Ten on Tuesday

Blogging has not been a priority lately (clearly), but I think I can handle ten quick items to share what's up with Team Kelley these days.

1. Kate transitioned to school wonderfully. She likes her teacher, her class, the library, going to P.E., art, and music class. She slept like crazy one afternoon during the first week, but other than that, hasn't seemed abnormally tired or anything. She and Claire are still live wires at bedtime, though Kate does conk out before Claire, these days.

 

2. Kate especially loves riding the bus. I had planned to take her in the morning (to allow us 20-30 extra minutes at home) and let her ride home, but she was totally eager to ride the bus both ways. The bus stop is around the corner from us (or just across a couple yards, if the grass isn't too wet) and Claire insists on coming too in the mornings. Kate feels independent, and has made some of her best school friends so far on the bus—another kindergartener (different class) and her first or second grade sister—who live across a couple yards in a different direction. They draw and do hair on the bus rides and have a great time.

 

3. Claire and Kate are super-into My Little Pony these days. It's so funny how kid-obsessions emerge so quickly and then disappear as quickly as they came. But they love to watch the cartoon on netflix, play with the couple of pony toys they have (my mom is wishing she had kept mine from the '80s!), and call themselves the different ponies, depending on what color they are wearing that day. My favorite is Twilight Sparkle, and I have the Pony theme song in my head all the time. That and the theme from Orange is the New Black.

4. Claire is pretty well potty trained these days, partially thanks to some My Little Pony panties I bribed her with to go #2 on the potty. (I have an aversion to clothing with branded characters on it, but sometimes a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do.)

5. BGC is doing better than we expected with her spica cast. Not near so whiny about it as we thought. She likes to be held a lot, since the cast gets hot and uncomfortable, but she's a trooper. And besides the bean bag chair, we've found ways to get her strapped in to her high chair, stroller, and the grocery cart, which I really didn't think would be possible! She gets this one off next week and another one put on for another six weeks. Hopefully that will be it, but there might be another cast or brace after that. Ugh.

6. Summer is essentially (if not officially) over. The pool is closed, we did one last item on our summer to-do list (a movie at the zoo last Friday night, or a "zoovie"), and I broke out the boxes of fall/winter clothing. Claire was excited to see all the "new" clothes appear in her drawers, and the fact that they were Kate's just makes it better! Poor thing—she'll get tired of hand-me-downs eventually, I'm sure.

7. It's consignment sale season! Of course, I don't really need much this year, since Kate wears uniform clothes to school and the littles get all the hand-me-downs. But Kate will need some cool-weather stuff for weekends and breaks, and BGC needs more long-sleeved dresses, since tops and pants don't work with her cast!

8. We're also quickly coming on birthday season in the Kelley house. My kids, husband, parents, and Jesus all have birthdays between October and January, so it's one family holiday after another scattered throughout all the secular holidays. BGC and Claire's parties are just two weeks apart in October, so I am planning, planning, planning! I even bought a little notebook to sketch my party ideas in . . . and of course had to retroactively chronicle the kids' parties from the last five years before digging in to this year's shindigs! (of course)

9. Totally random one before closing this list. Kate's P.E. teacher is named Ms. Aydelott. It's pronounced "ate-a-lot," and when Kate came home telling me this her first week, I didn't believe her. Then I concluded it must have been a mnemonic device for some similar-sounding name and Kate just got confused. Then I saw it in print and thought, wow. Of course the woman had to become a health and fitness fanatic, with a name like that! 

10. The BGC update: her parents have disappeared. So while we were so hopeful for their reunification with her (more hopeful and supportive than the social workers ever were!) that is now a presumed impossibility, and adoption is on the table. Matt and I did not go into foster care looking to adopt, but told ourselves we'd be open to it if the situation presented itself. So, we're in a time of major discernment on that. Lots of factors to consider, factors too personal to blog about. But that's what's up.

What's up with you?

First Day of Kindergarten

Yesterday was Kate's first day of kindergarten! It was only a half day (and then they're off today and have another half day tomorrow before starting full days on Monday!) so we've had a lot of juggling these past couple weeks since day care/pre-K ended, and Matt and I are both struggling to get work done in the margins of all the other stuff this week. All that to say that this post is going to be quick!

Here are the highlights of Kate's first day:

• She was nervous in the days leading up to it, but yesterday was nothing but excited. She woke up long before her alarm and got dressed and ready to go!
• Public schools here wear "standard school attire," which is basically a very loose uniform code: any color collared shirt and navy, khaki, or black bottoms. Kate looked super cute in her light blue shirt and navy jumper. (She did her own hair, and I let the funky part and bumps be, as I promised I would.)
• She was bummed she didn't get to take her lunchbox yet, but the half days end before lunch. We'll be ready to go on Monday!
• There is another Katherine in her class ("er," not "ar" like Kate) so it's good Kate goes by Kate. They seem to be buddies already. (Bonus for Mommy: she's Russian. I love it!) Actually, I'm most excited that there is a little girl from our neighborhood in her class, who also has a little sister Claire's age. Our families had met once or twice, and hopefully we'll get to know each other even better. 
• I signed up to volunteer for tons of stuff. No surprise there. I've been embarrassingly eager for these "room mom" type experiences, and I really hope to make some new friends among the other moms! I feel like the luckiest mom in the world to have the career I do with the flexibility to run over to the school for lunchroom monitoring or the class Halloween party—not to mention being home to meet the bus every day. So, so lucky. 
• I didn't get too much detail about what they did the first day, but when I dropped her off, Kate was so busy playing with play-doh with her new friend Katherine, I don't think she even acknowledged my hug and kiss goodbye! The teacher took the kids on a walk around the school building to see everything, and they ate a snack of cheese crackers. And everybody "stayed on green" (the color-coded discipline system where kids move their clothespin up or down for exceptionally good or bad behavior).

I'm looking forward to her next day of school, next week's full-day schedule, and the whole fun year of kindergarten ahead!

Last Day of Preschool

Today is Kate's last day of preschool. Yes, her "graduation" was back in May, but being a day care, that grand event is a little anticlimactic when the kids are right back there in class Monday morning! The teachers actually said the Pre-K kids seemed to have "senioritis" this summer, acting wild and crazy for the couple of months between their graduation and their departure for the big, bad world of kindergarten.

Kate's classmates have gradually moved on—one spending the whole month of July with grandparents, others going on family vacation, etc.—and now it's Kate's turn. She's spending next week with my parents and going to a daily tennis camp in Louisville that she's very excited about. The following week will be a staycation of sorts, Mommy and Daddy each taking a day off to spend with her, some time with Matt's parents, etc. The week after that, school starts!

It's not goodbye to her teachers forever, since I'm sure she'll drop in fairly often, joining us to pick up the little girls, etc., but we still wanted to mark the occasion and say thanks, especially to the main teachers of the classes Kate has been in since we moved back to Nashville three years ago.

Kate painted little flower pots for some begonias, and I made little cards showing pictures of her throughout her time at the school (ages 2, 3, 4, and 5, from top to bottom) and the message "Thank you for helping me bloom!" If I hadn't had so many things to do this week, I might have designed it with a flower graphic and the photos going upward, like she was blooming from a two-year-old to a five-year-old, but Mommy's busy, so we went the simple route. (In any case, there's an idea, if you want to do this yourself!)

Kate's teachers were so touched. Here she is with her pre-K teacher, Ms. Cynthia. They were out on the playground when I arrived yesterday to deliver the gifts and take some pictures. (We've got four kids in the house this week, at two different day cares, so Daddy didn't need to worry with flower pots at drop-off time!)

 Ms. Marian teared up immediately and said, "I love you, Kate!" Claire is currently in her class (AKA the "3-year-old class," though it's really about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2). The "4-year-old class" (3 1/2 to 4 1/2) teacher was out yesterday, so we just left her flower pot and card in her room.

Ms. Faye wanted a picture with both Kate and Claire. Kate was only in her class briefly, when we first moved here, before Kate moved up to Ms. Marian's class. Claire was with her until a few months ago, when she moved up. (We'll need a lot more gifts when Claire graduates, since she's been at this school since about 10 weeks old!)

I took some pics of Kate in the pre-K classroom, and then back out on the playground with some of her friends.

Can these kids pose or what? It looks like a catalog photo shoot, and I swear I didn't arrange them at all! (Matt pointed out that it's probably because kids are photographed so much more in this digital age; they are naturally more photogenic! Speaking of which, I saw a sign in Walgreen's the other day saying "We still develop film!" It was funny to see, and I noticed that it takes 3-5 days, since I guess they have to send it out now!)

 

Kate also wanted to take a few pics herself. This is my latest "fun hairdo" below: two french braids tied back into a chignon. We call it "Elsa's coronation hair," since the girls frequently ask for "an Elsa braid" (one french braid) or "Anna braids" (two braids).

I also snapped pics of Claire and BGC's classrooms on my way out, as they were sitting down for lunch. Here's cutie Claire and her friends, but why bother showing you BGC's class, since I'd have to block out her face anyway? (In any case, we're proud that even though she can't walk yet, she's moved up to be in class with her age level, and sits at the table with her peers! She's made such amazing strides in her 11 months with us!)

Matt is much more emotional than I am about Kate's last day, since he is the one who usually takes the kids and picks them up, and since his office is just upstairs, he can come down and visit during the day. So, I naturally took a pic of him and Kate before loading up the car this morning.

On to a new stage of childhood! My firstborn baby is such a big girl now, tall and insightful, creative and strong. I'm so excited for all that kindergarten will bring.

Starting School #TBTstories

Linking up with Throwback Thursday Stories on The Mom Creative.
This week: 1987. I was six.

Kate will start kindergarten two months from tomorrow. That's right—early August. (Last year, I think public schools here started July 31, so at least this is a little closer to "fall.") In any case, I'm super excited about her starting "real school." Field trips, school projects, getting to know her teacher, all that fun stuff. I feel like the dorkiest mom out there to be so excited about this, but maybe I'm not alone. Matt's the one who's feeling misty-eyed about this milestone.

The pictures above were from my first day of first grade. I did preschool and kindergarten at a church preschool, so first grade was the start of my elementary school experience, as kindergarten will be for Kate. I don't know if Kate will pose so adorably on the step of the school bus (or even if we'll have her ride the bus in the mornings) but you can bet I'll be taking pics in front of our house with Kate and her little backpack. She'll be wearing a uniform (public schools here do "standard attire") but otherwise, I don't think the scene will look too much different. Lots of things change, but the excitement and sentimentality over the first day of school is a constant.

Singamajig (with a brief potty update)

No, Kate did not get one of Christmas 2010's hottest toys, the Fisher-Price Sing-A-Majig (seems like this year's Furby, but they sing and harmonize if you get several together. Whatever.) But when Kate put the lid to her new teapot in her mouth (while sitting in a laundry basket and wearing a rubber bib, no less) I couldn't help but see some resemblance with the little musical critters... 

This time might be as good as any to document Kate's favorite songs now, at (almost) two years old:

• Itsy-Bitsy Spider (which she requests by making the hand motions)
• I'm Picking Up a Baby Bumblebee (AKA "a-bee". And might I say that the way Kate says "ooh, sticky!" is the cutest thing ever? "ooh, kicky!")
• Ring Around the Rosey ("Ashes? Ashes?")
• The Alphabet Song
• Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

She has always enjoyed music. I remember singing "She'll be coming 'round the mountain" to her when she was just a couple months old, and making up new, personalized verses as I went. ("She'll be wearing a pink bow when she comes...") She was nuts about "Old MacDonald" for a long time, but that seems to have passed in favor of songs with hand motions.

She starts in the two-year-old room at day care today, and I know she'll be coming home with even more fun songs and crafts and things she's learned (including enhanced potty skills!)

To update on the potty training, we didn't make much progress during our "intensive" week of training, having her wear training pants and taking her to the potty frequently, so we're back to diapers most of the time (and disposable pull-ups sometimes). She may just not be ready, but we have had progress in that she knows how to do the whole drill--pulling down her pants, wiping, flushing, washing hands, etc.--and likes to do it, but just doesn't "go" when she's on the potty. I'm not sure exactly what's up with that, other than that must hard to go in a way you are not used to going. Like when adults have to go in the woods, without a toilet, it feels wierd. As foreign as it would be for us to just pee wherever we're sitting, it must feel strange for her not to go in a diaper. They work on it a lot in the two-year-old room, though, and Kate always follows the lead of bigger kids around her, so I bet we'll see a burst of progress in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Outliers and Parenting

I love learning why things are the way they are. That's why I love Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink. I recently read his Outliers: The Story of Success, which features tons of fascinating stories and statistics exploring why some people succeed while others don't. His overall thesis is that success is less about natural talent and more about the opportunities one has to practice and develop one's natural aptitudes. The Beatles' Hamburg sessions and the fact that Bill Gates went to a private high school that had computer technology before most colleges are primary examples.

I've blogged about a couple parenting-related books lately (Parenting Inc. and The Lolita Effect), and I'm definitely not planning on reviewing every book I read here, but a few of Gladwell's insights on success do have interesting implications for parenting.

1. It may be a good idea to hold kids back a year. I never thought much about that concept, having been young for my grade myself (a July birthday) and doing just fine, but Gladwell offers some interesting evidence to make me consider it. His opening case study focuses on Canadian hockey players and how most of them are born early in the year. Analyzing the rosters of professional teams and the elite youth programs, January birthdays were common, followed by February, on down to where only a handful were born after July. This is because in kids' leagues, the best players from each age level were tapped early for special training and opportunities, and with a birthday cutoff of January 1, the fastest, strongest players tended to be those born early in the year. They would get the extra playing time and special coaching that it took to become really great. A small advantage as an eight year old becomes huge by adulthood because of all those special opportunities.

As I said, I was young for my grade, and it didn't cause me any problems, and Kate is a January baby, so she's not in the iffy zone at all, but Gladwell's point was that if a child is close to the cutoff date for something (August or September for school, I guess) there really might be some benefit to holding them back. Not because they need the extra year of kindergarten, but because if they're extra smart in first grade, they will get the special attention that may privilege them later. (One of the top GPAs in my graduating class was an August birthday, as I recall, so she was almost a year older than me--and got her driver's license a year and a half before me, due to a change in Kentucky law that hit right as our grade was turning sixteen. Then again, I think the other top GPA was a guy with a June birthday--just a month older than me--so who knows. He's a Navy SEAL now, so he may have been an outlier for other reasons!)

2. Teach your kids to be a little impertinent. In one of my favorite chapters, Gladwell talks about a sociological study where researchers were flies on the wall in the homes of families of all socio-economic classes. There were many differences between rich and poor, of course, but the one they really found to make a difference was the way wealthier parents taught their children to interact with authority figures. It was what he called "entitlement in the best sense of the word."

The main case he described was an upper-class mother who told her son on the way to the doctor's office, "Now, be thinking of any questions you want to ask the doctor." She showed her son that even though he was a child, he could freely address an authority figure to get the information he wanted. Gladwell compared this to a bonafied genius in another chapter who didn't get anywhere in life because he had been trained to distrust authority and could not competently work with authority figures to work out his scholarship and stay in school when he hit a minor paperwork glitch.

3. Parents' involvement matters academically. Nashville blogger Lindsey Ferrier wrote a post last week that actually prompted me to write this post. Lindsey was talking about how much homework her first grader has, and how it would be impossible for a child to do it all and learn from it without a parent right there, walking them through it. Kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to take that time (working a second shift or just too busy with other responsibilities) are at a distinct disadvantage.

This immediately brought to mind Gladwell's discussion of the "achievement gap" studies of schoolchildren have revealed. The stats generally show that kids from lower-income families score lower on various tests, while middle- and upper-class kids do much better. The conclusion is often that poor kids are not as smart or that schools fail poor kids. However, comparing June's scores to September's revealed that over the course of the school year, lower-income kids show more improvement than others, essentially erasing the gap by the end of the school year.

The clincher was when they compared September to June--that is, the end of the summer to the beginning. Poor kids declined over the summer--actually losing some of their reading skills--while the middle-class kids improved slightly and rich kids improved by a huge margin. While the poor children were just chilling out over the summer (and there is certainly something to be said for unstructured playtime), other kids were reading with their parents and going to day camps and special classes, etc. Gladwell uses this to advocate for a school year schedule that doesn't allow such long breaks where so much retention can be lost. I agree with that, since we need to be looking out for the interests of disadvantaged kids, but this vignette also says something about the importance of reading with kids and creating an intellectually-stimulating environment at home.

We all want our kids to be successful--with or without the Beatles' or Bill Gates' kind of fame--and in a way it's nice to know it's not all about their genes (takes some pressure off us biological parents!) But there is some pressure to realizing that we have a huge influence on who our children become, whether it be through big decisions or conversations in the car, or simply snuggling up to read books together.

Kate's Musical Debut

Today I (Matt) attended my first school musical program as a parent. Like literally every single adult there, I had my camera in hand and went nuts when my child was in front of the crowd. There were even a few parents dressed up like they were going to the opera! They made me feel strange sitting there in my jeans and sandals!

Kate started the morning having "Muffins with Mommy", a pre-Mother's Day gathering so moms could hang out with each other and the kids and teachers. Next month there will be a "Doughnuts with Daddy" (for the purposes of alliteration, and because dads eat less healthy in general) gathering for the pater familiai.

The program, entitled "The Giving Tree is Growing" began with all the age-level classes processing in. The Infant class came in seated in cribs with wheels on them, reminding us all of the Circus-train cars on the little boxes of animal crackers we used to have in our lunch. Anyone else remember those?

Here's the one-year-old "Ladybugs" class doing their first number, "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider". While it looks like Kate is actually doing the moves, she was just chewing on her fingers. To be fair, though, the only ones actually doing the motions were the teachers. It was pretty darn impressive that they got a bunch of toddlers to stand in one place for that long!

The Ladybugs class does their second number, "If You're Happy and You Know It". Several of them did, in fact, clap their hands. Once again, nice work, teachers!

Every great performance has an epic after-party, and this one was no exception. Jammies were all the rage and the breast-milk flowed like wine (just like in a little place called "Aspen"). Kate was kind enough to give me an exclusive interview.

Big thanks go out to red-carpet hostess extraordinaire Zoe Hewitt for giving me pointers on how to interview big stars and not be intimated by them.