The Queen's Rambles

We had a really fabulous weekend. It was unseasonably warm, so we went and sweated our butts off at a corn maze/fall farm festival on Saturday. There are a lot of places like that in the area, but we’ve found our favorite: Summers Farm in Frederick, MD. If you’re in the area, I highly recommend it. It has something for every age–big slides, corn maze, corn kernel pits, tetherball, animals and so much more. We left before they set off the fireworks because the three year old girls were melting down. In the future I’d love to go out for an evening, rent one of their campfire sites and do the Moonlight Maze with fireworks and the whole she-bang. I posted pics on FB but am not sure how to transfer them to over here. I can’t seem to get Flickr to connect. Bad Flickr.

Erik had a soccer game on Sunday, which I found quite odd. The coach and two of the best players weren’t there because they had church. I thought the team was going to get trounced, but they manged to pull through in the end and have a 2-2 draw. When we got home I puttered around the house and tried to get things straightened up a little. I am starting to feel a little hoarder-y with all my piles of junk and am trying to clear them out. I won’t even tell you what I put in the recycling bin. Let’s just say it was a wedding gift from my grandmother that had never even been out of the box. I’m probably going to hell, but we already knew that. Good thing I don’t believe in hell.

And then it was almost Monday. . .

Elsa always seems to have a cough at night, but it usually goes away if I rub Vicks on her feet. Last night it did not go away, no matter how much Vicks I rubbed on her. No one got a good night’s sleep, and then we had to get up early to take Erik to school. Normally I send him off to school via bus–easy peasy. I wave him off while wearing my jammies and Elsa usually sleeps through the whole thing. Today, though, I had to go to the school and hand out a cheesy plastic trophy to the class with the most PTA participation. My poor sleeping beauty did not want to get up and I ended up taking her in her jammies with uncombed hair, which bothers me. I hate being seen as the fat, lazy lady who can’t even dress her kid.

Later this morning, our unseasonably warm weather turned into a tornado watch and buckets of rain, leading me to sit in a cold gymnastics’s waiting room with drenched clothing for an hour. Not comfortable. Let’s just say it was definitely a Monday.

I was not thrilled with the rain, but I’ll be happy if fall is finally here. Elsa is outgrowing her summer clothes. Her little tush hangs out of most of her shorts and I feel like some kind of perv for letting it happen. It’s so funny how different boys and girls are in body shape. You’d think there wouldn’t be that much difference in preschoolers, but Elsa is definitely a lot more womanly/curvy than Erik ever was.

And now the kicker for the day, as if lack of sleep and a good rain drenching weren’t enough–

Erik got an “OOPS!” note home from school. It says he was being disrespectful and disobeyed the direct orders of two teachers. I can’t say I’m surprised.

So the story:

He’s been reading a series of books called Beast Quest, which are not available in the school library. I’ve been special ordering them from the county library. They aren’t that great, but they aren’t terrible either. They’re your basic fantasy quest with fantastic beasts that must be killed. Evil wizard/young boy/heroic wolf. That sort of thing.

Erik doesn’t want to check any books out of the school library because he knows he won’t read them. He says he will lose them and get in trouble when he can’t find them and that it is stupid to check out books he knows he won’t read. I’ve talked to him about this and asked him to check out books that he could read to Elsa since they enjoy reading together. He says the librarian won’t let him check out picture books because they are below his reading level. I do not know if that is true or not.

I told him to ask the librarian for help in finding some non-fiction books focused on math, science or animals. Apparently he forgot this strategy.

Instead, the librarian tried to show him all sorts of books that were similar to Beast Quest, but we’ve already sampled all the series that she presented to him. He is a stubborn kid and refused to check them out.

On the one hand, of course I am not pleased that he is being disrespectful. I know how he gets–he probably completely shut down and was being rude about the whole thing.

On the other hand, I am pleased that he is not afraid to stand up for himself. I don’t know that he was being rude. He could have just been stating the facts as he sees them and they decided it was disrespectful since he wasn’t bowing down to them. I can’t really decide on the appropriate punishment without seeing the surveillance video (not that surveillance video actually exists). The child can be incredibly frustrating since he is so logical and refuses to do anything that doesn’t make sense to him. It makes no sense to check out a book when you have no plan to read it. Really, it doesn’t. And it makes no sense to be forbidden from checking out a book that you would like to read to your little sister just because it is below your reading level. He has my full sympathy on both counts.

There is no way for the teacher or librarian to know that he lives in a book rich house, with frequent trips to the public library and a stack of unreads that will take a month to get through.

Tomorrow he is supposed to go to the library first thing and check out a book. I’ll send in a note letting them know he has enough fiction books to keep him happy for the next month and asking them to either let him check out a picture book or direct him to the non-fiction. We’ve talked through strategies and he’s supposed to ask the librarian to show him the non-fiction. If he can’t find something he likes, he is supposed to just pick something and keep it in his backpack. He is not thrilled with this compromise. I am not thrilled with this compromise. It feels like lying, but isn’t that what we have to do so often in life? Go with the flow to keep ourselves out of trouble? It’s a good skill to learn for real life, but I hate teaching my child that sometimes it’s better to just sit down, shut up and do what your told instead of fighting the good fight. I suppose we all need to learn to pick our battles. The line between asshole and doormat is not exactly fine, but at age almost-8 it can be hard to explain.

I’m not happy to get the OOPS note, but I am proud of him for being able to present such a logical argument. He came up with the “I’ll just lose it or damage it and then be in even bigger trouble” argument all on his own. I think it’s a pretty solid argument against checking out books you don’t want. Except I know the school believes that if you don’t check out a school library book you aren’t reading. Which is probably true for many children, but is not true for Erik.