Random Things
Oct. 9th, 2007 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerThere's something kind of pathetic about getting this far behind in posting on a blog this mundane. I think periodically about posting about how first grade is going for Molly, and how preschool is going for Kiera, and then I start thinking about all the other things I've never gotten around to talking about and eventually the blog post in my head gets to be too ridiculously long to bother with. Plus, my days have been busy, and in the evening, I'm either working on fiction writing, or feeling guilty over the fact that I'm not.
So anyway, I decided I would do a free-association "10 Random Things" style post. Under a cut, so that I don't have to worry about filling up everyone's friends page with an overly long, incredibly mundane post.
Ten Random Things About Molly
1. There were 31 kids in Molly's class at the beginning of the year. They're down to 29 now -- two kids were moved out to different classes in the first couple of weeks. This strikes me as a ridiculously large group.
2. This is a mixed first-through-third-grade class, which is standard for Montessori schools (it's called E1, and for some reason they eschew the term "first grade" in favor of "first year").
3. They've had five or six false fire alarms so far this year. Nearly all of them on cold and/or rainy days.
4. Despite the craziness, Molly seems to be thriving. Her teacher tested her reading and her math skills and is having her do work at her current level, rather than slogging through the formal curriculum designed to teach her stuff she's already figured out. For the first time, I feel really good about the fact that we have her at a Montessori school.
5. It does bother me that they get a grand total of thirty minutes for both lunch and recess, though.
6. Today was Picture Day. Molly apparently has a favorite shirt: I bought it at a rummage sale, and it's a velvet shirt with a very colorful abstract design. Molly has a name for this shirt: "Uniquey." Molly wore Uniquey. That was fine. She also wore an orange skirt over a black skirt, which I decided was not worth arguing over. I vetoed the red sparkly shoes, though, because they have extremely slippery soles.
7. Molly still definitely has her own personal sense of style.
8. Molly lost one of her two front teeth months ago, and the permanent tooth has come in, kind of crooked and kind of in front of the front baby tooth that's still there. I don't know how she's going to wiggle out the other front baby tooth, with that permanent tooth in the way, but she has a dentist appointment next month and hopefully he'll have some suggestions.
9. Molly's academic skills are pretty impressive for a first grader. Her physical skills, not so much. People talk about athletic skills being recognized in ways that academic skills are not, and there's something to this, but on the other hand, if we fretted and twitched over age-appropriate development in physical abilities the way we do with academics, Molly would be attending pull-out classes in remedial skipping.
10. Yesterday, she and Kiera were pretending to be astronomers, using some leftover wrapping paper tubes as telescopes. Molly pretended that she has just found a previously unknown moon of Saturn (Saturn is her favorite planet) and named it.
Ten Random Things About Kiera
1. Like many younger siblings, Kiera loves to tattle. When her sister isn't around, she tattles on the cats.
2. After showing no particular interest in learning her letters, something suddenly clicked and now she knows almost all of them, along with the sounds many of them make, and she's trying to learn to write.
3. The letter K is really hard, though, so she can't write her name. When she tries to write a K she invariably gets frustrated and ends up shrieking in fury and then crumpling and hurling the paper.
4. I have no idea where she got this from. ::paranoid look::
5. Kiera sings on key.
6. She is fascinated by the Spanish language and bugs me periodically for Spanish vocabulary. She remembers some of the colors, in Spanish, and will point things out and say that they are rojo or verde or rosa. When I don't know the Spanish word for something, she will make up a new word and insist that this is the Spanish word for whatever it is.
7. She likes to cook. She can scramble an egg with supervision. At her request, we made chicken noodle soup yesterday, and she pulled meat off the bones after the chicken was done, and peeled one of the carrots.
8. Kiera is a very meticulous, careful eater and in general is much better at staying clean than Molly is. She can eat ice cream without getting any on her clothes. If she needs her face washed, she wants to do it herself, but will actually seek out a mirror to make sure she does a good job.
9. She will adamantly insist on putting on her own tights and shoes without help but will insist that I have to snap her nightgown for her at bedtime.
10. Tonight, for some reason, she is insisting that her name is Fiona.
Ten Random Things About Me
1. I stocked up on wine today, since our favorite wine store is holding its fall sale. We drink a lot of red wine. I could tell you all about our favorite kinds of red wine, but I worry that there are wine snobs who would make fun of me. Not that we drink Three Buck Chuck, mind you (bleah) but we drink lots of cheap Spanish and Italian wines plus Cote du Rhone, which is French but it's cheap French.
2. My current writing project, the juvenile SF novel, has been going in fits in starts. It'll go really well for a while and then stall out, usually because I'm busy and stressed out. I feel like I'm 4/5ths done and have been fretting about whether it's long enough even though my personal observation is that a middle grade novel can be pretty much any length at all.
3. No one has bought the Ark of the Covenant book. I am beginning to think it will never see print.
4. My computer runs agonizingly slowly. I want a new one. I decided at some point that I'd wait until I sold another novel to buy a new computer, and now I feel bound by that decision even though this one is slowly driving me insane.
5. For example, it takes a full minute (I just timed it) for the Start menu to pop up when I click on it, and then another twenty seconds if I select the Program menu, and so on. When I wanted the Calculator earlier, I realized at some point in the process that it would've been much more efficient to get up, go downstairs, and get the pocket calculator from its spot in the dining room to do the calculations I wanted.
6. I volunteered in Molly's classroom today. I really like volunteering at the school. It's fun. Sometimes in the hallway I see a kid from Molly's class last year, and they always get really excited to see me. One of the awesome things about small children is that they will treat regular classroom volunteers like visiting celebrities while actual visiting celebrities may well get a blank look. Unless they're penguins. The visiting penguins were pretty damn exciting. (The penguins are an annual event for the kindergarten, I think.)
7. The juvenile SF book is currently at 39,509 words. I initially named the protagonist after Molly (I gave her Molly's middle name) but I'm going to change the names to sound Hispanic, and all three kids are going to come from a cluster of colonies settled by people who speak Spanish-English Creole languages. It's a shipwreck story, so I've been reading a lot of "kid gets stranded in the wilderness" children's books, like Hatchet.
8. I don't recall this particular genre convention from the shipwreck books of my own childhood, but the current requirements seem to include that (a) early on the child weep and whine and generally bemoan his imminent death before (b) shaping up and surviving, and (c) there needs to be a scene 2/3rds of the way through where he reflects on how buff and tough he's become, although (d) fate can then give him a kick in the ass immediately after he pats himself on his well-muscled back.
9. None of these scenes are in my book. In part this is because they nearly always annoy me when I read these books, and also, I don't recall any of these scenes in the shipwreck stories of my own childhood. Admittedly, I haven't been able to find my old favorites because they're all out of print.
10. I worry that this will make the book impossible to sell. On the plus side, if I decide the book needs them, at least they'll be easy to add.
So anyway, I decided I would do a free-association "10 Random Things" style post. Under a cut, so that I don't have to worry about filling up everyone's friends page with an overly long, incredibly mundane post.
Ten Random Things About Molly
1. There were 31 kids in Molly's class at the beginning of the year. They're down to 29 now -- two kids were moved out to different classes in the first couple of weeks. This strikes me as a ridiculously large group.
2. This is a mixed first-through-third-grade class, which is standard for Montessori schools (it's called E1, and for some reason they eschew the term "first grade" in favor of "first year").
3. They've had five or six false fire alarms so far this year. Nearly all of them on cold and/or rainy days.
4. Despite the craziness, Molly seems to be thriving. Her teacher tested her reading and her math skills and is having her do work at her current level, rather than slogging through the formal curriculum designed to teach her stuff she's already figured out. For the first time, I feel really good about the fact that we have her at a Montessori school.
5. It does bother me that they get a grand total of thirty minutes for both lunch and recess, though.
6. Today was Picture Day. Molly apparently has a favorite shirt: I bought it at a rummage sale, and it's a velvet shirt with a very colorful abstract design. Molly has a name for this shirt: "Uniquey." Molly wore Uniquey. That was fine. She also wore an orange skirt over a black skirt, which I decided was not worth arguing over. I vetoed the red sparkly shoes, though, because they have extremely slippery soles.
7. Molly still definitely has her own personal sense of style.
8. Molly lost one of her two front teeth months ago, and the permanent tooth has come in, kind of crooked and kind of in front of the front baby tooth that's still there. I don't know how she's going to wiggle out the other front baby tooth, with that permanent tooth in the way, but she has a dentist appointment next month and hopefully he'll have some suggestions.
9. Molly's academic skills are pretty impressive for a first grader. Her physical skills, not so much. People talk about athletic skills being recognized in ways that academic skills are not, and there's something to this, but on the other hand, if we fretted and twitched over age-appropriate development in physical abilities the way we do with academics, Molly would be attending pull-out classes in remedial skipping.
10. Yesterday, she and Kiera were pretending to be astronomers, using some leftover wrapping paper tubes as telescopes. Molly pretended that she has just found a previously unknown moon of Saturn (Saturn is her favorite planet) and named it.
Ten Random Things About Kiera
1. Like many younger siblings, Kiera loves to tattle. When her sister isn't around, she tattles on the cats.
2. After showing no particular interest in learning her letters, something suddenly clicked and now she knows almost all of them, along with the sounds many of them make, and she's trying to learn to write.
3. The letter K is really hard, though, so she can't write her name. When she tries to write a K she invariably gets frustrated and ends up shrieking in fury and then crumpling and hurling the paper.
4. I have no idea where she got this from. ::paranoid look::
5. Kiera sings on key.
6. She is fascinated by the Spanish language and bugs me periodically for Spanish vocabulary. She remembers some of the colors, in Spanish, and will point things out and say that they are rojo or verde or rosa. When I don't know the Spanish word for something, she will make up a new word and insist that this is the Spanish word for whatever it is.
7. She likes to cook. She can scramble an egg with supervision. At her request, we made chicken noodle soup yesterday, and she pulled meat off the bones after the chicken was done, and peeled one of the carrots.
8. Kiera is a very meticulous, careful eater and in general is much better at staying clean than Molly is. She can eat ice cream without getting any on her clothes. If she needs her face washed, she wants to do it herself, but will actually seek out a mirror to make sure she does a good job.
9. She will adamantly insist on putting on her own tights and shoes without help but will insist that I have to snap her nightgown for her at bedtime.
10. Tonight, for some reason, she is insisting that her name is Fiona.
Ten Random Things About Me
1. I stocked up on wine today, since our favorite wine store is holding its fall sale. We drink a lot of red wine. I could tell you all about our favorite kinds of red wine, but I worry that there are wine snobs who would make fun of me. Not that we drink Three Buck Chuck, mind you (bleah) but we drink lots of cheap Spanish and Italian wines plus Cote du Rhone, which is French but it's cheap French.
2. My current writing project, the juvenile SF novel, has been going in fits in starts. It'll go really well for a while and then stall out, usually because I'm busy and stressed out. I feel like I'm 4/5ths done and have been fretting about whether it's long enough even though my personal observation is that a middle grade novel can be pretty much any length at all.
3. No one has bought the Ark of the Covenant book. I am beginning to think it will never see print.
4. My computer runs agonizingly slowly. I want a new one. I decided at some point that I'd wait until I sold another novel to buy a new computer, and now I feel bound by that decision even though this one is slowly driving me insane.
5. For example, it takes a full minute (I just timed it) for the Start menu to pop up when I click on it, and then another twenty seconds if I select the Program menu, and so on. When I wanted the Calculator earlier, I realized at some point in the process that it would've been much more efficient to get up, go downstairs, and get the pocket calculator from its spot in the dining room to do the calculations I wanted.
6. I volunteered in Molly's classroom today. I really like volunteering at the school. It's fun. Sometimes in the hallway I see a kid from Molly's class last year, and they always get really excited to see me. One of the awesome things about small children is that they will treat regular classroom volunteers like visiting celebrities while actual visiting celebrities may well get a blank look. Unless they're penguins. The visiting penguins were pretty damn exciting. (The penguins are an annual event for the kindergarten, I think.)
7. The juvenile SF book is currently at 39,509 words. I initially named the protagonist after Molly (I gave her Molly's middle name) but I'm going to change the names to sound Hispanic, and all three kids are going to come from a cluster of colonies settled by people who speak Spanish-English Creole languages. It's a shipwreck story, so I've been reading a lot of "kid gets stranded in the wilderness" children's books, like Hatchet.
8. I don't recall this particular genre convention from the shipwreck books of my own childhood, but the current requirements seem to include that (a) early on the child weep and whine and generally bemoan his imminent death before (b) shaping up and surviving, and (c) there needs to be a scene 2/3rds of the way through where he reflects on how buff and tough he's become, although (d) fate can then give him a kick in the ass immediately after he pats himself on his well-muscled back.
9. None of these scenes are in my book. In part this is because they nearly always annoy me when I read these books, and also, I don't recall any of these scenes in the shipwreck stories of my own childhood. Admittedly, I haven't been able to find my old favorites because they're all out of print.
10. I worry that this will make the book impossible to sell. On the plus side, if I decide the book needs them, at least they'll be easy to add.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 02:09 am (UTC)K3. Mmm-hmm.
N3. The Ark of the Covenant book is awesome. Someone will buy it soon, I'm sure!!
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 05:14 am (UTC)Your kids sound great. :D
The book sounds quite intriguing.
And yes, you need a new computer. Now. Perhaps to help out, though, you can defrag it and make sure that there are no viruses hiding (freaky clever, those viruses...I once had close to a hundred after coming to campus for a year. Never knew it til someone helped me out). The defrag alone should help out.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:25 pm (UTC)Giggles. I am a mutant ant, I follow the trails in bookstores ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:26 am (UTC)I'm not a fan of Macs. I find them awkward to use and incompatible with the programs I'm required to use at school. That might be awkward if you have to exchange files with people often--though mind, I haven't used a Mac in several years, and that was for a music-based program.
HP's aren't bad. I'm fond of my Dell, as well, for all that it's five plus years old now. Best Buy people might be able to help you--those people really know their stuff, especially the Geek Squad.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:51 am (UTC)My boyfriend has joked about almost being left back in kindergarten because he couldn't skip.
For my first grade class photo I insisted on wearing one of my mom's old skirts, from my dress up box, with the waist hiked up to just about my nipples. It strange, because I don't think I was, nor ever have been, very fashion conscious. But I also had some other weird ideas about things in the first grade, such as my romantic story-book notion that the only proper thing for a little schoolgirl to bring for lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one apple, and a thermos of milk. That lasted exactly one day. I wasn't a big milk drinker. I must have read that in some book before school started...
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:24 pm (UTC)And yet I passed kindergarten. I think they took pity on me because I could read and stuff.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:20 am (UTC)I tend to be really, really distrustful of anything technology related that's being sold on Ebay. On the other hand, your average Ebay vendor could not possibly have worse customer service than Dell...
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 01:25 pm (UTC)I like to think that by 3rd grade, or maybe even 2nd, Molly will be skipping like a skip-bo pro and Rachel will be reading like a demon.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 02:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 05:37 pm (UTC)Yay! I know you were worried about this. I'm so happy to hear it!
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:26 am (UTC)I really loved my mixed-age open classrooms at the school I attended as a kid. But, it was a private school with 2 teachers per 25-kid class, or something like that. I find it hard to imagine Wingra being functional with the kind of ratios we see in Minneapolis.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:09 am (UTC)And you should get a new computer.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 01:49 am (UTC)Heh. Like buying shoes? I don't think I've ever seen you get frustrated at writing or calculus, but I can just picture in my head your reaction to buying shoes, only aimed at a piece of paper. :D
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 02:22 am (UTC)And unlike calculus, buying shoes is something I still have to do. On a regular basis, even.
It's gotten less frustrating because (a) more stores now carry size 11 and (b) I've mostly quit shopping in the women's section anyway and just buy men's shoes for most purposes.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:21 pm (UTC)You need a new puter. My old puter was like that. Is like that -- it is now the designated Kids' Computer. If I hadn't just spent $40 on Norton for it, I would mindwipe it and see if that helped.
If you're going to get a new puter anyway, you're not saving money or anything by living with this one. (And it is clearly in danger of being crumpled up and thrown across the room as you shriek at it.)
I lived for almost a year with a ktichen sink faucet that let water out at a grudging dribble. Washing dishes was close to impossible. Filling the dog's dish took so long I could take out the trash and it still wasn't done. My mom said, "Doesn't that bother you?" and I answered, "Yes, it pisses me off every time I use the sink," but I still didn't fxi it. And when it started to drip and I finally got it replaced, I was so much happier. I still wonder why I lived with it for so long.