I'm not sure why I haven't written much lately. Maybe it's because I'm pregnant. Maybe because we've just been kind of chugging along. Who can say? But I feel like enough time has gone by that I can at least do a big catching up post. So here's most of what we've been up to.
We've been doing normal school work. There's not much new on that front. We're continuing to do normal reading and writing. She's doing a bit of handwriting work because she is consistently doing some of her letters and numbers backwards so I wanted to nip that in the bud. I have her fill out a daily calendar where she writes the day, month, date, year, weather, and high and low temperature.
Her reading is awesome. If she can't sleep after I turn the light out, she'll get some books and her little book light and read to herself. Yesterday, at our Father's Day dinner, she was watching golf and reading the closed captioning. And yet, she will still occasionally tell someone she can't read. I just smile and nod now.
We're doing kill and drill in math to memorize addition facts up to 10+10=20. She loves it. We spent a long time working on various graphs (mainly pictographs and bar graphs) and how to read them. Then we worked on addition for a long time to show her why it worked, various ways to get the answers, how to find missing variables, etc.
We're on the tail end of learning about space. We've been on it for a while now. We read a million books, watched Magic School Bus episodes, Bill Nye episodes, and Apollo 13. She was bored by Apollo 13 but I was riveted. I love that movie. We made a moon cycle using Oreo's (she loved that one), a planet, a mini-book of star and planet facts, and we're making a constellation box.
When I was reading her a book about the first moon landing, I made a comment about how we could watch the real footage on youtube if she wanted. She turned to me wide-eyed and said, this is a true story?
So I have a parenting success story that I'm excited about but seems shockingly obvious now. Two things that drive me crazy: one, her toys all over the freaking place! Two, nagging her about what she has to get done before she can watch TV or play on her Kindle. So, I decided to make a "Before Screens" list. It's brilliant. I have all the normal things like get dressed, brush hair and teeth, make the bed. But then also she has to pick up all her toys, both upstairs and downstairs. I don't why this felt so genius to me but I was picking up her toys in my room for the upteenth billion time and I thought, I could make her do this. Like I said, shockingly obvious. I also make her do all of her school work first. And it's great because when she comes and starts bugging me, I just say, have you checked your list. No nagging necessary. And she doesn't know how to turn the wifi off and on on the Kindle so I just have to make sure I turn it off every night and she just thinks it isn't working and I have the magic touch.
The other night she was watching a bit of The Fox and the Hound while I showered. I had gotten out and was sitting next to her while she watched. I wasn't really paying attention because I was putting on lotion but all the sudden, I looked over at her, and she had tears streaming down her face. It was the scene in the movie where the mom takes the fox and leaves him in the forest so he'll be safe from the hound's owner (who is a fox hunter). And as an aside, who the hell wrote this as a movie for children??? It's awful. I pulled her up on my lap and reminded her that the fox ends up happy in the forest and meets his wife there and she sobbed, I don't want him in the forest, I want him with his mama. Ugh, it broke my heart. I've never seen her cry at a movie or book (and we've read Charlotte's Web twice).
As another aside, here's another in the long list of differences in Maggie and Ella. I happened to be at Laurie's house the night they got to the part in Charlotte's Web where Charlotte died and I could hear Ella sobbing from the living room. Poor little thing. I guess Maggie is like me in that: I almost never cry at movies or books. Except book 7 of Harry Potter, I think I cried non-stop the whole book.
We went to her eye appointment. She broke her glasses right before this past Christmas. Hold on, here's the story from the beginning. She originally went to Doctor 1 and he said, her vision is fine but one eye is stronger than the other so she needs glasses temporarily to correct that and then she won't need them anymore. She went back to him a few times and the problem was fixed and he said she'd probably wear them until she was 4 or 5 and be done. Then we changed insurance and had to go to Doctor 2. He had no clue what I was talking about when I explained all that and just seemed to think Maggie had bad eyes. Then at one appointment he said, oh you mean her vision is different in her eyes. What else could I possibly have meant??? At the last appointment with him I took her too, I asked him how much longer he thought she'd need glasses and he said, well she can get contacts at 13 or so and Lasik at 21. When I tried again to explain her original diagnosis, he said, no she'll be in glasses forever. So when she broke her glasses, I didn't replace them. I let her go without and last week we went and saw a new eye doctor after about 6 months with no glasses. And her vision is 20/25. We're going to do every 6 months for now to make sure she doesn't regress but for now she doesn't need glasses anymore.
We had a Father's Day dinner yesterday. We went to a pizza place. Maggie was so tired but they had a pretty good time.
