Quiet but not Still

I've been feeling very passive, lately, letting life wash over me. I spend a lot of my time curled up with yarn and some needles watching movies or, shockingly enough, listening to the rain. I like the slower pace that comes with deep fall setting in. You can never tell, here, if winter will ever come, but the muffled and chilly aspects of late fall are sure to catch up with you eventually. The newness of it all is getting to me, as well. New house, new routines. New furnace, new being a relative term. Now that we've gotten that sorted out and it's functional the cold weather isn't as grumble-inducing. We had to figure out where to put the stockings, too. While we do have a fireplace, it didn't come with a mantle. We ended up making one out of a curtain rod and strung it with the stockings and a garland. It actually worked out really well.

I do get out, though--quite frequently, too. James has speech therapy twice a week. It's a lot like nursery, really. We sing songs, read books, play with toys, look out the window, and color pictures. While we do that, we kind of talk about what we're doing, repeating pertinent words so that he'll pick up on them, too. He's picked up a few and uses them at home every now and then. And of course, being James, he has IDEAS about how he does things. He'll only let you sing the peanut butter song if you're making him a peanut butter sandwich. This means you can't sing it at therapy, anymore. He's also the only one who's put Frosty's arms on his head, like antlers, and was quite adamant that they had to stay right there, like that. He loves the train set and discovered the Little Engine That Could pop-up book. It's now his most favorite thing ever and he goes straight to his favorite page so he can spin the wheel and make the train go over the mountain again and again and again.

The older kids are humming along, too. Elena has settled down a lot since her teacher has started giving her jobs and she joined the after-school Recorder Club (for 3rd?, 4th & 5th graders). The music teacher says she's picking up the music quickly and doing a good job. She was nominated and then tested for Gifted/Talented, this year. The nomination form was interesting because you had to rate your kid based on various questions (Does your child like to build things? do puzzles? play with words?) and then you give examples of their interests and times their intelligence "has surprised you" (she has learned to do Sudoku puzzles, likes puns, and both taught herself to read and could do a Perfection-style geography puzzle of all 50 US states when she was 3). She got an acceptance letter, the other day, for the Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies programs and has even started a few of the classes.

Joseph also got nominated (all his favorite TV shows are science-themed; and he asked me, last year, while I was discussing how babies grow and basic female anatomy with Elena, if he had a urethra in his penis--bonus points to him for connecting dots across differences in sex), despite Kindergarten kids not normally getting tested, and got accepted for Language Arts and Science. I don't know if he's started his new classes, yet, but I hope he does soon. He has not only not settled down, he's, um... a bit of a handful. He loves Kindergarten, he really does, but every few days I hear about how he ran through the lunch room, painted on someone in art, broke the teacher's headphones, or hit a kid for going to say something mean. It's never the same thing twice, thank goodness, but that means he keeps coming up with more weird stuff to do. We've had lots of Family Time lessons on being polite, paying attention, and following rules and directions, lately. Strangely enough, he listens while Elena rolls around on the floor. It's no wonder I'm starting to go gray.