________________________

So I'm sitting at the table in my nightgown eating my egg and poking around on the internet, when
I hear a tapping on my front door.

??

It's not even 9am yet. Who could it be?
Why, it's the contractor and some other dude. The electrician. Contractor says he told John they were coming.
Okay.
Hello, I'm in my nightgown. My NURSING nightgown. And I don't wear a stitch of clothing under my nightgown.
Come on in, men who may or may not be getting an eyefull.

I scurry off to the bedroom to put on clothes. Call John on speaker phone and thank him for the warning.
He swears he didn't know.

Pixie is in her crib crying while I'm running around, so I grab her and notice she has a wet diaper.
So I put her on the floor and whip her diaper off.
On the floor, you see, because her changing table is piled high with her clothes because she plays in
her drawers, trying everything on, and I haven't put it all back yet.
Guess what? Surprise poop!
Not formed toddler poop, either. Peanut butter poop designed especially to leave a great brown smear on my bedroom floor.
The bedroom floor that the electrician will be seeing soon, because the breaker box is in our bedroom.
And also all of the laundry and things piled around because I've been slacking on housey things while I do other things.
So I go to grab the wipes. No dice. They're out in the diaper bag. The cloth wipes are all dry.
Toss her in the tub and wipe off as much as I can with toilet paper before running out to grab the wipes from the diaper bag.
Wipe her off and start the tub running at a trickle because she's highly insulted and crying.

Run out to the kitchen to grab a glass to mix a little Dr. Bonner's so I can clean the poop of my carpet.
At this point, the contractor is trying to talk to me. Whatever man. Hear the crying baby? Go away.
I get the Dr. B, check on Pixie, give her toys, leave her in the tub because she's not exactly sanitary.
Dump soap on rug, go soap up Pixie, go scrub rug. (Pixie can be seen from rug stain with a little leaning.)
Also pile laundry onto bed so it looks like I meant it to be that way.

Now I'm hiding here sitting on the toilet. There's an electrician here somewhere. I hear him skulking around.
Pixie is playing in the tub, but I hear the microwave beeping at me to remind me the butter I was softening is waiting for me.
Because I was making muffins before all this started.

*sigh*

Time to get back on the horse.

Monday, May 09, 2011

A little ambition

About a week before the tornado hit, we drove out to Broadwell's nursery in Angier and got some plants. We got a maple tree for the front yard, 3 little shrubs that I think are bayberries but I could be wrong. There are no labels at Broadwell's. And we got this twig that was supposed to be a blueberry bush.
That weekend, we planted all of it. The next weekend, we got a tornado. But wouldn't you know... all the yard damage was in the back. Not a single one of our new little plants took a hit. Not even the blueberry twig.


I call it a twig because it's really not a proper bush yet, but it's in a sheltered spot that gets lots of sun, so that will change. 
I didn't expect much of it this year, what with being planted and whipped around in a windstorm and pretty much ignored in all the mayhem. But then I went out to check on it, and what do you know? This little guy has big ambition.
 
I'm pretty proud of the plucky little thing.