School Days

It is 11:35 p.m.  I have tons of school work today and sleep to catch up on, but instead I am blogging.  It's a good stress reliever, I guess.

We've been in school for almost 3 weeks now.  Molly goes to school with me.  Jack hangs out with my cousin Maddie and her cute little boy Cole.  I go to crazy land and try to teach.

My ESL U.S. History class is fun this year!  It is a huge relief to the challenge of my majority Ukrainian students last year.  The countries represented in the class include: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Mexico, Belgium, Czech Republic, Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Nepal, Thailand . . . I think that's it.  Their residency in the U.S. ranges from a few weeks to several years and their language skills have just about as broad a range.

Utah adopted new math curriculum and began implementing it last year.  We have started teaching it at our school this year - Secondary Math II.  The curriculum itself is kind of fun and I am buying into it, but it is a challenge to have students of all ability levels in one class.  It is a wide gap and we are all grappling with how to not "water down" the curriculum for the top end students while not leaving the lower end students in the dust.  It's tough.

Molly has been pretty good at school.  She really likes it and has only fussed a couple of days that I've dropped her off.  She thinks Miss Autumn and Miss Sarah live there because instead of calling it school, she says she wants to go to "Miss Autumn's and Miss Sarah's house."  Though our toilet training has been pretty successful, she wouldn't go to the bathroom at school for a week and a half.  She held it all day and had no accidents, but was having stage fright or can't-go-with-new-adults-helping-me issues.  She's finally warmed up a little bit and today successfully even told her teachers that she needed to go, rather than waiting for them to make her go.

(I stole this picture from my sister.  It was a Sunday afternoon photo session and for reasons you can probably guess, Molly's nickname during this short period of time was "Static Underpants."  Willie, Annie, and I also thought that could be a clever band name.)

The bad news is that Sunday she got in trouble in nursery for hitting kids and then Monday and today she also got in trouble for doing that at school.  On Monday it was little kids.  Today is was big kids.  I guess at least she doesn't discriminate against age.  Other than an occasional run-in between her and Wyatt, she's never really been a hitter.  I don't know what has brought this on.  Miss Sarah says it's just a phase and they are working through it.  We are, of course, talking about not hitting at home, but she hasn't done it at home.  I don't know what's going on, but she seems super stressed and has had a many a screaming fit in the last few days, too.  I don't know what to do.  She seems to feel ok.  She could probably sleep better, but isn't doing terribly.  I just don't know.  I drugged her tonight to see if that would help.

Jack is just dandy.  He cries when he's hungry.  He cries when he's cold while getting dressed after his bath.  He cries when he feels neglected because his sister is requiring too much attention.  Otherwise, he smiles and giggles all the time.  He is such a happy boy!  He likes to be tickled under his chin and on his thighs.  He still spits up a lot, but it doesn't seem to phase him.

He's excited to start playing with his new cousin Quinn (though they look nothing alike)!

I've totally stolen all of these pictures from my sister.

My mom's Starting 5!  Notice Elliott and Wyatt were going for "Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil."  I think Jack was trying to do "See no Evil," but his arms just couldn't reach quite high enough.  Who knows what Static Underpants was trying to do.  She's coo-coo!

Handsome boy in blue!