Mostly Good News

Well, we're now up to our *eighth* offer of help to get Thing One to his game on Saturday now.  Pretty damned amazing.  Love this team.  Apparently he had a good practice tonight but I didn't see any of it because I was in the car in the parking lot with Thing Two (parked under a streetlight with the roof shade open so we could see) helping him with his math homework.  Oh, the joy of 6th grade math.  Ugh.  He's a fifth grader but in high math, which is 6th grade math.  We spent a good hour multiplying decimals, him doing the problems and me checking them.  I miss the days when checking the kids' math homework did not require half an hour and a calculator!

Thing Two had his second session with his former preschool teacher this afternoon.  She's trained to teach pretty much everything from K-8, both general ed and special ed.  She's the one who finally managed to reach him in preschool, and I was overjoyed that she was able to add him to her tutoring schedule this year.  They are focusing on reading comprehension but also adding in the social and behavioral piece.  The only downside is that this looks like it is going to be just like obedience training for the dog, in the sense that you have an hour or so a week with a professional trainer but that this hour is spent teaching *you* how to train your dog.  The actual training of the dog takes place outside of class.  I mean no disrespect to my son whatsoever in comparing him to the dog, hopefully it goes without saying...I only bring this up because he seems to be getting a ton of homework every week from her and we have to juggle this into the schedule with everything else.  Oh well.  She worked one near-miracle with him already, and if she can get him better-positioned for middle school than he is now by the end of the year, all will be worth it in the end.

In other news, Himself is still in Amsterdam for work, I managed to get myself stung by yellow jackets four or five times in rapid succession while geocaching yesterday (ouch!) and both of the younger kids did very well on the standardized tests they took last spring.  Hallelujah.  No surprise for Petunia, but Thing Two was actually within spitting distance of "normal' (whatever that is) in Language Arts for the second year in a row--utterly amazing given his language deficits.  He scored solidly in the normal range in math and actually blew the doors off the science test...a score of 250 put you in the highest category for results and he got a *271.*  There's a fine brain under those crossed language wires, yessiree.

Off to bed.  Very glad it's Thursday.  See you on the flip side.