At my desk...

I totally shouldn't be blogging right now, especially not three posts, because I'm at my desk at the office where I'm volunteering, I got her a half hour late, I've been here an hour, and I've done almost nothing yet today.

But I just wanted to give you all a heads up that in my complete self-absorption, I've created another blog to consolidate all of my non-anonymous blogging in one place. My knitting stuff will be there, my crazy lawyer stuff will be there, and hopefully I'll add in some social justice blogging as well. If you are interested in reading there as well, shoot me an email so that I can decide if you are someone I trust to respect my foster parent anonymity while letting you in to the non-anonymous part of my world. FrumFosterMomATgmailDOTcom.

And even more pre-k homework fun

In my most recent post, I mentioned that 98% of Sabrina's homework is the same. Well, last week was the 2%. She had two math worksheets that were both WAY above her level. One because she hadn't learned enough about the subject (graphing) in school yet, and one because, well, the level of thought required to do it went way beyond the skill it was reinforcing.

This second worksheet was about sorting. There are lots of great ways for parents to reinforce lessons about sorting at home. For example, our tub toys are letters, numbers, and shapes, and come in six different colors. We could sort them by any of those categories while in the tub. We could sort laundry (Sabrina's in one pile, mine in another). We could sort all of the goodies that I got for Purim. We could sort her legos. No. We had a worksheet. It had two squares, two circles, and two triangles on it. One of each shape was big, and one of each shape was small. The directions were to sort the shapes into two groups. If you were four, how would you think to sort the shapes? Right, you would want to sort them by shape. But that makes three groups, not two. If the directions said to sort by size, that would be one thing. But I don't think a four year old should be expected to think abstractly enough to figure that out.

Rant over.

Pre-K Homework "Fun"

After a week of deciding that going to the library and not getting beaten up on were more important than doing two worksheets on the letter "A," Sabrina was in a good mood after her visit with her mom last night, and I decided that it was time to do homework.

Like 98% of her homework, she had two worksheets with pictures on them. She had to identify which pictures start with the correct letter sound (this week was "A"), cut them out, and glue them to the top of the worksheet.

One of the worksheets had the following pictures:
Ant
Apple
Car
Alligator

Or, if you are 33, ant, apple, automobile, and alligator. Yes, I knew this was wrong. And I never would have complicated things for Sabrina by saying that there were two different words for car. And "automobile" doesn't really start with an "A" sound anyway. Not a pure one, at least.

But the bigger problem is this: if you are four, and you see a picture of an alligator, you very well might think that it is a crocodile.

These worksheets are dumb. But even worse are the people who decide that ambiguous pictures are appropriate for 4 year olds.

Alas, and ewww

No big special tour today. Sabrina is back in bed, and I am bracing myself for the clean up of the carpet and sofa where she threw up. Mmm, fun.

M&Ms?

(Title of the post a teaser for Hazelmoon. Love ya!)

So, today is the big day, our tour of the specialest of special buildings in my Big City. Sabrina said yesterday she doesn't want to go. "I want to go with my Daddy." and "My Daddy took me." Poor thing probably doesn't want to have this special experience with me instead of her family.

We have to be there at 9:45, so we can leave a little later than when we go to school. I'm letting Sabrina sleep a little extra, but I'm nervous that we're going to end up having another one of her marathon two-and-a-quarter-hours-just-to-get-dressed mornings. She really is adorable, though: she woke up, came into the living room and asked for milk, drank a bit, then got on the sofa, curled up, and fell back asleep. If only she hadn't completely melted down last night when I tried to put her cream on, I'd be more confident about getting ready; if she weren't so completely desperate for her skin to be moisturized, she could get herself ready in about 20 minutes. Instead I'm going to have to balance her being awake enough to be rational with the fact that my involvement in getting dressed makes it take five or six or nine times longer. Wish me luck!

Stupid question time

How do I know if Sabrina's underwear is too small for her? Everything I bought for her is 4T (or 4, or XS), but she comes back from dad's wearing 2T/3T, and some of what she brought from mom's is 2T/3T... She's a pretty small girl, but I just don't know how to tell if her clothes fit.

Suddenly...

...I'm feeling like I shouldn't have just sat on my sofa for the last seven hours looking at yarn and knitting patterns, and knitting and doing KenKen puzzles.

Today was a day off from school (parent-teacher conferences--why are they during the school day?) so Sabrina is still at her dad's. I had the whole afternoon and evening to wash dishes, clean up the mess in the living room, wash Sabrina's clothes. But now it's after 10 and I'm ready to crawl into bed.

Guess who is going to be getting up early in the morning?