Christopher – an update

It’s been an interesting week of parent-teacher conferences for the big guy.  Also had his yearly speech review, so, a whole lot of good academic information for Suzanne and I to digest.

Reading:  Improving…but still not where he needs to be yet.  It’s been a challenge figuring out what exactly the problem is, or, better said, what one of the biggest stumbling blocks is.  Here’s the best example I can think of:

spelunking

Christopher has a great deal of difficulty in recognizing sound blends…..he doesn’t see the sp- and think the sp sound and similarly, he doesn’t hear sp- and begin to write the sp- sound.  Same deal with the ‘unk’, or, the ‘l’ for that matter.  We’re dropping back and really drilling him on these sounds (phenomes) right now. 

His reading, for all that, is coming along quite nicely…..we’ve been reading “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” together with Matthew and he’s doing just fine (except for the big words where he would need to sound them out) and he even corrects Matthew at times, so, that’s all good. 

Speech:  This was supposed to be the last year for Christopher in speech, but, the sound thing described above is the reason he’ll have one more year of time with the speech therapist.  He still struggles with the ‘r’ and ‘wr’ blends in speech, but, that alone wouldn’t have been enough to keep receiving services.  It’s nice (for us) that the speech and reading issues are coming together in a complimentary fashion….it’s also nice that we’ve finally figured out…

Testing:  …that Christopher’s standardized tests are very inconsistent; we think it’s because, at times, he just doesn’t care if he does his best on a test (or an exercise, or an assignment).  This attitude, I guess, is good for Christopher’s stress level but frustrating for parents and teachers.  His teacher thinks that, in reading, his comprehension isn’t an issue, consistently, he scores high on those parts of the test and she’s amazed during class and during testing at how well he follows along.

The speech therapist?  Her testing shows comprehension as a real weakness.  MEAP’s(the Michigan standardized test)?…..he performed well enough in reading to be right where he needed to be (a little better than average for his grade level).  Thank goodness he was interested enough to do well in that!

Math:  Those MEAP’s?  show him as advanced for his grade level.  Am somewhat ashamed that I’m pleasantly surprised like that.  We’re spending a lot of time on mental math right now; if we’re in the car he gets to try and answer multiplication facts or addition and subtraction problems….it’s coming along, but, not a strength.  Apparently spatial math is; his teacher pointed out he was one of only a few that very clearly understood the geometry parts of the curriculum that the class just started working on.

Attitude:  Certainly has a lot of that at home, and, this year, for the first time, it’s starting to creep in at school.  When asked to change his attitude at school by the teacher, he does, and is very contrite about it, but, had to have a little talk about it with him.  Also has had a few incidents of 'sensitivity’….made the last out at kickball and the kids got on him for that and he dissolved in tears…the teacher’s quote was “I sometimes forget because he’s so big he’s still a little boy” or something like that.

Whew….let’s talk about something other than school.

Teenage girl:  Never thought my 9-yr old would be there, but he is.  Loves the Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato crowd….just today saw a teen-beat type magazine at Target and begged and pleaded with Suzanne to get it…those posters will be all over his room shortly.  Still loves to sing those Taylor Swift tunes everywhere. 

Orchestra:  ….went and saw the OHS orchestra on a field trip today.  Was very taken with the bass, which is good, because Mom and Dad have always thought that might be a good fit for him (that darned size thing coming in again).

Sports:  A five paragraph story for Matthew is simply summed up here by saying that he likes them when he’s playing in them but can give you a whole lot of crap about them before and after them.  He’s not happy at all that he’s been signed up for baseball again this year, for example.

Neighborhood:  Matthew plays with the boys…they do sports. And sometimes does what Christopher does…plays some made up games with a teenage girl and a kindergartner that involves houses and horses and islands and the level of imagination that goes into that is pretty decent.  Very rarely decides to go play baseball, or football, or whatever (will be seen playing basketball though!).  Lots of hide and go seek going on right now.

Animals:  Nothing fascinates Christopher more than a book about animals.  Loves to talk about animal facts and what they do. 

Matthew – an update

Did this last year; figure I’ll do it again…go through boy by boy and write down a few thoughts.  It’s a good time; parent teacher conferences are upon us and the sports schedule is pretty dead until after spring break.

I was talking with Matthew’s teacher the other day and she said he’s a lot of fun in class because he is so intense and serious and determined, and asked if we noticed that at home.  Academically at home?  We don’t see it at all…Matthew’s homework is an exercise in how-fast-can-I-get-this-done-what-do-you-mean-its-wrong-and-you-can’t-read-my-handwriting-can-I-go-now?  The intense, serious, determined Matthew we see shows up on the sports fields…we’re happy to hear that he’s transferred that to school.

Matthew does very well in math and is improving quite a bit at reading….had a weird outlier of a result on some testing at school where it showed, on one test, he was just a little below the minimum.  The test emphasizes accuracy and speed; can easily see how Matthew-I-want-to-be-done-now could have punted on that test.  Last report I heard said he was reading above grade level, so, that’s a good thing.  He’s consistently said the worst part of his school day is ‘art’…I can relate to that.

Soccer:  Not at all sure what we’re going to do with him next year.  Play up with the U10’s and be a good, not great player or go back to his age group and dominate?  May have him go back for the local travel league and pay to put him with one of the soccer clubs (where he’ll get better coaching and would play up a level there).

Snowboarding:  Has a major desire to do more of this

Flag Football/Basketball:  Will not be doing flag football (but most certainly will be doing real football in 4th grade) and basketball may suffer next year because of the snowboarding urge.

Fishing:  Don’t know why, can’t explain it, but the boy wants to fish.  Always brings it up “Does that lake have fish, Dad?” and really really wants a fishing pole to get to work.  Will have to arrange a trip soon he can see how boring it is I guess…

Lacrosse:  He can’t play for 2 more years but is very taken with it right now; his friend up the street has a stick and the last few nights they have been playing catch pretty regularly.

I’ve been working on this post over the last few days; today the spring portraits arrived so I was able to incorporate them.  Unlike Matthew’s normal photo events, these ones turned out pretty well.

The truth is unbelievable sometimes

Today, and for the rest of the week, the book fair is open at the school in conjunction with parent/teacher conferences.  The boys asked for, and received some, money to buy a few things during the day when the classes went down to check things out.

Matthew, when I saw him at lunchtime, gave me $1 in change with very specific instructions to give it back to Mom.  I did so, and life was good.

Sometime later, Mom decides to ask Christopher if he had any change.  “$1.03” Christopher says.  Well, where is it?  “I deposited in my lunch account”.  Mom and Dad immediately start chuckling; I tell Christopher that he came up with a pretty good story right off the bat, but, this one isn’t going to cut it, we can go online and check the balance.  He’s laughing and says, go ahead, do it.  Mom starts threatening to do it….He laughs, he jokes, but doesn’t change his story.

Mom picks up the computer and begins to log-in to the system. 

Never in a million years would have guessed that a) that’s what he would do with his change and b) that the “lunch lady” would take his $1.03 and apply it to his account!  Suzanne goes to show me this and I tell her she’s lying….just can’t believe it happened.

For the curious, Friday’s extra entree was an extra slice of pizza on Domino’s Day, and the treat on Thursday was a sugar cookie “…they are yummy because they have sprinkles and frosting”

Battleships

Kevin had a legitimate request the other day; hey, I need some new shoes.  Mom says “we just got you those” and Kevin pulls up one foot and the whole front lifts up exposing his socks and toes.  Mom agrees that some new shoes are in order and last Friday they head off to Kohl’s.

Get this text from Mom:

”Had to get Kevin size 11 1/2”

And that would give Kevin the largest feet in the house.  His last pair were 10 1/2; so, he’s been on a tear here size wise recently. 

Iphone Photo Dump

It's time for another edition of that blog-staple....the Iphone Photo Dump

Holly has figured out what goes and what doesn’t pretty quick.  Perched on the couch?  Check.  Sleeping on top of her big brother?  Check.

Don’t think I ever mentioned that Kevin and I got some tickets for the Michigan State / Penn State game a few weeks back.  Turned out pretty well I guess…went in thinking the Nittany Lions had a pretty good chance of getting blown out and with 2 minutes left the arena was dead quiet as Penn State clung to a one point lead.  Alas, it wasn’t to be, and Sparty won by 2. 

We were about 6 rows from the top, if you’re curious.

These were hanging on the walls at school as I walked in to teach Junior Achievement earlier this month.  The Ping Pong Drums were Matthew and Dad’s attempt at a musical instrument; I wouldn’t have used so much duct tape but Matthew won the day there.  The instrument did what it was supposed to (show the difference between low and high frequencies) so, there is that.

I didn’t take this picture, Mom did.  It’s on my Iphone because she texted it to me.  I’ve attended Dr. Seuss’ day with Kevin and Christopher; Mom made it for Matthew’s turn and brought along a crockpot full of green scrambled eggs as well!

The photo on the right is me playing with a new photo app I have; allows the color separation.

 

Matthew’s contribution to the Okemos Fine Arts Festival; a three night program at the high school.  All of the elementary schools have artwork hung by the students posted in the halls.  There are concerts on three different nights featuring the different groups of fifth graders and middle school students…the final night features the high school ensembles (and the program for that looked incredible…but, we won’t be going.)

 

Christopher’s contributions to the Festival…the picture on the right is based, I think, on a short story titled “The Cat and the Temple”….not sure about that…sure I’ll get more when we do the art posts in a few months.

    

this photo deserves a post of it’s own….

Vibrato

Friday I headed into Kevin’s viola lesson with the camcorder to record him; we need to send in a CD for him to receive a seat placement in the orchestra and be considered for the viola solo.

Kevin is playing, his instructor, Jon, is instructing, I’m recording when asked.  Remain, to this day, amazed at how well Kevin handles the very fast notes…unlike other auditions, these pieces have long stretches of nothing but really fast movements and that’s always been a strength of his.  So that’s good.

But, I’m sitting there, during the second of the three pieces I’m going to tape, and I have to ask “Why aren’t you using vibrato on some of the notes?”.  I’m very puzzled by this…Kevin knows, he knows(!) that not using vibrato is what sunk his last try out. 

Puzzled look from Kevin, Jon very quickly says, yeah, Kevin, if you add that in these places it will sound a lot better.  And he adds it on the few long drawn out notes there are and the piece sounds a lot better.  Tape the second piece, tape the third, Kevin thinks he’s done and I force him to do the first one over again with vibrato in it.

Kevin and I have an unpleasant talk when we get home….what is he doing?  How come he isn’t doing this basic thing to make his sound so much better?  Do we need to switch instructors…..Jon realizes it’s important, he said at one point during the recording “Advanced students use vibrato all the time”.  Kevin gets frustrated with me; I can only point out the bad, not the good, etc, etc, storms out in a huff.

We’ll see how Kevin places; he’s hoping for sixth chair or better…almost every other viola is older than him (some are juniors and seniors in high school) so, his parents expectations are set appropriately.  Very strange to think that in a few months he leaves (June 12) and we won’t see him again for a month. 

Holly – Week 4

I was going to do these updates once a week, but, well, life happened and it didn’t work out that way.

She’s still a cute little puppy, but, she’s getting bigger every moment.  First trip to the vet she was 14 pounds (and couldn’t go 2 seconds without squatting to poop…those were bad times).  Medicine and food and one week later, she’s up to almost 18. 

Still follows Wiley around outside, which is awfully cute….haven’t instituted the collar for the fence with her yet, part of the reason there is no rush to do that is she’s pretty good about staying where Wiley is, or, is she wanders away, it’s not far and she comes back pretty quick.

I wish the cats would turn around and smack her…..they aren’t doing this, and she’s taken to chasing them more and more, and this isn’t the type of behavior that’s good for the cats.  The fence will end a lot of this, they can just run off and she’ll be stuck, but, for now, her farthest journeys from home have been chasing cats.

The fights with Wiley are commonplace; he’s pretty good about it and she’s a noisy little savage.  My concerns about my very submissive male dog have turned out to be very true; she gets everything she wants and he doesn’t put up much of a fight.  Gave them two rawhide bones yesterday…a small one for Holly and a big one for Wiley.  Within five minutes she had both.  In the end, I guess it worked out, because he demolished both of them within an hour, but, not sure what he was doing at first….just not interested in fighting/growling over it?  very strange.

For the most part, she’s sleeping through the night now.  Holly’s way more into her crate than Wiley every was….when she’s tired, she goes in there voluntarily to sleep, and Wiley’s never done that. 

One more note on height

Did a little more google on the internet and found a site at a university that had a calculator for height for adolescents based as a summary of their research.  So, for kicks, plugged Kevin’s numbers in there (the research, such as it is, isn’t applicable to younger kids).

The results:

Prediction of Adult Height During Adolescence - Results

Input:

Gender:	male
Date of Birth:	12/12/1995
Date of Test:	03/08/2010
Chronological Age:	14.2
Height:	68.0 inches
Sitting Height:	33.0 inches
Weight:	120.0 pounds

Output:

Predicted Maturity Classification: Average
Predicted Growth Remaining: 6.4 inches
Predicted Adult Height: 74.4 inches
Current Percentage Adult Height: 91.4

Kevin squealed (yes, squealed) in delight at this prediction….6’2”. 

Basketball - Postscript

 

The Frac and the Fric

Fric – After the Cracker Barrel breakfasts started he came on like gangbusters for the rest of the season (note to self:  food is a good motivator!).  He’s always been pretty good on defense; a lot of that is that he’s quick for his size and when he gets that size in front of someone they are going to stop….but as he started getting more comfortable he was capturing more rebounds, intercepting passes, and taking (and making) shots.

Frac – A weird season; his team had some really good kids that were all friends with each other.  So, they passed the ball almost exclusively to their buddies (and it sure did look in the last game that they had been working on plays away from the practices, and ran those plays among themselves).  This frustrated Frac to no end.  At the last game I commented to Suzanne what a nice kid Frac is; he still was passing the ball to open players even though he could hardly expect the same in return.

Needs to work on going to the basket; seemed content to just hang around the edges….luckily for him he can drain some of those shots and he also did a good job of passing into the open kids in the middle after drawing the other team out to him with the ball.  Like his brother, he’s a stalwart on defense…picked off a bunch of passes to start fast breaks.  Sometimes dribbles too high (the ball is up at his ears) but this is a minor nitpick.  Not sure if basketball is in the cards for him next year; he really wants to do Winter Walden next year and that would wipe out any games he would play.

Punches 2 through 10

Picked the boys up from school on Tuesday; how was your day, blah, blah, blah.  And got quite an interesting story from Christopher.  He was out on the playground at lunch, doing something on something (sitting on a particular piece of playground equipment I think) when these two fourth graders come up to him and say "We want to be there; get off now”.

Christopher flat out refuses, and, well, the conversation heads downhill from there.  Christopher relays that the lunch supervisors had to get involved at the end to resolve the situation and during the ‘disagreement’ Christopher had threatened to beat the kids up as a way to bring things to a quick conclusion.  Lunch supervisors have a talk with all; situation diffused.

Some more facts might be in order before we go on:

• Christopher, as you may know, is a big big 3rd grader. 
• We know the two fourth graders.  They are not so big.

The next day I’m at the school for Matthew’s VIP week (more on this later) and get a chance to ask the supervisor, Mary, what really happened.  Christopher had relayed the story accurately; one point he didn’t relay that stuck with Mary was that during the ‘investigation’ part of the intervention the fourth graders were quick to say “He threatened to beat us up!”.  Mary asked Christopher if this was true, and Christopher said “Yup, and I’ll do it!”…which, Mary admitted made her laugh.

All of this resulted in a longish talk with Christopher and Matthew with a simple message; you are forbidden from throwing the first punch, but, anything after that, you’re fine by me.  The authorities may not be ok with it; you’ll get no complaints from Dad on that score though.  The guy can throw the first punch; punches 2 and up are all yours.

Still chuckle, as I’m writing this, that some crazy kids thought Christopher was the kid that they could bully away from something.  I’m glad he held his ground.

The tall and short of it

Had a measurement day here at Club Graystone earlier this week.  The tale of the tape says:

68 inches – Kevin’s growing like a weed; Suzanne and I live in fear that he’s going to come back from Europe with those 2 inches he needs to reach his goal….height domination.  Sadly for Kevin, all signs point towards him not having that title for too long, because coming up behind him is….

59.5 inches – Can’t give Christopher that other 1/2 that he needs for an even five feet; he’s very clearly short of it on the official measurement.  Has recently weighed in over triple digits too….still a very big kid

53 inches – Matthew brings up the rear…he’s on the upper end of boys his age but not way out of line like his older brother.  

Disaster

The hard drive that we’ve (ok, I’ve….it’s clear who screwed this up, no shared blame here) been storing all of our video, photos, and music on died a week or two back.  This is not good.  Music was completely backed up and not an issue.  Photos, I’d guess, we’re about 95 to 100%….I think we have everything but it’s spread out among a few places.  Video is a complete disaster and is going to be a very expensive lesson. 

So why didn’t I have everything backed up?  It’s not like I don’t know better?  Don’t really have a good excuse…the best one is that the amount of storage needed (we had a 500G hard drive that crashed) means you need something that big to act as backup, and I was being cheap and not getting it.  Just bought that new hard drive less than 6 months ago…what’s to worry right?

So, what happens when your hard drive dies?  This hard drive has had a complete physical failure; the ‘heads’ of the drive aren’t even reading the media any more.  I’m not even sure at this point if the data can be recovered…to find out, they have to take the drive completely apart in a clean room and then take the actual media out and remount it and attempt to read it.  It’s a nominal charge to see if the data is there and can be recovered; it’s a big step up to get the data back.

Ugly.   Stupid Dad.   Ugly.