The Po Show

22,290

So, November is over, and with it ends my self-imposed NaBloPoMo/NaNoWriMo hybrid-thingie.

Final count: 22, 290 words. Far short of my word goal of 30,000 (a thousand words a day), but I did hold to my goal of writing at least something every single day this month. I'm stoked on myself for doing that, since this was a pretty freaking horrible month :p. Between Matthew's flu and bronchitis, my own flu and possible bronchitis (I'm still coughing up my lungs), and Tessa viral whatever it was, I had sickness plaguing our house for over half the month. Then the busy time around Thanksgiving (including my nerve conduction test, which wiped me out in its aftermath), with everyone home, and I really didn't have a lot of solid writing time. There were (many) days when I literally typed a paragraph or two and had to call it a day. But I called it, every single day.

And though it's rough, I think it's actually pretty good. It certainly was an interesting, if often freshly infuriating, journey back in time. I'm currently up to the beginning of Matthew's second grade year, so there's a ways to go. I'm going to let up a bit on myself, let myself take a breather, but I am going to finish.

Remind me of that, sometime after the holidays :).

Third Grade Afternoon

It's National Education Week again, and as always our elementary school invites parents to come into their children's classes to observe a lesson. Today I went to Tessa's class for math time.

I've been in the classroom before, during Open House and then for the Halloween party, but I was struck again how wonderful the spaces in the new school are. Everything is so light and there's so much more space in the rooms. That's a good thing, since there are 23 kids in Tessa's class, which makes it the biggest class in the whole school. Most classes are right around 20 kids, and many have fewer.

Today's lesson dealt with estimating and algorithms as strategies for solving equations. I still haven't quite gotten over the fact that they talk about algorithms in third grade now, but it's just another word to the kids :). After doing some work at the board all together, they broke up into partners and played a game called Go Collecting, similar to Go Fish, that helped them practice estimating. The room got a little loud, naturally, and I didn't feel so great, but it was so nice to see Tessa's teacher in action. She is so kind and very gentle with the kids, but she doesn't let anyone get out of hand.

I wasn't feeling great, as I mentioned, and it was a little iffy as to whether I was going to school today at all. Matthew started feeling really sick last Friday evening, shivering violently and feeling achy and exhausted. Ugh, what else could it be but the flu? Once he started running a 103 fever over the weekend, it was pretty clear we were done for. This was such a bummer, since he and Tessa were scheduled for H1N1 vaccinations tomorrow. I spoke to the receptionist at the ped's today, and she said that if he does have the flu, and it certainly seems like he does since he had all the symptoms, it had to be H1N1 since seasonal flu hasn't started around here yet. Then of course yesterday I started feeling badly, and I tried to convince myself that I just had a sinus headache because of the high pressure system that had come in.

Today it was clear that I was too far down the path of flu to turn back. But I really wanted to go to Tessa's class, and I wasn't running a fever yet (though I am now), and Matthew was feeling much better in the early afternoon, so I got to go. It was all worth it, to see Tessa coming down the hallway, jumping up and down in line when she saw me.

10K

I'm currently at 10,107 words. I'm a little behind schedule, but I don't want to write while Matthew is around. I don't want him to walk up to me at the computer, look at the screen, see his name, and ask, "What are you doing?" Not ready to go there yet. So on days he's home all day, like weekends, I end up restricted to writing while he's in the shower.

He's only four years old in the narrative so far, so there's a long way to go :). It's been interesting, and infuriating, looking through the old documentation of his initial IEP, when he was denied services. Oh, to be able to go back to that time and know what I know now. I'd give that horrible school psychologist a run for her money.

Under Pressure

Poor Tessa was so anxious this week, worrying about small group enrichment. On Friday (today), they were supposed to write a character study of a character from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She had chosen Titania (big surprise there! :p), and she was frantic that she was not going to be able to complete the assignment during the time period. I tried to help her prepare; we discussed the play and Titania's role (but you know, you never really know much about her, other than she's beautiful and haughty and her jerkface husband makes her fall in love with a man with the head of a donkey because she won't obey him). She was still in tears yesterday afternoon. They had done a "sloppy copy" rough draft last Friday, and did not have small group enrichment again this week (it's four days a "cycle," and with Election Day being a holiday, the next day of class did not fall till today). She obsessed the entire time, that her sloppy copy had not been complete, that she is too slow in writing, that there was no way she could write the whole character study in the 50 minutes of class.

Part of her problem here is that she is a really slow writer. She's amazingly creative, and her structure is very good, but the actual physical writing takes her forever. I think part of it is that she has some attentional difficulties and has trouble staying on task; part is that she has some of the same processing issues Matthew has and it's hard for her to spell and plan her writing. And part of it is that she's eight years old and just hasn't reached the developmental level necessary to write paragraphs quickly.

Anyway, I emailed her enrichment teacher this morning, letting her know that Tessa had been really anxious about the exercise and that she had some difficulties with writing. I asked her if she could just tell Tessa to do her best (because me telling her that obviously wasn't making much headway). She wrote back and very nicely said that she would reassure Tessa, and that she was a wonderfully bright and vivacious child who always tried her very best.

When I picked Tessa up at school, I asked her how enrichment had gone. "Well," she replied, "in a bizarre twist, we now have two days to complete it!" She was beaming, and skipped down to the car as I laughed hysterically at her uniquely-Tessa phrasing.

But I'm sad that at eight years old, she's already so hard on herself, so worried about performing well. I really don't think I've done anything to plant this anxiety, but hey, she is my daughter. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, when squeezed from the inside.

Word Count

As of today: 2230 words. I've decided to set a goal of 1000 words a day, which seems very manageable. Thirty days means 30,000 words!

NaNoWriMo

I decided that I am going to take the occasion of NaNoWriMo to kick my butt into gear vis-a-vis writing my Asperger Mom memoir (so far only a title: The Ultimate Advocate: A Mother's Asperger Journey). I'm sort of mixing the elements of NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo together, in that I'm writing every day, in a very rough sort of way. I don't intend to finish, but I'm going to start. It's not a novel, but hey, I play by my own rules.

Incidentally, what happened to NaBloPoMo? Now the site says that to take part, all you have to do is post on your blog every day for a month. No particular month, it seems, so I guess November is no longer the official month.