I'm having a very bitter few days. If you're looking for an upbeat blog, I'm afraid that today you'll need to visit someone else's. The closer my mil gets to arriving, the worse my mood and attitude seem to be deteriorating.

Honestly, there is just too much to do to prepare this house for her imminent white glove arrival and I'm not in the mood. When my mom came last week, I basically vacuumed the living room, cleaned the kitchen and was done with it. She doesn't care if there is chaos upstairs or we don't clean the kitchen immediately after eating. It is nice to be able to just relax and enjoy her company.

I am so tired lately...more so than I've ever been. I used to be an extremely high energy person and now I find that I have to be in bed by about 9 or 9.30pm. It's very unusual for me.

I recognize that my body has been through a lot and that it is still healing. I continue to struggle with chest pain and shortness of breath as well as weird swelling above my clavicle and sternum. It is what it is...
There isn't evidence of a recurrence and I don't feel that that is the problem. I think my body is just trying to mend itself and that I need more time...and rest...

I don't have time to rest though because of our large family. Aidan isn't really napping anymore, Zoe naps sporadically and my older children really need my involvement right now more than usual. Andrew is struggling so much with organizational skills right now that he is doing poorly in some of his classes. Amanda is still being bullied by our next door neighbor's child and the school counselor has had to step in. Amanda began developing facial tics and was having crying outbursts because of the stress of it all. Now that the school counselor has met with Amanda and the other child (and this child apparently broke out into hysterical sobs at school and was crying and carrying on!) I am waiting for my neighbor to drop another crazy bomb.

Alex has historically done very well in math. When there was a substitute teacher the first month of school he had a very high placement. His real teacher came out of maternity leave and gave each of the kids a *star* math and *star* reading test on the computer. Alex clicked the wrong buttons and somehow managed to get really poor grades on both...as in...below 1st grade level (He is in 2nd grade). To me, that indicates that he screwed up the tests...to his teacher, it's indicative a low ability level. The result? Based on those two tests, he was placed down in the subjects. He came home and said "I used to be good at math, but I guess I'm not anymore mom. What happened?"

:thud:

I went to conferences hoping to talk with the teacher. She's very young and also a newer teacher. She was about an hour behind in her conference schedule. By the time it was my turn there were 4 other families waiting after me and it was 7.30 (my conference time was 6.20). We had to zip through the conference. She told me that in preparation for Alex's conference that she'd had him re-do the *star* reading test and he'd tested above grade level. (3rd grade 2nd month) "It must have been a glitch" she said. "What about the math?" She didn't re-test him....she hadn't even considered it.

Jeeebus. Do I have to homeschool my children? A quick chat with Alex's first grade teacher had her scratching her head. She just couldn't understand the math placement.

DH is as overwhelmed by all of the school issues as I am....the lack of math group levels in the 6th grade, the social problems, the one-time math test being used to guage a child's ability level (did I mention Alex continues to get A+'s on every math paper and test?). So he said to me "What should we do?"

Pretty much, my answer has changed from one of activism to "well, honey, I guess we turn around, bend over and take it". This is St. Cloud. This is the professional choice that has been made. This is the area that we live in. It is not Minneapolis/St. Paul where we could choose a Montessori school, German immersion program or something different for our children. I am tired of calling teachers, going in to talk about issues that don't end up being resolved anyway etc. I feel like the public school system has finally just worn me down.

This morning, dh was really depressed about it all and I told him that we simply need to adjust to the fact that our children will never achieve the same educational level at highschool graduation that he had...they won't learn the same quantity, won't excel the way he has...and he should just suck it up and get used to it.

I'm the queen of support...I know. I'm going to nominate myself for wife of the year this year, I think.


To end this uplifting blog, I have decided to include part of my son's 6th grade science test. Enjoy the guessing game. C in the animal cell is???? The teacher told Andrew that they were meant to be vacuoles. Hmmm...I was always taught that vacuoles played a larger role in the plant cell. Of course, I could have missed something since I was more narrowly focuses on DNA...I was thinking peroxisome, vesicle...maybe even a little ribosome? Heck, if you're going to narrow an animal cell down to the bare bones like that, how about a mitochondria?

C, D, and E in the plant cell are???? D is not a chloroplast. Of course it doesn't look like the nucleus either, but C is definitely not the nucleus....which is what Andrew assumed. He thought the unmarked blob was the vacuole. I assume that C was the central vacuole.

Do they not have pre-made drawings of plant/animal cells that are a little more accurate from which to test children?

Maybe I'm just being too picky. Obviously, I'm feeling crabby today!



Kris