Six Days and Counting
Posted on: April 22, 2013
The weather forecast for next Sunday looks like this:
Which is good, because next Sunday is the March for Babies! I’m still on the committee, and we are, of course participating.
And we always need donations. This year our team consists of us and the Poulins, like it has for the past couple of years. You can donate, like you can every year, here.
Shoshanna in the photobooth…
Posted on: March 9, 2013
… at my friend’s art installation.
Halfway Through Third Grade
Posted on: February 18, 2013
A couple of weeks ago at Thursday Dinner, the kids had to be plunked down in the family room for quiet reading time because Jess was putting E to bed right at the same time that I needed to go get Matthew from the train station and they had been super-crazy all afternoon already (having, among other things, flooded the downstairs bathroom). Shoshanna pulled Jess’ copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone off the shelf and was almost halfway through it by the time we sat down to dinner.
The next day she read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Prisoner of Azkaban took her a little longer, as did Goblet of Fire (which is the book she picked for her February book report). She has since re-read Prisoner of Azkaban about three times – it’s her favorite. This Thursday she sat down with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (to do her 20-minutes-of-reading-every-day homework that we never even bother to worry about because really the challenge would be to LIMIT her to 20 minutes of reading a day…)
and when I came back into the room a half-hour later, she was reading Heidi because the beginning of Order of the Phoenix was too scary for her. She has also recently devoured Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess. She took The Secret Garden to school with her last week but I don’t know if she’s finished it or not.
Report cards came out from both regular school and religious school within the past 10 days, and we had her parent-teacher conference last Tuesday. To say she’s doing well would be an understatement… her grade improved from the first to the second quarter, and all of her teachers love her. Two comments sum up halfway-through-third-grade Shoshanna. From one of her RS teachers: “She demonstrates a great deal of enthusiasm for class activities”. From Mrs. V, on her presentation of her Black History Month project (which was about Martin Luther King, of course): “Clear, loud, and energetic.”
… and tonight in things that make you cock you head to the side, look at her, and go, “really?”…
Posted on: February 8, 2013
Shoshanna came home from after-school today with a medium-sized scrape on the side of her face. I asked her if she’d taken another foot to the face while playing soccer, and she said “No, we were playing in the snow.” Makes sense.
At dinner when the scrape was pointed out to Matthew and he asked how she had gotten it, she said, “wrestling.” The following conversation ensued.
Us: Who were you wrestling with?
Her: Guess.
Me: Grace.
Her: Nooooooooo.
Us: We don’t know who.
Her: Liam.
Me: Oh, Liam M?
Her: No, the other Liam. Liam J.
Me: Right. Why were you guys wrestling?
Her: Because.
Matthew: Who started it?
Her: I tackled him.
Us: Why did you tackle him?
Her: Because.
Us: And then what?
Her: I threw snowballs at him. And then I was done and went to play with Grace.
Us: So you tackled him, threw snowballs at him, and then were done?
Her: But first I sat on him a little bit.
Us: …We later established that this whole thing was part of a larger snowball fight amongst a bunch of the kids.
December 2012 Swim Meet
Posted on: January 2, 2013
While you wait for all sorts of pictures and stories from our madcap adventures on both coasts… the Storm Swim Team meet from mid-December.
(Her medley team won their heat by quite a bit and she won her leg of it, too.)
Shoshanna the songbird is singing in two choirs right now – Junior Choir at Temple and her school chorus. She loves both of them. Junior choir sang at a local retirement community last weekend and she charmed the residents like crazy. It was kind of hilarious.
At an awards assembly the day before Thanksgiving Shoshanna was recognized for “Overall Excellence”. And her first-quarter report card was excellent. So she’s a little full of herself on that front.
Dental adventures continue… the sealant they put on her lower six-year molars isn’t doing as good a job as we would like and she has to have a filling in one of them next month. And then we’ll continue to watch and wait. She’s a trouper, though; the pediatric dentist we see is awesome.
I’m sure there was some other thing that I was going to post about but it escapes me. Such is life.
Thankful Things…
Posted on: November 20, 2012
At Hebrew School today the kids were talking about thankfulness and were working on a list of 100 things they are thankful for.
We parents came in at numbers 11 and 12 behind (among other things) her cousins, the cat, grandparents, and her friend Grace.
In other news… the other morning as we were all working on the motivation to get out of bed, Shoshanna told me that she loved multiplication. I started asking her squares… 4×4, 5×5, 6×6… she knows those cold.
7×7 took her a minute, though. She thought. She said, “so it’s 14×3…” and then she wrote with her finger on the pillowcase before declaring “FORTY-NINE!”
But she can’t quite articulate WHY that works.
