(no subject)
Jul. 7th, 2024 09:02 pmSo I'm back from seeing family, etc. and I read some (though not all) of Hugo stuff and I have a lot to talk about, but then about when I was excited to be able to interact on the internet again, I also managed to (somewhat stupidly) fracture a finger. Fortunately left hand. While I can still type awkwardly, I have to save most of awkward typing for work right now. So... just consider that I would like to respond to you, but most likely won't in any great detail for the next several weeks at least, bleh :( (though I'll be reading DW)
(no subject)
Apr. 30th, 2024 09:01 amI had a post all ready to go -- two and a half weeks ago -- about life for us and extended family (i've appended it at the end of this post). And then it was subsumed by the news that D's dad ("Papa") has died. It was very sudden and unexpected.
( Papa, funeral, etc. )
-We saw our family's second eclipse! Stayed with my sister's family (my sister's husband is really a great guy who did not bat an eye at our coming and invading his house for a long weekend -- of course we tried to help out as much as we could, like babysitting so they could go on a date night, and I folded a lot of clothes -- and the kids had a great time playing with cousins and playing Xbox with cousins!) and drove south from St. Louis for three and a half hours that morning to get into totality range. (We picked south because of the marginally higher probability that it would be clear, though luckily for everyone, it turns out that all the skies around were pretty clear with just a bit of haze.) There was -- well, I would have said "a lot of traffic," but it seems like it wasn't actually a lot compared to what I hear from people on the East Coast -- it took maybe double the amount of time it would have taken if the roads had been clear. We did also run into something it looks like a lot of people ran into: Google Maps sending everyone to rural roads and then the traffic backing up a lot there (unlike a lot of other people's experiences, this was interestingly more pronounced on the way to the eclipse than back). Apple Maps seemed slightly better at figuring this out.
At about 1:10 (totality was scheduled at about 1:58), I started looking around for places to go, and found a recreational area near a creek that was about ten minutes away, so we went there, while the kids and I periodically looked through our eclipse glasses in the car when we could see the sun. When we got there -- and this was basically in the middle of nowhere in rural Missouri -- there were like 50 or so other people there who had had the same idea. It was neat to see it with other people -- it wasn't crowded, but it was reasonably full. Also, A. had running water to throw rocks into, which he was possibly more excited about than about the eclipse :) The interesting thing about having some clouds, even wispy hazy ones, is that my hind-brain stubbornly kept telling me as the skies darkened from the partial eclipse that the skies were darkening because of the clouds, even though I could see perfectly well that the clouds were not noticeably getting thicker (and in fact were, if anything, dissipating). After having experienced the eclipse in 2017, I now knew that it doesn't get fully pitch black like pictures can make it look, but that's actually really interesting because unlike sunset, it's darker (still not pitch black, but darker) in the middle of the sky but it looks like dawn all around the horizon. Where we got to was about 3 1/2 minutes of totality.
Afterwards we walked along the creek and a nice couple lent us their binoculars so we could see a bald eagle nesting in the tree, which was quite cool -- they said they'd been watching it all afternoon. (Not during the eclipse, I imagine!)
This happens to be the second time that we have majorly lucked out with the weather, when the day before it looked not so promising (D showed me the forecast showing a line of clouds lining up exactly with the line of totality) but then the actual day of the eclipse turned out clear. Really grateful we got to see it! E in particular thought it was amazing (she dimly remembers 2017, enough that she was excited for this one) and actually thanked us for bringing her to see it!
-D's sister ("S") was sufficiently worried by our Christmas adventures that she made D's dad ("Papa") go to the doctor and take a cognitive functioning test, the results of which were that if he'd got one less point on the test, he would have been diagnosed with mild dementia. So there's that. S then booked a flight for herself and one of her teenage daughters the first week of April to figure out what the terms of their parents' trust is, get power of attorney, hire a cleaner for him, and so on.
D's brother saw the house a week or two before she came out and said that it looked "worse than ever," which is rather alarming considering that it's only been a few months since we saw him (and it had had a couple of years to get into that state before we saw him). S concurred entirely with their brother's statement when she got out there. She also found that someone, not Papa, has been withdrawing money from his bank account. Anyway, long story short, she and D and Papa were eventually able to get all the financial stuff sorted and D now has power of attorney. But major warning: if your parents have a trust, if you don't have a copy of it, at least make sure you at least know the lawyer/firm who wrote the trust! (This took a while to figure out.)
At this point S. convinced Papa to live in a senior independent-living apartment which we are all SO relieved about. It turns out that his biggest concern was that he didn't like the permanence of it -- he worried that once he got there, if he didn't like it, he'd be trapped there forever. So they aren't making any permanent moves -- keeping his house for now, etc. But now he is in said apartment! As far as I can tell, the ENTIRE timeline from Papa agreeing to this to him being installed in the apartment was literally less than 36 hours. D told me about it Wednesday night, and by Thursday night S had sent out pics on their family group text with him installed in this apartment (apparently they had a single one left and she jumped on it). I do not know how S is a legit member of D's family, none of the other members of which can make a decision with more than literal years of lead time! But I hope that he is able to find this place less overwhelming and more sociable. I also hope that he does not move right back into his house now that S. has gone home.
-My dad is now officially diagnosed with "very mild" dementia (which he emphatically contests). Around this time (though I think it was a couple of weeks before the diagnosis was given) my parents thought it was an A-OK idea for my dad to fly to LA by himself, without mom, to see some long-lost relatives he had just found, on the weekend when our whole family was going to St. Louis TO SEE THEM. (Okay, to see the eclipse, but we did do things like schedule an extra day into the visit to make it longer, etc.) My dad's flight to LA was a direct flight (I don't think they would have done it if it wasn't) and cousins met him at the airport, and it DID actually all work out all right and he got back safely, but wow. We did actually see him briefly in the airport as we came in and he was about to leave! This worked out well because his gate had changed and I was able to walk him to the new gate. (He also told me as we were halfway to his new gate that he'd forgotten what the new gate was. He did once travel a lot for work, so I think he would have been able to figure it out, but I think it was also good that I was there.) Also, his flights from St. Louis to LA the Friday before the eclipse and LA to St. Louis after the eclipse was over were not very full, I suppose in retrospect totally not surprisingly.
( Papa, funeral, etc. )
The post I was going to post: A busy couple of weeks for us/extended family. Eclipse, father-in-law moved to independent living, dad traveled to LA
-We saw our family's second eclipse! Stayed with my sister's family (my sister's husband is really a great guy who did not bat an eye at our coming and invading his house for a long weekend -- of course we tried to help out as much as we could, like babysitting so they could go on a date night, and I folded a lot of clothes -- and the kids had a great time playing with cousins and playing Xbox with cousins!) and drove south from St. Louis for three and a half hours that morning to get into totality range. (We picked south because of the marginally higher probability that it would be clear, though luckily for everyone, it turns out that all the skies around were pretty clear with just a bit of haze.) There was -- well, I would have said "a lot of traffic," but it seems like it wasn't actually a lot compared to what I hear from people on the East Coast -- it took maybe double the amount of time it would have taken if the roads had been clear. We did also run into something it looks like a lot of people ran into: Google Maps sending everyone to rural roads and then the traffic backing up a lot there (unlike a lot of other people's experiences, this was interestingly more pronounced on the way to the eclipse than back). Apple Maps seemed slightly better at figuring this out.
At about 1:10 (totality was scheduled at about 1:58), I started looking around for places to go, and found a recreational area near a creek that was about ten minutes away, so we went there, while the kids and I periodically looked through our eclipse glasses in the car when we could see the sun. When we got there -- and this was basically in the middle of nowhere in rural Missouri -- there were like 50 or so other people there who had had the same idea. It was neat to see it with other people -- it wasn't crowded, but it was reasonably full. Also, A. had running water to throw rocks into, which he was possibly more excited about than about the eclipse :) The interesting thing about having some clouds, even wispy hazy ones, is that my hind-brain stubbornly kept telling me as the skies darkened from the partial eclipse that the skies were darkening because of the clouds, even though I could see perfectly well that the clouds were not noticeably getting thicker (and in fact were, if anything, dissipating). After having experienced the eclipse in 2017, I now knew that it doesn't get fully pitch black like pictures can make it look, but that's actually really interesting because unlike sunset, it's darker (still not pitch black, but darker) in the middle of the sky but it looks like dawn all around the horizon. Where we got to was about 3 1/2 minutes of totality.
Afterwards we walked along the creek and a nice couple lent us their binoculars so we could see a bald eagle nesting in the tree, which was quite cool -- they said they'd been watching it all afternoon. (Not during the eclipse, I imagine!)
This happens to be the second time that we have majorly lucked out with the weather, when the day before it looked not so promising (D showed me the forecast showing a line of clouds lining up exactly with the line of totality) but then the actual day of the eclipse turned out clear. Really grateful we got to see it! E in particular thought it was amazing (she dimly remembers 2017, enough that she was excited for this one) and actually thanked us for bringing her to see it!
-D's sister ("S") was sufficiently worried by our Christmas adventures that she made D's dad ("Papa") go to the doctor and take a cognitive functioning test, the results of which were that if he'd got one less point on the test, he would have been diagnosed with mild dementia. So there's that. S then booked a flight for herself and one of her teenage daughters the first week of April to figure out what the terms of their parents' trust is, get power of attorney, hire a cleaner for him, and so on.
D's brother saw the house a week or two before she came out and said that it looked "worse than ever," which is rather alarming considering that it's only been a few months since we saw him (and it had had a couple of years to get into that state before we saw him). S concurred entirely with their brother's statement when she got out there. She also found that someone, not Papa, has been withdrawing money from his bank account. Anyway, long story short, she and D and Papa were eventually able to get all the financial stuff sorted and D now has power of attorney. But major warning: if your parents have a trust, if you don't have a copy of it, at least make sure you at least know the lawyer/firm who wrote the trust! (This took a while to figure out.)
At this point S. convinced Papa to live in a senior independent-living apartment which we are all SO relieved about. It turns out that his biggest concern was that he didn't like the permanence of it -- he worried that once he got there, if he didn't like it, he'd be trapped there forever. So they aren't making any permanent moves -- keeping his house for now, etc. But now he is in said apartment! As far as I can tell, the ENTIRE timeline from Papa agreeing to this to him being installed in the apartment was literally less than 36 hours. D told me about it Wednesday night, and by Thursday night S had sent out pics on their family group text with him installed in this apartment (apparently they had a single one left and she jumped on it). I do not know how S is a legit member of D's family, none of the other members of which can make a decision with more than literal years of lead time! But I hope that he is able to find this place less overwhelming and more sociable. I also hope that he does not move right back into his house now that S. has gone home.
-My dad is now officially diagnosed with "very mild" dementia (which he emphatically contests). Around this time (though I think it was a couple of weeks before the diagnosis was given) my parents thought it was an A-OK idea for my dad to fly to LA by himself, without mom, to see some long-lost relatives he had just found, on the weekend when our whole family was going to St. Louis TO SEE THEM. (Okay, to see the eclipse, but we did do things like schedule an extra day into the visit to make it longer, etc.) My dad's flight to LA was a direct flight (I don't think they would have done it if it wasn't) and cousins met him at the airport, and it DID actually all work out all right and he got back safely, but wow. We did actually see him briefly in the airport as we came in and he was about to leave! This worked out well because his gate had changed and I was able to walk him to the new gate. (He also told me as we were halfway to his new gate that he'd forgotten what the new gate was. He did once travel a lot for work, so I think he would have been able to figure it out, but I think it was also good that I was there.) Also, his flights from St. Louis to LA the Friday before the eclipse and LA to St. Louis after the eclipse was over were not very full, I suppose in retrospect totally not surprisingly.
Christmas and New Year's
Jan. 8th, 2024 07:53 pm-We spent Christmas with D's dad, I sang in D's dad's church's choir with him, and after Christmas we saw D's brother and wife and the five kids in their blended family (I think there are two more who are grown-ups that I have never met).
( Content warning for capital letters concerning papers piled up in places where they should not be. Also: Christmas Eve power outage! )
-So anyway, I was pretty excited to see my family, who may have a lot of flaws but at least have working wireless. We stayed with my sister, who has a girl six months older than A and a boy who is about three years younger, and the three of them had a great time with Legos and playing board games and video games. (A: Can we get a TV? Me: Sure, we've meant to for a while. A: Can we get an XBox? Me: Hmm....) Sometimes E would deign to join in and then often had a good time too. I did Yuletiding and D did a fair amount of work.
( More family stuff. )
-We did make two unforced errors here (one of which probably had no effect).
( Content note: COVID. )
( Content warning for capital letters concerning papers piled up in places where they should not be. Also: Christmas Eve power outage! )
-So anyway, I was pretty excited to see my family, who may have a lot of flaws but at least have working wireless. We stayed with my sister, who has a girl six months older than A and a boy who is about three years younger, and the three of them had a great time with Legos and playing board games and video games. (A: Can we get a TV? Me: Sure, we've meant to for a while. A: Can we get an XBox? Me: Hmm....) Sometimes E would deign to join in and then often had a good time too. I did Yuletiding and D did a fair amount of work.
( More family stuff. )
-We did make two unforced errors here (one of which probably had no effect).
( Content note: COVID. )
This actually happened in the fall, but I was reminded about it this week, so here you go.
Me: The Halloween song, "Have you seen the ghost of John" -- do you know that song?
A: No! What are the words?
Me: Have you seen the ghost of John
Long white bones with the skin all go-o-o-o-one
Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on!
A: *thinks about this*
A: ...
A: ...Is this the same John that's in the song "Are you sleeping?"
E: Wait!! maybe he isn't hearing the morning bells ringing because he's DEAD and a GHOST!
All three of us: *laugh uproariously*
Me: The Halloween song, "Have you seen the ghost of John" -- do you know that song?
A: No! What are the words?
Me: Have you seen the ghost of John
Long white bones with the skin all go-o-o-o-one
Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on!
A: *thinks about this*
A: ...
A: ...Is this the same John that's in the song "Are you sleeping?"
E: Wait!! maybe he isn't hearing the morning bells ringing because he's DEAD and a GHOST!
All three of us: *laugh uproariously*
(no subject)
Jan. 16th, 2023 05:47 pmThis morning I'm innocently getting ready for work when D comes in the bedroom.
D: I've found a Youtube channel that is entirely made up of dad jokes!
Me: OH NOOOOO MUST ESCAPE!
D: My wife put glue on my rifles. She denies it, but I'm sticking to my guns!
Me: IT IS JUST AS I HAVE FORETOLD
Kids: Tell us, tell us!
Then, when I came home:
D and me: have perfectly reasonable conversation about the dishes, then suddenly:
D: My inflatable house collapsed! Now I live in a flat.
Me: YOU WERE WATCHING THAT YOUTUBE CHANNEL, WEREN'T YOU
D: *is very pleased with himself*
D: I've found a Youtube channel that is entirely made up of dad jokes!
Me: OH NOOOOO MUST ESCAPE!
D: My wife put glue on my rifles. She denies it, but I'm sticking to my guns!
Me: IT IS JUST AS I HAVE FORETOLD
Kids: Tell us, tell us!
Then, when I came home:
D and me: have perfectly reasonable conversation about the dishes, then suddenly:
D: My inflatable house collapsed! Now I live in a flat.
Me: YOU WERE WATCHING THAT YOUTUBE CHANNEL, WEREN'T YOU
D: *is very pleased with himself*
(no subject)
Jan. 2nd, 2023 09:02 amMerry Christmas? and happy Yuletide? and happy New Year? As usual for this year, I am way behind, and actually I managed to drop or refuse to play with a number of balls over Christmas -- I think I had a minor case of burnout this year, which I'm sort of bemused by as I had a lot less going on than in previous years. I only had to organize not-all-that-much music for one morning (not two mornings, I did not have to organize the evening music-intensive performance), I didn't have to organize any instrumental rehearsals (Awesome Musical Family Mom: Should we get a bunch of people together to do an instrumental thing? Me: ...I'd be the one coordinating all these rehearsals, wouldn't I. ...no.), we didn't fly anywhere (which, given the weather, I'm rather grateful for). I did a lot of knitting instead of anything any more intensive than that.
Things I did do: ( Choir conducting, dad's memoirs, skiing )
One more thing I did (a more conventional reveal post here):
This fall I reread The Perilous Gard, a kidlit/YA-ish (Newbery Honor) book from 1974 about a young woman who, in the last days of Mary Tudor's reign, gets sent to an out-of-the-way castle that may or may not be associated with the Fair Folk. This book I adore to little bits and pieces. I love everything about it, although on this reread I was amused to find that I have read the last third or so so many times that I basically have large portions of it memorized, and then the first two-thirds I only remembered rather vaguely. (although I really enjoyed rereading it! It's just that those parts are in a lot of ways setting up the last third, that was and is super iddy for me.) ( minor spoilers )
All the characters are just wonderful, even the ones who have only very slight appearances. Kate's father shows up for... maybe a few paragraphs?? ...and he is delightful; you can totally see how important he is to Kate, and how important Kate is to him, and how Kate turned out the way she did <3 Sir Geoffrey has a fairly minor part in the story but he's also fully-formed and totally great! And the young future Elizabeth I has a single scene, but I've been imprinted with her and that's how I've thought of young Elizabeth ever since. And I love Alicia too! And as for the Lady, and the worldbuilding of the People Under the Hill, and Kate and Christopher... well, as I said to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor all my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents. (looking at you, Holly Black! Sorry!)
I've always loved that Kate gets to save the day, and she gets to save it rather a lot; one of the things that struck me in this reread was how many times Kate's brain saves the day, but not in any way that feels overtly 21st-century (though her father clearly is progressive for his time in the way he teaches her, and Kate clearly is extremely intelligent and thoughtful). There are several things about her that save the day, of course, not just her intelligence -- also her stubbornness, also her ability to value what is real, also her compassion, also her sense of what's right -- but it was interesting to me on this read that it's also in large part her intelligence and extreme dose of common sense, which leads her to realize e.g. that something's wrong with Christopher's story in the beginning, how to find Christopher under the Hill, how to get out near the end.
Another thing I loved was how Kate's and Christopher's rationality complement each other. Kate: asskygiants said in her awesome review, Kate Sutton has no TIME for your manpain. She will call Christopher out every time he's being Super Drama Emo Boy! Which is, admittedly, a lot of times! (also I ABSOLUTELY 100% LOVE that this is (yet another) major quality of hers that saves the day!) But then there's also the part where Christopher will also counter Kate's subconscious assumptions that he's Super Dramatic Romance Knight with things like, but what about worrying about cleaning out the drains!
Basically I love these two a lot. Kate in particular is just really an awesome heroine -- she's so individualistic that I felt it was hard for me to extrapolate what she'd think about a situation that wasn't in the book, which I feel I don't usually have a problem with. With Christopher, I did feel like I had a much better idea how he would respond.he would talk about drainage, probably
This was also the only example in my childhood that I can think of where, in the boy-girl romance, it is the boy who is described as extremely conventionally attractive and not the girl! I also love ( spoilers )
Also also! one of my favorite lines continues to be the one that Kate thinks about the Guardian of the Well: Questions, thought Kate savagely; why even now couldn't the thing tell a plain lie, like an honest man? (It's a line that comes near the climax of the book, in an incredibly tense scene, and yet it always makes me laugh when I come across it. It's so Kate. Kate is just so great.)
Things I did do: ( Choir conducting, dad's memoirs, skiing )
One more thing I did (a more conventional reveal post here):
This fall I reread The Perilous Gard, a kidlit/YA-ish (Newbery Honor) book from 1974 about a young woman who, in the last days of Mary Tudor's reign, gets sent to an out-of-the-way castle that may or may not be associated with the Fair Folk. This book I adore to little bits and pieces. I love everything about it, although on this reread I was amused to find that I have read the last third or so so many times that I basically have large portions of it memorized, and then the first two-thirds I only remembered rather vaguely. (although I really enjoyed rereading it! It's just that those parts are in a lot of ways setting up the last third, that was and is super iddy for me.) ( minor spoilers )
All the characters are just wonderful, even the ones who have only very slight appearances. Kate's father shows up for... maybe a few paragraphs?? ...and he is delightful; you can totally see how important he is to Kate, and how important Kate is to him, and how Kate turned out the way she did <3 Sir Geoffrey has a fairly minor part in the story but he's also fully-formed and totally great! And the young future Elizabeth I has a single scene, but I've been imprinted with her and that's how I've thought of young Elizabeth ever since. And I love Alicia too! And as for the Lady, and the worldbuilding of the People Under the Hill, and Kate and Christopher... well, as I said to
selenak, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor all my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents. (looking at you, Holly Black! Sorry!)I've always loved that Kate gets to save the day, and she gets to save it rather a lot; one of the things that struck me in this reread was how many times Kate's brain saves the day, but not in any way that feels overtly 21st-century (though her father clearly is progressive for his time in the way he teaches her, and Kate clearly is extremely intelligent and thoughtful). There are several things about her that save the day, of course, not just her intelligence -- also her stubbornness, also her ability to value what is real, also her compassion, also her sense of what's right -- but it was interesting to me on this read that it's also in large part her intelligence and extreme dose of common sense, which leads her to realize e.g. that something's wrong with Christopher's story in the beginning, how to find Christopher under the Hill, how to get out near the end.
Another thing I loved was how Kate's and Christopher's rationality complement each other. Kate: as
skygiants said in her awesome review, Kate Sutton has no TIME for your manpain. She will call Christopher out every time he's being Super Drama Emo Boy! Which is, admittedly, a lot of times! (also I ABSOLUTELY 100% LOVE that this is (yet another) major quality of hers that saves the day!) But then there's also the part where Christopher will also counter Kate's subconscious assumptions that he's Super Dramatic Romance Knight with things like, but what about worrying about cleaning out the drains! Basically I love these two a lot. Kate in particular is just really an awesome heroine -- she's so individualistic that I felt it was hard for me to extrapolate what she'd think about a situation that wasn't in the book, which I feel I don't usually have a problem with. With Christopher, I did feel like I had a much better idea how he would respond.
This was also the only example in my childhood that I can think of where, in the boy-girl romance, it is the boy who is described as extremely conventionally attractive and not the girl! I also love ( spoilers )
Also also! one of my favorite lines continues to be the one that Kate thinks about the Guardian of the Well: Questions, thought Kate savagely; why even now couldn't the thing tell a plain lie, like an honest man? (It's a line that comes near the climax of the book, in an incredibly tense scene, and yet it always makes me laugh when I come across it. It's so Kate. Kate is just so great.)
(no subject)
Sep. 16th, 2022 09:48 pmWELP my kids have been in school... three?... weeks and I have a rant!
I happened to ask A. about his math class today because I'd heard from a friend that A. had been placed in math class with her kid and our conversation made me curious about what math they were doing. A. told me that they were doing more complicated multiplication, and he further told me, in his calm but insistent and somewhat annoyed voice (that kid really does have superior emotional regulation) that his teacher had said he'd done a problem wrong and that he'd really done it right.
So I asked him to write it out for me. This is what he wrote:
(99*497) + (1*497) = __ *497 =
He further explained that the right side of the first equality was his explanation of how to do the problem, not what his teacher said. (He knew that in the blank space went 99 + 1 = 100, and then he could do the problem.) He said his teacher said that was wrong because there were parentheses, so he should do the multiplication of 99 and 497 because that was inside the parentheses. ("But it works!" he said about his method.)
(I think maybe she was trying to see whether he could multiply 99 by 497 -- which I don't think he knows how to do -- but then why not just give him that problem?)
Now, my children are famously unreliable narrators in the sense of being very good at leaving out context (this is the same child who said that his teacher takes balls from him, and we later learned that it was a game that his teacher was playing with all the kids during recess that involved them grabbing balls away from each other) so I should keep my mind open that it might be a misinterpretation or that additional context might make it okay. But... I really rather don't think there's additional context here that makes it okay. I mean, I think the additional context is that (I know from school gossip) his math teacher wasn't originally hired as a math teacher and got pulled into the job at the last minute, because you know, staffing.
We of course told him he had done it correctly and cleverly, and I am additionally pretty happy that he understood he had done it right even though the teacher had told him it was wrong. But ARGH. If I didn't have to work full-time right now (I have to work full-time right now) I would SO be spending some time teaching in our school, because they SO need help with lower-grade math. (Upper-grade math at this school has a lovely awesome teacher. Lower-grade math has been foxed by lack of good math staffing for YEARS. Fortunately for E, the lower-grade math problem happened literally the year after she went to upper-grade math.)
I happened to ask A. about his math class today because I'd heard from a friend that A. had been placed in math class with her kid and our conversation made me curious about what math they were doing. A. told me that they were doing more complicated multiplication, and he further told me, in his calm but insistent and somewhat annoyed voice (that kid really does have superior emotional regulation) that his teacher had said he'd done a problem wrong and that he'd really done it right.
So I asked him to write it out for me. This is what he wrote:
(99*497) + (1*497) = __ *497 =
He further explained that the right side of the first equality was his explanation of how to do the problem, not what his teacher said. (He knew that in the blank space went 99 + 1 = 100, and then he could do the problem.) He said his teacher said that was wrong because there were parentheses, so he should do the multiplication of 99 and 497 because that was inside the parentheses. ("But it works!" he said about his method.)
(I think maybe she was trying to see whether he could multiply 99 by 497 -- which I don't think he knows how to do -- but then why not just give him that problem?)
Now, my children are famously unreliable narrators in the sense of being very good at leaving out context (this is the same child who said that his teacher takes balls from him, and we later learned that it was a game that his teacher was playing with all the kids during recess that involved them grabbing balls away from each other) so I should keep my mind open that it might be a misinterpretation or that additional context might make it okay. But... I really rather don't think there's additional context here that makes it okay. I mean, I think the additional context is that (I know from school gossip) his math teacher wasn't originally hired as a math teacher and got pulled into the job at the last minute, because you know, staffing.
We of course told him he had done it correctly and cleverly, and I am additionally pretty happy that he understood he had done it right even though the teacher had told him it was wrong. But ARGH. If I didn't have to work full-time right now (I have to work full-time right now) I would SO be spending some time teaching in our school, because they SO need help with lower-grade math. (Upper-grade math at this school has a lovely awesome teacher. Lower-grade math has been foxed by lack of good math staffing for YEARS. Fortunately for E, the lower-grade math problem happened literally the year after she went to upper-grade math.)
assorted kid things
Sep. 1st, 2022 10:29 pmI swear I have also been reading books and maybe I will even post about them someday! But, uh, not today. Instead you get random kid stuff!
-A. has finally FINALLY learned how to swim. He had almost learned before the pandemic hit, so he could sort of swim with a lot of pauses to turn over and float, so he was reasonably safe, but neither he nor we considered that really swimming. And even now that swim lessons have begun again in general, the particular place where we had taken him before (which we love) hasn't started back, and D was supposed to be in charge of his swimming, so... yeah. Then it happened that one of my church acquaintances wanted to make a little extra money and ran swim lessons out of her apartment's pool for a couple of weeks, so it was both relatively cheap and super easy to set up. Well, I suppose it's not surprising that her landlord shut her down after those couple of weeks (wah! but I get it) but he got swim lessons every weekday for two weeks and that's what he needed to go from "kid who can't quite swim" to "kid who can actually swim" even though he has no conception of things like strokes (he does crawl and sort-of-kind-of backstroke) and it would be nice for him to get more lessons. (I would really love if he could do "swim team" with their old swim school, which was low-key, once a week, half an hour of swimming laps and improving their strokes -- E did this and her swimming got really reasonably good. Neither kid, I think, is into hard-core Swim Team that's two hours twice a week or whatever.)
It's rather amazing the difference it makes. Before this time, we'd occasionally be around a pool and he would either stay in a float the entire time or he would sort of creep around in the shallow end. We just went to a friend's house with a pool and I suggested he take a float and he said, "Oh, I don't need it now," and when we got there he just swam around like a little duck and tried diving in the deep end (he dives adorably badly) and he and the other kids played with "lightsaber" pool noodles in the deep end and he was perfectly fine (he would not have done this last year, as he was very hesitant about going in the deep end at all unless he had a float and was not interacting with other kids).
-E is going into 7th grade and we had parent-teacher conferences and her teacher this year is just amazing, full of empathy for these kids who are in general struggling with that transition between being kids and being adolescents, and also empathy for E's social and emotional issues in particular, and I just think E is in such good hands and I'm so grateful we get this teacher. (Especially extremely grateful because she had pancreatic cancer last year! But is apparently in full remission!)
A's parent-teacher conferences for second grade were good too. His new teacher seems to have stuff figured out, and he won't be teaching language arts; he'll trade off with the kindergarten teacher (who is awesome) for that. And I raised my concerns about one classmate who tends to invade A's personal space in a way that A clearly finds kind of offputting (but won't complain about -- but I don't want it to be a thing where he keeps being made uncomfortable because he doesn't want to complain), and New Teacher knew about it already and had made plans for it. And I kind of peeked in their window yesterday morning with another parent and the kids seemed to be totally engaged and doing great.
A's math teacher is different, new this year, and I'm not sure about her. (Heh,conuly, she asked what kind of learner he was, whether he was a visual learner or whatever. I was like, he learns whatever way you teach him...) But she was on board with him doing Beast Academy, so, as long as he gets to do that I'm happy :)
-During the pandemic, E learned about the chat function in Zoom (and often sends me chats while I'm at work and she's at school or at home, it's super cute). A. was too young at the time.
A few weeks ago, E asked to do Habitica again. The last time we played around with Habitica, A. was also too young. But now, at age 7, he is old enough and he is actually pretty excited about doing his tasks (which is great).
...It turns out Habitica also has a chat function. A. is really excited about finally having access to a chat function!
We were doing a "quest" to "kill a monster" (it's sort of a black spheroid with an upside down face) through the purity of our... getting tasks done... thus leading to the following chat conversation, transcribed verbatim. ("horsie" is E, "Flaming Duck" is A., and "raspberry hunter" is me.)
horsie: we will kill you upside down jack-o-lantern
Flaming Duck: Thats black aNd DoSentHAVE a sTeM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Flaming Duck: AlSo ITSSHADOWY on the outside ALSO ITS BAD
raspberry hunter: You guys are funny 😂
Flaming Duck: NOIMNOT
Flaming Duck: WHATEVERRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Flaming Duck: Bibs
Flaming Duck: Wait no bubs
Flaming Duck: Sthcukvukgdfjohfbjhgfgjkpounceonmommykbcjkvgukkhvcxgjk fgkngfgjjgffyjhjbggyuh
Flaming Duck: Pooooooooooooooop poop
horsie: You're weird
horsie: buba
Flaming Duck: HAHA I CAUGHT YOU BEING WEIRD
Flaming Duck: SO WE’RE BoTH WEirD
Flaming Duck: GhnfykjgfbkjffhkysylgscfiudhoudYIKNFSGJ(BCZfggxGGFSZdgjhcxzDdgbngcfjlnhdzgkkhhhk IS NOT NOT WEIRD
(I promise he's a much quieter kid in person! Though possibly still just as quirky :) )
-A. has finally FINALLY learned how to swim. He had almost learned before the pandemic hit, so he could sort of swim with a lot of pauses to turn over and float, so he was reasonably safe, but neither he nor we considered that really swimming. And even now that swim lessons have begun again in general, the particular place where we had taken him before (which we love) hasn't started back, and D was supposed to be in charge of his swimming, so... yeah. Then it happened that one of my church acquaintances wanted to make a little extra money and ran swim lessons out of her apartment's pool for a couple of weeks, so it was both relatively cheap and super easy to set up. Well, I suppose it's not surprising that her landlord shut her down after those couple of weeks (wah! but I get it) but he got swim lessons every weekday for two weeks and that's what he needed to go from "kid who can't quite swim" to "kid who can actually swim" even though he has no conception of things like strokes (he does crawl and sort-of-kind-of backstroke) and it would be nice for him to get more lessons. (I would really love if he could do "swim team" with their old swim school, which was low-key, once a week, half an hour of swimming laps and improving their strokes -- E did this and her swimming got really reasonably good. Neither kid, I think, is into hard-core Swim Team that's two hours twice a week or whatever.)
It's rather amazing the difference it makes. Before this time, we'd occasionally be around a pool and he would either stay in a float the entire time or he would sort of creep around in the shallow end. We just went to a friend's house with a pool and I suggested he take a float and he said, "Oh, I don't need it now," and when we got there he just swam around like a little duck and tried diving in the deep end (he dives adorably badly) and he and the other kids played with "lightsaber" pool noodles in the deep end and he was perfectly fine (he would not have done this last year, as he was very hesitant about going in the deep end at all unless he had a float and was not interacting with other kids).
-E is going into 7th grade and we had parent-teacher conferences and her teacher this year is just amazing, full of empathy for these kids who are in general struggling with that transition between being kids and being adolescents, and also empathy for E's social and emotional issues in particular, and I just think E is in such good hands and I'm so grateful we get this teacher. (Especially extremely grateful because she had pancreatic cancer last year! But is apparently in full remission!)
A's parent-teacher conferences for second grade were good too. His new teacher seems to have stuff figured out, and he won't be teaching language arts; he'll trade off with the kindergarten teacher (who is awesome) for that. And I raised my concerns about one classmate who tends to invade A's personal space in a way that A clearly finds kind of offputting (but won't complain about -- but I don't want it to be a thing where he keeps being made uncomfortable because he doesn't want to complain), and New Teacher knew about it already and had made plans for it. And I kind of peeked in their window yesterday morning with another parent and the kids seemed to be totally engaged and doing great.
A's math teacher is different, new this year, and I'm not sure about her. (Heh,
conuly, she asked what kind of learner he was, whether he was a visual learner or whatever. I was like, he learns whatever way you teach him...) But she was on board with him doing Beast Academy, so, as long as he gets to do that I'm happy :)-During the pandemic, E learned about the chat function in Zoom (and often sends me chats while I'm at work and she's at school or at home, it's super cute). A. was too young at the time.
A few weeks ago, E asked to do Habitica again. The last time we played around with Habitica, A. was also too young. But now, at age 7, he is old enough and he is actually pretty excited about doing his tasks (which is great).
...It turns out Habitica also has a chat function. A. is really excited about finally having access to a chat function!
We were doing a "quest" to "kill a monster" (it's sort of a black spheroid with an upside down face) through the purity of our... getting tasks done... thus leading to the following chat conversation, transcribed verbatim. ("horsie" is E, "Flaming Duck" is A., and "raspberry hunter" is me.)
horsie: we will kill you upside down jack-o-lantern
Flaming Duck: Thats black aNd DoSentHAVE a sTeM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Flaming Duck: AlSo ITSSHADOWY on the outside ALSO ITS BAD
raspberry hunter: You guys are funny 😂
Flaming Duck: NOIMNOT
Flaming Duck: WHATEVERRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Flaming Duck: Bibs
Flaming Duck: Wait no bubs
Flaming Duck: Sthcukvukgdfjohfbjhgfgjkpounceonmommykbcjkvgukkhvcxgjk fgkngfgjjgffyjhjbggyuh
Flaming Duck: Pooooooooooooooop poop
horsie: You're weird
horsie: buba
Flaming Duck: HAHA I CAUGHT YOU BEING WEIRD
Flaming Duck: SO WE’RE BoTH WEirD
Flaming Duck: GhnfykjgfbkjffhkysylgscfiudhoudYIKNFSGJ(BCZfggxGGFSZdgjhcxzDdgbngcfjlnhdzgkkhhhk IS NOT NOT WEIRD
(I promise he's a much quieter kid in person! Though possibly still just as quirky :) )
(no subject)
Aug. 1st, 2022 10:07 pmAfter not going on a plane for two and a half years, I have now been on three plane trips in the space of less than a month.
Trip #1: ( My family reunion in Juneau Alaska: fish cookouts, no PPT )
Trip #2: ( Work trip with family detour: yarn with niece, fandom pins with sister )
Trip #3: ( D's family reunion in Colorado: tundra and crafts )
( Travel adventures. )
( And the covid aftermath. )
Trip #1: ( My family reunion in Juneau Alaska: fish cookouts, no PPT )
Trip #2: ( Work trip with family detour: yarn with niece, fandom pins with sister )
Trip #3: ( D's family reunion in Colorado: tundra and crafts )
( Travel adventures. )
( And the covid aftermath. )
(no subject)
Jun. 24th, 2022 02:34 pmI guess I should talk about this. I might put this under lock or delete it later, I might not.
About nine years ago, I made the decision to have an abortion at about twelve weeks. (Sometimes, at the time, I said I hadn't made the decision, because I hadn't made the final final decision -- see below -- but I had. I had scheduled the hospital appointment and everything.) Because of the timing, the specialist ob-gyn who had been called in said that it was better to do it at about fifteen weeks. (I actually still don't really understand this part, which I feel like I've never heard people talk about otherwise -- his explanation was that it to do with the way the uterus thickens at about this time, so it's not great to do some methods after twelve weeks and other methods are easier after fifteen weeks.)
It turned out that in the end, I did not have an elective abortion. My unborn child, a little boy, died the week before I was scheduled to go into the hospital, for the same reasons that I had chosen to have an abortion in the first place. We found out during an ultrasound when the doctor was about to do the confirmatory testing for us to finalize our choice. I did go into the hospital the day I was scheduled and had the procedure I was scheduled to have, only I am lucky enough (and I mean that unironically -- it made things much easier at the time as well) that I can talk about it as an induction of a missed miscarriage instead of an elective abortion.
During this whole process, which was the hardest time I've ever gone through in my life (yes, I've had a good life, but still), I was unutterably grateful that no one in the process who might have considered themselves to have a say -- my husband, my doctor, the state -- did anything but support me in my decisions.
Since then, I've never thought about it as "my body, my choice," although of course that's a valid way to think of it. But for me it's this: I'm the one who carried this child in my body, under my heart, who endured weeks of nausea for his sake; who else but me would love him (and me, and our family) enough to be able to make these kinds of painful decisions for all of us?
And if you don't think that, why the hell are you letting me have babies at all?
About nine years ago, I made the decision to have an abortion at about twelve weeks. (Sometimes, at the time, I said I hadn't made the decision, because I hadn't made the final final decision -- see below -- but I had. I had scheduled the hospital appointment and everything.) Because of the timing, the specialist ob-gyn who had been called in said that it was better to do it at about fifteen weeks. (I actually still don't really understand this part, which I feel like I've never heard people talk about otherwise -- his explanation was that it to do with the way the uterus thickens at about this time, so it's not great to do some methods after twelve weeks and other methods are easier after fifteen weeks.)
It turned out that in the end, I did not have an elective abortion. My unborn child, a little boy, died the week before I was scheduled to go into the hospital, for the same reasons that I had chosen to have an abortion in the first place. We found out during an ultrasound when the doctor was about to do the confirmatory testing for us to finalize our choice. I did go into the hospital the day I was scheduled and had the procedure I was scheduled to have, only I am lucky enough (and I mean that unironically -- it made things much easier at the time as well) that I can talk about it as an induction of a missed miscarriage instead of an elective abortion.
During this whole process, which was the hardest time I've ever gone through in my life (yes, I've had a good life, but still), I was unutterably grateful that no one in the process who might have considered themselves to have a say -- my husband, my doctor, the state -- did anything but support me in my decisions.
Since then, I've never thought about it as "my body, my choice," although of course that's a valid way to think of it. But for me it's this: I'm the one who carried this child in my body, under my heart, who endured weeks of nausea for his sake; who else but me would love him (and me, and our family) enough to be able to make these kinds of painful decisions for all of us?
And if you don't think that, why the hell are you letting me have babies at all?
(no subject)
Apr. 11th, 2022 10:19 pmI am hoping that I am now Done with the time-intensive parts of April church, which were a) giving a talk at church (this was very time-consuming, because although I now have deconstructed the process of how to give a very effective talk at church, I have to rehearse a lot and go through a lot of drafts to smooth it out) b) the "Easter concert" that was last night, and c) planning the Easter music for actual Easter.
I honestly don't really understand why people thought doing an Easter concert was a good idea, given that we sort of scraped by on the Christmas concert even though everyone had a good time. But okay. Except that the two stars, whom I guess I have called Operatic Music Guy Tenor and Smooth Music Guy Tenor before, both got super sick (not with covid -- one of them lost his voice and the other had a flareup of long-standing heart issues) and couldn't participate. (Smooth Music Guy Tenor was doing a trio of "Savior, Redeemer" with me on violin and our other friend on piano.) The lady running it is... umm... very intense, and she managed to persuade another of our mutual music-friends to sing in the place of Smooth Music Guy Tenor. The catch here is that the new singer was still in a walker because of a bike accident she had a couple of months back (which is why she hadn't been previously asked to sing). I would have said no! But she didn't say no, except that she couldn't walk to the stand. And then the special mike she had (because she couldn't walk to the stand with the usual mike) malfunctioned so this poor woman was singing unmiked to the entire audience. Fortunately she has a voice that carries pretty well, even if it's not super operatic, and I did a lot of volume modulation so as not to drown her out, but that was exciting. The good part for me is that all my brainpower was going towards how I was going to make sure that I wasn't drowning her out, with none left for being nervous, which usually I would be and which usually makes me play noticeably worse in concert than in rehearsal. But anyway, everyone had a good time and it went just well enough that they'll probably do it again next year, joy.
(The lady running it also sang, and... I... feel that someone needs to tell her that while it was fine ten years ago (the last time I heard her sing), she kind of needs to not sing at these events anymore.) (Hilariously, I'm pretty sure she was not asked for the Christmas concert.)
I am also super pleased that the music drama for this year ended both happily and in a way where I don't have to do anything, lol. So this was unforced error on my part -- I had agreed with Awesome Alto that she would sing "Savior Redeemer" at our ward at Easter and I would accompany her on piano, and then I had suggested the same song to Smooth Music Guy Tenor to sing with me at the fireside without thinking about it at all, and once I did, AAlto objected at doing the same one. Well, she found another song, but couldn't find it in the appropriate key, and there is no way I can transpose music on piano, especially (for me) difficult music like this was. Fortunately, Amazing Organist was just standing around randomly waiting for his wife after church (he's very often traveling for work, so this was doubly fortuitious that he was around this month at all), and I was like "I bet AO can do it, he's right there, let's ask him!" and dragged her over, and AO was like "Oh, I've played this before, and sure, I can't transpose it from the music but I can do it by ear." (I told you he was amazing. Gosh. I can do that on violin but there is NO WAY on piano.) So they rehearsed and now not only are we all set, I also don't have to spend all my spare time learning a new piano piece this week, which as you can imagine I am very excited about ;)
(If you've been following all my vague references, you may well be asking, why didn't Awesome Alto sing "Savior Redeemer" for the fireside? She could only sing it in another key, and this was like a few days beforehand so our pianist, who was not AO, wouldn't have had time to learn in the different key.) (Though I would have preferred it as the violin part is easier in the other key, lol.) And also she wasn't super excited about singing for it so might have just said a flat no anyway.)
...Very fortunately D. is on the ball with regard to, like, buying chocolate and hard-boiling Easter eggs for the kids to color and such, because that was not even on my radar.
Also Hugo nominations are out! I've read the short stories now, starting in on the novelettes, and at some point will Post My Decided Opinions, and have a couple of novels queued from the library. Anyway, She Who Became the Sun and The Last Graduate are on the novel and YA ballots respectively, which is really all I wanted :)
I honestly don't really understand why people thought doing an Easter concert was a good idea, given that we sort of scraped by on the Christmas concert even though everyone had a good time. But okay. Except that the two stars, whom I guess I have called Operatic Music Guy Tenor and Smooth Music Guy Tenor before, both got super sick (not with covid -- one of them lost his voice and the other had a flareup of long-standing heart issues) and couldn't participate. (Smooth Music Guy Tenor was doing a trio of "Savior, Redeemer" with me on violin and our other friend on piano.) The lady running it is... umm... very intense, and she managed to persuade another of our mutual music-friends to sing in the place of Smooth Music Guy Tenor. The catch here is that the new singer was still in a walker because of a bike accident she had a couple of months back (which is why she hadn't been previously asked to sing). I would have said no! But she didn't say no, except that she couldn't walk to the stand. And then the special mike she had (because she couldn't walk to the stand with the usual mike) malfunctioned so this poor woman was singing unmiked to the entire audience. Fortunately she has a voice that carries pretty well, even if it's not super operatic, and I did a lot of volume modulation so as not to drown her out, but that was exciting. The good part for me is that all my brainpower was going towards how I was going to make sure that I wasn't drowning her out, with none left for being nervous, which usually I would be and which usually makes me play noticeably worse in concert than in rehearsal. But anyway, everyone had a good time and it went just well enough that they'll probably do it again next year, joy.
(The lady running it also sang, and... I... feel that someone needs to tell her that while it was fine ten years ago (the last time I heard her sing), she kind of needs to not sing at these events anymore.) (Hilariously, I'm pretty sure she was not asked for the Christmas concert.)
I am also super pleased that the music drama for this year ended both happily and in a way where I don't have to do anything, lol. So this was unforced error on my part -- I had agreed with Awesome Alto that she would sing "Savior Redeemer" at our ward at Easter and I would accompany her on piano, and then I had suggested the same song to Smooth Music Guy Tenor to sing with me at the fireside without thinking about it at all, and once I did, AAlto objected at doing the same one. Well, she found another song, but couldn't find it in the appropriate key, and there is no way I can transpose music on piano, especially (for me) difficult music like this was. Fortunately, Amazing Organist was just standing around randomly waiting for his wife after church (he's very often traveling for work, so this was doubly fortuitious that he was around this month at all), and I was like "I bet AO can do it, he's right there, let's ask him!" and dragged her over, and AO was like "Oh, I've played this before, and sure, I can't transpose it from the music but I can do it by ear." (I told you he was amazing. Gosh. I can do that on violin but there is NO WAY on piano.) So they rehearsed and now not only are we all set, I also don't have to spend all my spare time learning a new piano piece this week, which as you can imagine I am very excited about ;)
(If you've been following all my vague references, you may well be asking, why didn't Awesome Alto sing "Savior Redeemer" for the fireside? She could only sing it in another key, and this was like a few days beforehand so our pianist, who was not AO, wouldn't have had time to learn in the different key.) (Though I would have preferred it as the violin part is easier in the other key, lol.) And also she wasn't super excited about singing for it so might have just said a flat no anyway.)
...Very fortunately D. is on the ball with regard to, like, buying chocolate and hard-boiling Easter eggs for the kids to color and such, because that was not even on my radar.
Also Hugo nominations are out! I've read the short stories now, starting in on the novelettes, and at some point will Post My Decided Opinions, and have a couple of novels queued from the library. Anyway, She Who Became the Sun and The Last Graduate are on the novel and YA ballots respectively, which is really all I wanted :)
(no subject)
Jan. 17th, 2022 08:59 pmSince you had so many great ideas for books for E to read, I am consulting you yet again! E and I went over her list of book categories tonight and there are two more categories that I need help with (and a third I want to complain about but would also welcome help with) :
-Category: vampires
-Category: book about superheroes
-Category to complain about: #1 on NYT list
As before, the categories are not super strict; her teacher is very flexible (more flexible than I am, lol); if there is any way one can reasonably argue for it, I am willing to count it. I know there have got to be offbeat vampire or superhero books I can't think of right now. (Sadly, E is not old enough to read The Dragon Waiting.)
I did go to amazon and snag a paperback of Sarah Rees Brennan's Team Human, which is apparently out of print (I... thought I read this?? But I can't find any record of it anywhere, the library doesn't have it and I don't have an e-copy or any other sort, and I remember nothing about it, so maybe not), and we have Tanith Lee's Red as Blood if it comes down to it. But there must be others, right? That might be more middle-school-ish and therefore probably make more sense to E?
Superheroes I just have no clue! ...except that I just put a library hold on How Mirka Got Her Sword for the graphic novel category; does Mirka count as a superhero? (I have never read this and am looking forward to it!)
I am also massively side-eyeing the #1 New York Times category. E has rejected rereading the Harry Potter books (even though rereading is allowed); maybe I get her a Sue Grafton book, because I went through the lists for the last ten years and to be fair I didn't look super closely, but I can't find anything besides Harry Potter that's remotely suitable except maybe Grafton. I am not giving her Jodi Picoult, for crying out loud. Any suggestions there would be very welcome, though that's harder to weasel around, I think. Maybe I should work on her Harry Potter reluctance. ETA: I live under a rock and did not know there was a middle school category?? Yay!
-Category: vampires
-Category: book about superheroes
-Category to complain about: #1 on NYT list
As before, the categories are not super strict; her teacher is very flexible (more flexible than I am, lol); if there is any way one can reasonably argue for it, I am willing to count it. I know there have got to be offbeat vampire or superhero books I can't think of right now. (Sadly, E is not old enough to read The Dragon Waiting.)
I did go to amazon and snag a paperback of Sarah Rees Brennan's Team Human, which is apparently out of print (I... thought I read this?? But I can't find any record of it anywhere, the library doesn't have it and I don't have an e-copy or any other sort, and I remember nothing about it, so maybe not), and we have Tanith Lee's Red as Blood if it comes down to it. But there must be others, right? That might be more middle-school-ish and therefore probably make more sense to E?
Superheroes I just have no clue! ...except that I just put a library hold on How Mirka Got Her Sword for the graphic novel category; does Mirka count as a superhero? (I have never read this and am looking forward to it!)
I am also massively side-eyeing the #1 New York Times category. E has rejected rereading the Harry Potter books (even though rereading is allowed); maybe I get her a Sue Grafton book, because I went through the lists for the last ten years and to be fair I didn't look super closely, but I can't find anything besides Harry Potter that's remotely suitable except maybe Grafton. I am not giving her Jodi Picoult, for crying out loud. Any suggestions there would be very welcome, though that's harder to weasel around, I think. Maybe I should work on her Harry Potter reluctance. ETA: I live under a rock and did not know there was a middle school category?? Yay!
(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2022 09:23 pm-So the big thing I'm doing right now is watching Bablyon 5 for the first time via the rewatch on selenak's DW, which went from "I'm mildly interested, guess I'll watch further since ase and selenak really seem to like it" ("Midnight on the Firing Line") to "Yeah, I'm vaguely invested now" ("Mind War") to "OMG WHAT EVEN IS THIS SHOW MUST FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON" ("Signs and Portents"). Still in S1, it would be easy to join the watch if you wanted to!
-I realized over winter break that E.'s social skills are... well, they're probably reasonably okay for a first grader. (Note that E. is in sixth grade.) Anyway, they need a lot of work and we haven't been working on them explicitly. So we've started doing ten minutes every day of social skills work, scripting out conversations and responses to things, and techniques like mirroring (I'm not sure if there's a technical term for this, but basically, if someone asks you how your winter break was, asking them how theirs was), and troubleshooting responses I hear when she plays virtual Minecraft with friends. She reported that a kid in her class asked her how her break was, and she said fine, and then she asked them how theirs was, and they said fine, which she said was better than she would have done before :P
I am now running into the issue that she doesn't want to try practicing conversational work with kids her own age, which, fair, they are on a whole different playing field than she is, so I'm asking her to try short conversations with younger kids at her school. It's a good thing her school is tiny. I have no idea how high school is going to work.
I know I should probably get her into therapy, but therapy is... really hard to find right now, and also I think honestly I've done so much analyzing of socialization myself that I can provide a fair amount of that; what I think she really needs is practice, and that's the thing that's hard because unlike most kids (including the other ASD kid whose parents I'm friends with) she doesn't seem to get a whole lot of intrinsic enjoyment out of socialization. I think she does enjoy being with other people, but it's more of a... second-order effect? Like, she likes the kinds of things she can do with other kids, like Minecraft, but actually talking to the other people (other than exchange of information about their Minecraft missions, or whatever) is sort of a necessary evil for her (and yes, we've talked about how socialization will make it easier for her to get the things she actually does want, like friends to play Minecraft with -- but it's another layer to have to deal with). But she does really like playing with A., and they have a lot of hilarious fun times together, it's just that I think she needs to be very very close to someone to have that kind of relationship, and there's no one else who really fits that for her right now.
I think she is progressing, though! This year was the first year we have had zero reports of blowups at school (down from about weekly last year) -- which is partially better regulation, but also seems to be in large part because she has finally internalized that she should maybe care what other people think. Which is funny because I feel like everyone else who's a parent of an almost-teenager daughter is trying to get their kid not to care as much what everyone else thinks, and I'm like, "no, care more! Care enough not to throw loud obnoxious tantrums in front of them, at least!"
-A. is expressing displeasure with the extracurriculars he is either doing or trying out right now, that is, karate (which he begged me to sign him up for last year) and math circle (which he was super engaged with and fascinated by during the zoom meeting, and then declared he didn't want to do it). He says he wants to do basketball, but unfortunately by the time I signed him up, we were on the wait list. The neighbor girl did get into basketball (girls' basketball isn't quite as full up), but judging from how A. behaves when they play together, I don't know how much he would actually like it.
On the other hand, we have come to an agreement that he doesn't have to go to karate on Wednesdays (it's supposed to be 2-3x a week; he goes on Fridays about once every other week *sigh*) if he takes a walk with me, and these are lovely and hilarious and we have great conversations where we talk about what animals have only two legs, and he tells me his big plans for building a combination see-saw/slide, and we see parts of the neighborhood we've driven through but never walked through, so that's been lovely :D
Besides his inexplicable hatred of extracurriculars, he is just... it's like he got parceled all of the emotional intelligence, both his own fair share and E's as well. In first grade, the age at which his classmates totally spazz out a lot, he's a total pro at meeting E's often-extremely-emotional outbursts with a calm, non-confrontational, patient response, which is just crazy to me. I mean, yes, he is also a total pro at winding her up, don't get me wrong, and I'm betting that a bit of his patience is him figuring out that if she's the one who blows up that she's more likely to get in trouble -- he's not 100% an angel. But kind of amazing for a first grader!
ase and selenak really seem to like it" ("Midnight on the Firing Line") to "Yeah, I'm vaguely invested now" ("Mind War") to "OMG WHAT EVEN IS THIS SHOW MUST FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON" ("Signs and Portents"). Still in S1, it would be easy to join the watch if you wanted to!-I realized over winter break that E.'s social skills are... well, they're probably reasonably okay for a first grader. (Note that E. is in sixth grade.) Anyway, they need a lot of work and we haven't been working on them explicitly. So we've started doing ten minutes every day of social skills work, scripting out conversations and responses to things, and techniques like mirroring (I'm not sure if there's a technical term for this, but basically, if someone asks you how your winter break was, asking them how theirs was), and troubleshooting responses I hear when she plays virtual Minecraft with friends. She reported that a kid in her class asked her how her break was, and she said fine, and then she asked them how theirs was, and they said fine, which she said was better than she would have done before :P
I am now running into the issue that she doesn't want to try practicing conversational work with kids her own age, which, fair, they are on a whole different playing field than she is, so I'm asking her to try short conversations with younger kids at her school. It's a good thing her school is tiny. I have no idea how high school is going to work.
I know I should probably get her into therapy, but therapy is... really hard to find right now, and also I think honestly I've done so much analyzing of socialization myself that I can provide a fair amount of that; what I think she really needs is practice, and that's the thing that's hard because unlike most kids (including the other ASD kid whose parents I'm friends with) she doesn't seem to get a whole lot of intrinsic enjoyment out of socialization. I think she does enjoy being with other people, but it's more of a... second-order effect? Like, she likes the kinds of things she can do with other kids, like Minecraft, but actually talking to the other people (other than exchange of information about their Minecraft missions, or whatever) is sort of a necessary evil for her (and yes, we've talked about how socialization will make it easier for her to get the things she actually does want, like friends to play Minecraft with -- but it's another layer to have to deal with). But she does really like playing with A., and they have a lot of hilarious fun times together, it's just that I think she needs to be very very close to someone to have that kind of relationship, and there's no one else who really fits that for her right now.
I think she is progressing, though! This year was the first year we have had zero reports of blowups at school (down from about weekly last year) -- which is partially better regulation, but also seems to be in large part because she has finally internalized that she should maybe care what other people think. Which is funny because I feel like everyone else who's a parent of an almost-teenager daughter is trying to get their kid not to care as much what everyone else thinks, and I'm like, "no, care more! Care enough not to throw loud obnoxious tantrums in front of them, at least!"
-A. is expressing displeasure with the extracurriculars he is either doing or trying out right now, that is, karate (which he begged me to sign him up for last year) and math circle (which he was super engaged with and fascinated by during the zoom meeting, and then declared he didn't want to do it). He says he wants to do basketball, but unfortunately by the time I signed him up, we were on the wait list. The neighbor girl did get into basketball (girls' basketball isn't quite as full up), but judging from how A. behaves when they play together, I don't know how much he would actually like it.
On the other hand, we have come to an agreement that he doesn't have to go to karate on Wednesdays (it's supposed to be 2-3x a week; he goes on Fridays about once every other week *sigh*) if he takes a walk with me, and these are lovely and hilarious and we have great conversations where we talk about what animals have only two legs, and he tells me his big plans for building a combination see-saw/slide, and we see parts of the neighborhood we've driven through but never walked through, so that's been lovely :D
Besides his inexplicable hatred of extracurriculars, he is just... it's like he got parceled all of the emotional intelligence, both his own fair share and E's as well. In first grade, the age at which his classmates totally spazz out a lot, he's a total pro at meeting E's often-extremely-emotional outbursts with a calm, non-confrontational, patient response, which is just crazy to me. I mean, yes, he is also a total pro at winding her up, don't get me wrong, and I'm betting that a bit of his patience is him figuring out that if she's the one who blows up that she's more likely to get in trouble -- he's not 100% an angel. But kind of amazing for a first grader!
Christmas and Yuletide
Dec. 27th, 2021 10:10 amMerry Christmas and happy Yuletide, two days late :)
We had a lovely Christmas. Christmas Eve we went to D's church and got to do candles for Silent Night, which E. remembered from pre-pandemic and A. didn't. A. got legos and E. got a board game which entertained them basically the whole day (E likes to play board games with other people less than she likes to read the rules and play games with herself). It turned out great that we got home two days early, as we had time to go grocery shopping before Christmas and had a proper Christmas dinner instead of sandwiches in the car, which had been our previous plan and which in retrospect was probably... not the best idea. We'd planned for D to roast a chicken, but when D got to the store, he called me and we had a conversation that went something like this (okay, I probably was not quite as vocal in real life):
D: They're out of chicken, but they have duck. Want me to get duck?
Me: ???? I don't really understand a world in which this is a question you have to ask?? OF COURSE I WANT DUCK. If I'd known they had duck I would have asked you to get duck! YAY DUCK
D: *laughs at me, gets the duck*
Anyway, D roasted the duck (he is getting good at roasting things) and it was wonderful, and we talked to my family and D's family on phone/facetime, and E was able to play Minecraft with (K/B/'s)D. And then on Sunday we had the last of our musical church performances, and they went... much better than we had any right to expect, really <3
AND I got some lovely lovely Yuletide presents and I love them! tl;dr one-line teasers:
1. 16th-C lovely arranged-marriage friendship plus murder; don't need to know canon
2. The Duke of Alba in (metaphorical) opera buffa
3. 18th-C writing my ships of everyone/music
4. Madness: Gram Tillerman is the best
5. Madness: brilliantly allusive poetry fusion of Wallace Stevens and Frederick the Great
First, my gift, in 16th C Hapsburg RPF, about the teenage Margaret of Parma and her arranged marriage to Alessandro de' Medici (a bastard and a black man and the first Duke of Florence), and his canonical murder. No canon knowledge needed, as it's explained in the story. Margaret and Alessandro are both awesomesauce, and in the story they have such a lovely (and historically plausible) friendship that it just makes me so happy. And the scenes with Margaret and Alessandro's mistress (which are much more complex and interesting than one might expect from a wife/mistress conversation) are also pure gold. Definitely worth reading even if you don't know anything about the period! <-- me, mostly
Murder in Florence (8977 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Taddea Malaspina, Taddea Malaspina/Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici & Ippolito de' Medici
Characters: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Taddea Malaspina, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, Cosimo I. de' Medici, Françoise de Lannoy, Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Caterina de' Medici, Ippolito de' Medici
Additional Tags: Murder Mystery, Coming of Age, Arranged Marriage, Illegitimacy, POV Female Character, Politics, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Male-Female Friendship, Misses Clause Challenge, Chromatic Yuletide, Renaissance Era, yule be first, Yuletide, Yuletide 2021
Summary:
I also got a treat in the same fandom! Now THIS one is about Barbara Blomberg, the mother of Emperor Charles V's illegitimate heroic son Don Juan of Austria, who managed to fox both the Duke of Alba (yes, THAT Duke of Alba) and Philip II! If you are a fan of Don Carlo(s) and/or Les vêpres siciliennes, which I know a few of you are, and would be interested in a tale where the Duke of Alba is starring in an opera buffa instead of an opera seria, this is the story for you :D (The historical Don Carlos is mentioned, but only in passing, in a way where you could conceivably headcanon in the opera if you wanted.)
Bad Reputation (2778 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Barbara Blomberg & Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba & Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain
Characters: Barbara Blomberg, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens, Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain, Juan de Austria | John of Austria
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Character Study, Dark Comedy, Winning at life
Summary:
I also was pleased to get a treat in 18th C Frederician RPF, which is about the first meeting of Frederick the Great (back when he was just Prince Friedrich and his lover/best friend Katte had just been executed by his father) and his life partner/valet Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf. The most lovely thing about this story, for me, and which I think will appeal to some of you as well, is the lovely lovely descriptions of music and how both Fritz and Fredersdorf feel about music, and how they start to form a bond because of the shared way they feel about it. (Also, Fredersdorf is greeeeeat and this story leans into that.) I don't think you need to know canon except what I've just said.
A Prussian Christmas Tale (7430 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE Frederician RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Curt Christoph von Schwerin
Additional Tags: First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Christmas, Yuletide Treat
Summary:
Then, two treats in Madness! The first is a small treat about Gram Tillerman, whom I love very much, and I was so happy to get something that centered on her, especially since the books are more centered on the kids, and she's such a fascinating character.
I know who you are (439 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Abigail "Gram" Tillerman
Additional Tags: Character Study
Summary:
The second is a riff on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird applied to Frederick the Great, Voltaire, and Frederick's brother Prince Henry, and his friend/friend-with-benefits Lehndorff, and I totally did not expect this cracky, touching, allusive brilliance. Unfortunately I think it might be pretty hard to follow if you didn't already know something about the canon. (Though if you've read some of the Frederician fics, that might be enough for some of it -- e.g. if you've read the Voltaire fics in the fandom, that would probably be enough to follow the Voltaire parts.) But it's still lovely even if you don't get all the references :D
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Frederick (781 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Voltaire (Writer), Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802), Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff
Additional Tags: Poetry
Summary:
We had a lovely Christmas. Christmas Eve we went to D's church and got to do candles for Silent Night, which E. remembered from pre-pandemic and A. didn't. A. got legos and E. got a board game which entertained them basically the whole day (E likes to play board games with other people less than she likes to read the rules and play games with herself). It turned out great that we got home two days early, as we had time to go grocery shopping before Christmas and had a proper Christmas dinner instead of sandwiches in the car, which had been our previous plan and which in retrospect was probably... not the best idea. We'd planned for D to roast a chicken, but when D got to the store, he called me and we had a conversation that went something like this (okay, I probably was not quite as vocal in real life):
D: They're out of chicken, but they have duck. Want me to get duck?
Me: ???? I don't really understand a world in which this is a question you have to ask?? OF COURSE I WANT DUCK. If I'd known they had duck I would have asked you to get duck! YAY DUCK
D: *laughs at me, gets the duck*
Anyway, D roasted the duck (he is getting good at roasting things) and it was wonderful, and we talked to my family and D's family on phone/facetime, and E was able to play Minecraft with (K/B/'s)D. And then on Sunday we had the last of our musical church performances, and they went... much better than we had any right to expect, really <3
AND I got some lovely lovely Yuletide presents and I love them! tl;dr one-line teasers:
1. 16th-C lovely arranged-marriage friendship plus murder; don't need to know canon
2. The Duke of Alba in (metaphorical) opera buffa
3. 18th-C writing my ships of everyone/music
4. Madness: Gram Tillerman is the best
5. Madness: brilliantly allusive poetry fusion of Wallace Stevens and Frederick the Great
First, my gift, in 16th C Hapsburg RPF, about the teenage Margaret of Parma and her arranged marriage to Alessandro de' Medici (a bastard and a black man and the first Duke of Florence), and his canonical murder. No canon knowledge needed, as it's explained in the story. Margaret and Alessandro are both awesomesauce, and in the story they have such a lovely (and historically plausible) friendship that it just makes me so happy. And the scenes with Margaret and Alessandro's mistress (which are much more complex and interesting than one might expect from a wife/mistress conversation) are also pure gold. Definitely worth reading even if you don't know anything about the period! <-- me, mostly
Murder in Florence (8977 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici/Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Taddea Malaspina, Taddea Malaspina/Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma & Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici & Ippolito de' Medici
Characters: Alessandro "il Moro" de' Medici, Lorenzo "Lorenzino" di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Taddea Malaspina, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, Cosimo I. de' Medici, Françoise de Lannoy, Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, Margherita di Parma | Margaret of Parma, Caterina de' Medici, Ippolito de' Medici
Additional Tags: Murder Mystery, Coming of Age, Arranged Marriage, Illegitimacy, POV Female Character, Politics, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Male-Female Friendship, Misses Clause Challenge, Chromatic Yuletide, Renaissance Era, yule be first, Yuletide, Yuletide 2021
Summary:
When Alessandro de' Medici is murdered, his teenage bride Margaret of Austria may be one of the few people sincerely mourning him - and determined to find out the truth. For the killer is one of Alessandro's closest friends, and Alessandro, the first Duke of Florence, both a bastard of uncertain parentage and a black man, had more than his share of enemies...
I also got a treat in the same fandom! Now THIS one is about Barbara Blomberg, the mother of Emperor Charles V's illegitimate heroic son Don Juan of Austria, who managed to fox both the Duke of Alba (yes, THAT Duke of Alba) and Philip II! If you are a fan of Don Carlo(s) and/or Les vêpres siciliennes, which I know a few of you are, and would be interested in a tale where the Duke of Alba is starring in an opera buffa instead of an opera seria, this is the story for you :D (The historical Don Carlos is mentioned, but only in passing, in a way where you could conceivably headcanon in the opera if you wanted.)
Bad Reputation (2778 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 16th Century CE Hapsburg RPF, 16th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Barbara Blomberg & Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba & Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain
Characters: Barbara Blomberg, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo III Duque de Alba, Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens, Felipe II de España | Philip II of Spain, Juan de Austria | John of Austria
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Character Study, Dark Comedy, Winning at life
Summary:
The Duke of Alba might be King Philip's most feared general and the terror of the Netherlands, but even he is an utter loss on how to deal with one woman: Barbara Blomberg, former lover of the late Emperor Charles V., mother of Spain's latest national hero - and determined to live her life exactly the way she wants to.
I also was pleased to get a treat in 18th C Frederician RPF, which is about the first meeting of Frederick the Great (back when he was just Prince Friedrich and his lover/best friend Katte had just been executed by his father) and his life partner/valet Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf. The most lovely thing about this story, for me, and which I think will appeal to some of you as well, is the lovely lovely descriptions of music and how both Fritz and Fredersdorf feel about music, and how they start to form a bond because of the shared way they feel about it. (Also, Fredersdorf is greeeeeat and this story leans into that.) I don't think you need to know canon except what I've just said.
A Prussian Christmas Tale (7430 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE Frederician RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Curt Christoph von Schwerin
Additional Tags: First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Christmas, Yuletide Treat
Summary:
Having survived a year of imprisonment and haunted by the death of Katte, Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia is determined to focus on nothing but ambition, and shut out all sentiment. But the Christmas of 1731 has a surprise in store for him: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf...
Then, two treats in Madness! The first is a small treat about Gram Tillerman, whom I love very much, and I was so happy to get something that centered on her, especially since the books are more centered on the kids, and she's such a fascinating character.
I know who you are (439 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Abigail "Gram" Tillerman
Additional Tags: Character Study
Summary:
A brief reflection on Abigail Tillerman as her grandchildren invade her life.
The second is a riff on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird applied to Frederick the Great, Voltaire, and Frederick's brother Prince Henry, and his friend/friend-with-benefits Lehndorff, and I totally did not expect this cracky, touching, allusive brilliance. Unfortunately I think it might be pretty hard to follow if you didn't already know something about the canon. (Though if you've read some of the Frederician fics, that might be enough for some of it -- e.g. if you've read the Voltaire fics in the fandom, that would probably be enough to follow the Voltaire parts.) But it's still lovely even if you don't get all the references :D
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Frederick (781 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Voltaire (Writer), Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802), Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff
Additional Tags: Poetry
Summary:
I was of three minds.
(no subject)
Dec. 24th, 2021 01:21 pmEveryone in my family-of-origin had agreed months ago that going on cross-country plane flights this Christmas was not a good idea (I hate flying at Christmas at the best of times, but we usually suck it up to see family), so instead we'd made plans to hang out with my best friend and her family for the first time in two years and go skiing over winter break to try to reprise a really excellent trip we had right before covid. But sadly a combination of raised omicron risk and weather foxed all those plans (as I know many others' plans have fallen through as well, this year) -- though we did end up going skiing by ourselves for a couple of days before the marked probability of ice on the road in another day forced us out too. I suppose the upside of this is that I'll be around on the 25th to read and comment on Yuletide gifts instead of in a car (the original plan), although as usual for me, it will probably be evening my time before that happens :)
(Skiing was great the first day and somewhat miserable the second day -- we were only out for a couple of hours -- because it was raining the entire time. Although the nice thing was that A. got a ski lesson that second day (we weren't able to book him for one the first day), and he is exactly the right age to learn quickly, and the instructor was excellent.)
Our situation is also significantly better than that of my extended family, who (because my uncle is an extreme optimist, I guess) had planned a family reunion revolving around going skiing in Canada (we had bowed out of that trip quite a few months ago, what with the uncertainty in when vaccines would be available for kids and also international travel uncertainty over Christmas in a pandemic) and just canceled the reunion yesterday. Some of the younger cousins are still talking about going up to use the houses. (I hope my cousin with a one-month-old baby doesn't go up, which the last email mentioned might be the case. Pandemic and risk to child aside -- not to minimize those, but honestly my first reaction was, I think I'd have murdered my husband if he went for a ski vacation most of a week when our first child was a month old.)
Also, here, have some things I wrote almost two weeks ago now (so, before people started getting worried about omicron) but never posted:
-I think I forgot to mention that one of the things that has made December busy was (covid) shots for everyone! (We'd gotten flu shots a month earlier.) Really happy I was able to get a booster at a convenient location (closest pharmacy to our house!) in the morning; kiddos also got their second shots last week at a convenient time for us (and I scheduled it at the pharmacy across the street from our favorite Indian takeout place, so we had some to celebrate). YAY all around. Kiddos also had zero side effects, not even any tenderness at the site, so I'm really really pleased about that. I had pretty severe flu-like chills the evening of, to the point where I was regretting my life choices for about ten minutes before I managed to fall asleep. I might even have avoided or at least been unconscious for the chills had I gone to bed when I actually started feeling tired like a smart person, or at least snagged an ibuprofen on my way to bed, but, well. The next day I felt similarly to how I felt after my second shot -- approximately how I feel when I have a reasonably bad cold. I felt more tired and less brainless than after the second shot -- it actually felt a bit less like feeling actively sick and more like my body had been through something that it now needed to rest from.
-I gave E Elatsoe to read and she really liked it! Score! The way Elatsoe codes as much younger than her canon age was a plus for E., and she also didn't mind (somewhat to my surprise) the interludes that didn't necessarily contribute to the through-line plot. (I also ended up moving Elatsoe much higher on my Lodestar voting list as a result -- to #2. I realized the only other books I would give E to read of this set were Raybearer, later, and Deadly Education, much later.)
-Everyone at church has been SUPER nice about my annoying and chivvying music emails. Music Guy (henceforth to be called Music Guy Baritone), after the third email where I was attempting to re-schedule his family (in this third case because I didn't understand his previous email, but we cleared that up) sent me a lovely note where he thanked me for organizing everything and how difficult he knew it was. Man, you know, my ward has tensions sometimes but overall does NOT do church politics well, everyone just is WAY too nice for that <3333333 (I also think our structure of callings, by which everyone plays musical chairs with different callings every few years, contributes -- Music Guy noted in his email that he'd had to be the music director before, so he knew how hard it can be, and it's much easier in general to be patient with someone else's failings when you've done that same job and know how tough it is!)
-Then there was the screwball comedy-like communications fail where I thought the kids' program had volunteered to sing without telling me, while they thought I was telling them to sing. It all worked itself out and now everyone thinks it's hilarious but wow self, next time up your communications game.
-That stake event where we did not have a choir to offer up? NO ONE had a choir, it turns out, for the obvious reasons. The only choir number was from a group from... the local Unitarian church?? (*) I find this utterly hilarious. (Also super weird! For another church it would not be weird, but my church is... usually very not good at playing well with others in our own space. I blame the stake music director for playing well with others!) Also there was the six-member group (the only actual group from my church more than three people) I managed to rustle up from my ward, where all were vaccinated and one member helpfully offered up the name "Safe Sextet." (...We did not go with that.) So Music Guy Baritone and Operatic Music Guy Tenor (who moved into the other ward, traitor!! Only I can't call him that because he very super nicely -- have I mentioned everyone is super nice -- helped out when we were going to be short a tenor) both did several numbers either solo or together, plus a couple of numbers with Smooth Music Guy Tenor (whose voice I am in love with and who ALSO moved into the other ward). But it all went super well and Awesome Organist Guy played the organ and everyone was so happy and, I mean, Music Guy Baritone and Operatic Music Guy Tenor and Smooth Music Guy Tenor are all completely excellent so no one was actually opposed to listening to a program that was all them.
-but I am very very happy to be past that particular event, I think actually last week was the big week rehearsal-wise and now we've rehearsed almost everything, yay, and HOW GLAD are all of the music people that we don't have a ward fireside/evening music program on top of all of this? SO GLAD
-how am I dealing with all of this? yes, by writing more (short) Yuletide fic and kind of feeling amused at the process by which I'm like "yeah, that prompt is great and I want to read it and definitely not able to write that myself" to "...but what if..." Also, betas are the best!
(*) Since I wrote this, I found out that it is the local Unity church, which is distinct from Unitarian, which I actually did not know before last week!
(Skiing was great the first day and somewhat miserable the second day -- we were only out for a couple of hours -- because it was raining the entire time. Although the nice thing was that A. got a ski lesson that second day (we weren't able to book him for one the first day), and he is exactly the right age to learn quickly, and the instructor was excellent.)
Our situation is also significantly better than that of my extended family, who (because my uncle is an extreme optimist, I guess) had planned a family reunion revolving around going skiing in Canada (we had bowed out of that trip quite a few months ago, what with the uncertainty in when vaccines would be available for kids and also international travel uncertainty over Christmas in a pandemic) and just canceled the reunion yesterday. Some of the younger cousins are still talking about going up to use the houses. (I hope my cousin with a one-month-old baby doesn't go up, which the last email mentioned might be the case. Pandemic and risk to child aside -- not to minimize those, but honestly my first reaction was, I think I'd have murdered my husband if he went for a ski vacation most of a week when our first child was a month old.)
Also, here, have some things I wrote almost two weeks ago now (so, before people started getting worried about omicron) but never posted:
-I think I forgot to mention that one of the things that has made December busy was (covid) shots for everyone! (We'd gotten flu shots a month earlier.) Really happy I was able to get a booster at a convenient location (closest pharmacy to our house!) in the morning; kiddos also got their second shots last week at a convenient time for us (and I scheduled it at the pharmacy across the street from our favorite Indian takeout place, so we had some to celebrate). YAY all around. Kiddos also had zero side effects, not even any tenderness at the site, so I'm really really pleased about that. I had pretty severe flu-like chills the evening of, to the point where I was regretting my life choices for about ten minutes before I managed to fall asleep. I might even have avoided or at least been unconscious for the chills had I gone to bed when I actually started feeling tired like a smart person, or at least snagged an ibuprofen on my way to bed, but, well. The next day I felt similarly to how I felt after my second shot -- approximately how I feel when I have a reasonably bad cold. I felt more tired and less brainless than after the second shot -- it actually felt a bit less like feeling actively sick and more like my body had been through something that it now needed to rest from.
-I gave E Elatsoe to read and she really liked it! Score! The way Elatsoe codes as much younger than her canon age was a plus for E., and she also didn't mind (somewhat to my surprise) the interludes that didn't necessarily contribute to the through-line plot. (I also ended up moving Elatsoe much higher on my Lodestar voting list as a result -- to #2. I realized the only other books I would give E to read of this set were Raybearer, later, and Deadly Education, much later.)
-Everyone at church has been SUPER nice about my annoying and chivvying music emails. Music Guy (henceforth to be called Music Guy Baritone), after the third email where I was attempting to re-schedule his family (in this third case because I didn't understand his previous email, but we cleared that up) sent me a lovely note where he thanked me for organizing everything and how difficult he knew it was. Man, you know, my ward has tensions sometimes but overall does NOT do church politics well, everyone just is WAY too nice for that <3333333 (I also think our structure of callings, by which everyone plays musical chairs with different callings every few years, contributes -- Music Guy noted in his email that he'd had to be the music director before, so he knew how hard it can be, and it's much easier in general to be patient with someone else's failings when you've done that same job and know how tough it is!)
-Then there was the screwball comedy-like communications fail where I thought the kids' program had volunteered to sing without telling me, while they thought I was telling them to sing. It all worked itself out and now everyone thinks it's hilarious but wow self, next time up your communications game.
-That stake event where we did not have a choir to offer up? NO ONE had a choir, it turns out, for the obvious reasons. The only choir number was from a group from... the local Unitarian church?? (*) I find this utterly hilarious. (Also super weird! For another church it would not be weird, but my church is... usually very not good at playing well with others in our own space. I blame the stake music director for playing well with others!) Also there was the six-member group (the only actual group from my church more than three people) I managed to rustle up from my ward, where all were vaccinated and one member helpfully offered up the name "Safe Sextet." (...We did not go with that.) So Music Guy Baritone and Operatic Music Guy Tenor (who moved into the other ward, traitor!! Only I can't call him that because he very super nicely -- have I mentioned everyone is super nice -- helped out when we were going to be short a tenor) both did several numbers either solo or together, plus a couple of numbers with Smooth Music Guy Tenor (whose voice I am in love with and who ALSO moved into the other ward). But it all went super well and Awesome Organist Guy played the organ and everyone was so happy and, I mean, Music Guy Baritone and Operatic Music Guy Tenor and Smooth Music Guy Tenor are all completely excellent so no one was actually opposed to listening to a program that was all them.
-but I am very very happy to be past that particular event, I think actually last week was the big week rehearsal-wise and now we've rehearsed almost everything, yay, and HOW GLAD are all of the music people that we don't have a ward fireside/evening music program on top of all of this? SO GLAD
-how am I dealing with all of this? yes, by writing more (short) Yuletide fic and kind of feeling amused at the process by which I'm like "yeah, that prompt is great and I want to read it and definitely not able to write that myself" to "...but what if..." Also, betas are the best!
(*) Since I wrote this, I found out that it is the local Unity church, which is distinct from Unitarian, which I actually did not know before last week!
Reading rant: The Sequels
Sep. 30th, 2021 10:26 pmMy life for the past couple of weeks has been basically the sequel to my previous reading-rant posts :P So in case you were wondering how those turned out, here is an update!
1) Sequel to my post on Lucy Calkins: Turns out that at Back-to-School Night the 1st grade teacher at the swank gifted school my kids go to revealed that they use Lucy Calkins for a reading curriculum in first grade, thus leading to one of the other parents panicking (she has heard of the evils of this curriculum from her reading specialist friend), a lot of evening texting, a meeting with this parent and her friend the aforementioned reading specialist, and now I'm trying to set up a meeting with this parent and the school curriculum director. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me viscerally speaking, because my kid knows how to read and did before even starting kindergarten, but man am I glad he knew how to read already. (The other parent's child mostly knows how to read, but is not fluent.) I mostly am just trying to make sure they don't use three-cueing because come on, that's completely ridiculous. I tried asking A. about it with very leading questions and he didn't seem to think that the teacher had ever said anything that was similar to three-cueing, so I guess that's a good sign. (Although I asked him about phonics in kindergarten -- which I now know his kindergarten teacher used, because the other kids have learned it -- and he had no idea about that either, so he might just be really poor at answering those kinds of questions. But also since he knew how to read, it's possible she did phonics with other kids but not him.)
(Interestingly, the reading specialist we talked to said that older teachers often do a decent job of teaching kids to read even with an awful curriculum, because they don't feel like they have to slavishly follow the curriculum, they just mix in phonics because they know it actually works. Their Kindergarten teacher is, in fact, on the older side -- not old, but she's definitely taught for a while, and I haven't heard any complaint about parents worrying this teacher didn't teach their kid how to read well (and let's just say I have heard many complaints from other parents about various subjects and teachers, so I kind of feel like I would have heard about it).
2) Sequel to the post where I mentioned my niece's reading: to recap briefly, my niece, my sister's oldest child O., who I think is reasonably bright, had not learned how to read at the end of 2019, the year before she entered kindergarten. Mostly legit, most kids don't know how to read when they enter kindergarten, right? But she'd been exposed to "whole-word" methods with maaaaaybe a small smattering of phonics, and I was a little concerned, not about the not reading yet, but because when I played word games with her that Christmas she was displaying a somewhat worrying tendency to guess the word, and I didn't like that. We all talked about this and my sister elected to wait and see how she did in kindergarten.
Then her kindergarten year, of course, turned out to be severely disrupted by the pandemic, and I'm not sure how much she learned about anything that year. But here's the thing! My sister, and apparently her kindergarten teacher as well, thought she was actually reading.
Now it is the fall of 2021 and O. is entering first grade, and she just turned 7. At this point, my sister has realized O. does not actually know how to read. That by itself I would be okay with (I know it's still pretty common not to know how to read in first grade), but the way in which she doesn't know how to read is still this thing where she goes "I'm going to look at the first two letters and then guess what the word is." And this is good enough that she seems to be fooling her teachers that she is reading. It is not good enough, as you can imagine, that she actually likes reading, and I worry that O. looks like she's doing well enough that the underlying deficits are not going to get addressed.
If I lived near them, I'd probably buy a phonics curriculum (conuly recommended me some on the previous post, and I've forwarded them to my sister) and go over it with O. I don't, and my sister doesn't have the spoons to do something like that (even though she's doing better these days with medication). But fortunately our parents agreed to pay for a tutor, and I spent a decent chunk of time this weekend and this week researching and phone-interviewing reading tutors. (This kind of thing is also very hard for my sister these days, which is definitely autoimmune-related because she was the queen of organization and logistics before she got sick... but also I have the pedagogical interest.)
The two tutors I'd really have liked to retain from their online description weren't able to do it, sadly. (I had a brief email exchange with one of them, and I just reeeeallly liked her and although I guess I can't say for sure because I haven't talked to her at length, my sense is that I would hire her in a hot second if she were available.) The three I've interviewed so far are all retired teachers.
The first seemed very nice and very personable, and I think O. would love her, and she kept bringing up sight words and how phonics were all very well and good but she taught to the whole child, and at one point she asked how O.'s comprehension was. "It's great when someone reads to her," I said. "Oh, okay, so she's an auditory learner!" Nooooo, I mean, maybe she is?? But the proximate reason she can comprehend being read to better than reading herself is because she doesn't know how to read properly!!
The second potential tutor sounds older and not nearly as much fun. She did also bring up sight words a time or two, but at least after I described O.'s problems she agreed that she thought a systematic phonics program would work well for her, and she at least threw around names that are consistent with an analytic phonics program.
The third runs one of those learning centers (Sylvan) which seems to have a reasonable phonics program, but she brought up sight words too. IDK I know I am working from one data point and a fairly bright data point at that, but I never did a single sight word with A. (of course we talked about words that don't quite follow the phonetic pattern as he was sounding out words) and he learned to read fine :P
I have recommended #2 to my sister and we'll see how it goes.
It's killing me, though, that there's a good chance O. will learn to read only because she's got an aunt who is interested in pedagogy and grandparents who are well-to-do enough to pay for tutoring. I think about all those other kids out there who don't have that and it makes me really sad. UGH.
1) Sequel to my post on Lucy Calkins: Turns out that at Back-to-School Night the 1st grade teacher at the swank gifted school my kids go to revealed that they use Lucy Calkins for a reading curriculum in first grade, thus leading to one of the other parents panicking (she has heard of the evils of this curriculum from her reading specialist friend), a lot of evening texting, a meeting with this parent and her friend the aforementioned reading specialist, and now I'm trying to set up a meeting with this parent and the school curriculum director. It doesn't make a lot of difference to me viscerally speaking, because my kid knows how to read and did before even starting kindergarten, but man am I glad he knew how to read already. (The other parent's child mostly knows how to read, but is not fluent.) I mostly am just trying to make sure they don't use three-cueing because come on, that's completely ridiculous. I tried asking A. about it with very leading questions and he didn't seem to think that the teacher had ever said anything that was similar to three-cueing, so I guess that's a good sign. (Although I asked him about phonics in kindergarten -- which I now know his kindergarten teacher used, because the other kids have learned it -- and he had no idea about that either, so he might just be really poor at answering those kinds of questions. But also since he knew how to read, it's possible she did phonics with other kids but not him.)
(Interestingly, the reading specialist we talked to said that older teachers often do a decent job of teaching kids to read even with an awful curriculum, because they don't feel like they have to slavishly follow the curriculum, they just mix in phonics because they know it actually works. Their Kindergarten teacher is, in fact, on the older side -- not old, but she's definitely taught for a while, and I haven't heard any complaint about parents worrying this teacher didn't teach their kid how to read well (and let's just say I have heard many complaints from other parents about various subjects and teachers, so I kind of feel like I would have heard about it).
2) Sequel to the post where I mentioned my niece's reading: to recap briefly, my niece, my sister's oldest child O., who I think is reasonably bright, had not learned how to read at the end of 2019, the year before she entered kindergarten. Mostly legit, most kids don't know how to read when they enter kindergarten, right? But she'd been exposed to "whole-word" methods with maaaaaybe a small smattering of phonics, and I was a little concerned, not about the not reading yet, but because when I played word games with her that Christmas she was displaying a somewhat worrying tendency to guess the word, and I didn't like that. We all talked about this and my sister elected to wait and see how she did in kindergarten.
Then her kindergarten year, of course, turned out to be severely disrupted by the pandemic, and I'm not sure how much she learned about anything that year. But here's the thing! My sister, and apparently her kindergarten teacher as well, thought she was actually reading.
Now it is the fall of 2021 and O. is entering first grade, and she just turned 7. At this point, my sister has realized O. does not actually know how to read. That by itself I would be okay with (I know it's still pretty common not to know how to read in first grade), but the way in which she doesn't know how to read is still this thing where she goes "I'm going to look at the first two letters and then guess what the word is." And this is good enough that she seems to be fooling her teachers that she is reading. It is not good enough, as you can imagine, that she actually likes reading, and I worry that O. looks like she's doing well enough that the underlying deficits are not going to get addressed.
If I lived near them, I'd probably buy a phonics curriculum (
conuly recommended me some on the previous post, and I've forwarded them to my sister) and go over it with O. I don't, and my sister doesn't have the spoons to do something like that (even though she's doing better these days with medication). But fortunately our parents agreed to pay for a tutor, and I spent a decent chunk of time this weekend and this week researching and phone-interviewing reading tutors. (This kind of thing is also very hard for my sister these days, which is definitely autoimmune-related because she was the queen of organization and logistics before she got sick... but also I have the pedagogical interest.)The two tutors I'd really have liked to retain from their online description weren't able to do it, sadly. (I had a brief email exchange with one of them, and I just reeeeallly liked her and although I guess I can't say for sure because I haven't talked to her at length, my sense is that I would hire her in a hot second if she were available.) The three I've interviewed so far are all retired teachers.
The first seemed very nice and very personable, and I think O. would love her, and she kept bringing up sight words and how phonics were all very well and good but she taught to the whole child, and at one point she asked how O.'s comprehension was. "It's great when someone reads to her," I said. "Oh, okay, so she's an auditory learner!" Nooooo, I mean, maybe she is?? But the proximate reason she can comprehend being read to better than reading herself is because she doesn't know how to read properly!!
The second potential tutor sounds older and not nearly as much fun. She did also bring up sight words a time or two, but at least after I described O.'s problems she agreed that she thought a systematic phonics program would work well for her, and she at least threw around names that are consistent with an analytic phonics program.
The third runs one of those learning centers (Sylvan) which seems to have a reasonable phonics program, but she brought up sight words too. IDK I know I am working from one data point and a fairly bright data point at that, but I never did a single sight word with A. (of course we talked about words that don't quite follow the phonetic pattern as he was sounding out words) and he learned to read fine :P
I have recommended #2 to my sister and we'll see how it goes.
It's killing me, though, that there's a good chance O. will learn to read only because she's got an aunt who is interested in pedagogy and grandparents who are well-to-do enough to pay for tutoring. I think about all those other kids out there who don't have that and it makes me really sad. UGH.
(no subject)
Sep. 17th, 2021 10:31 pmYou guys, D is the best :D
Because I have apparently scrubbed most traces of the LOTR movies from my brain, I asked him this morning whether "You have my sword!" is just from the LOTR movies, as I totally did not remember it from the books (yes), and he mentioned that Gimli said "You have my axe!" right after he actually fractured his axe (which I also had forgotten from the movies), and then he said, "And then of course there's Aragon, with the Sword that was Broken..."
And tonight he gave me this.
:DDD I laughed SO HARD!
Because I have apparently scrubbed most traces of the LOTR movies from my brain, I asked him this morning whether "You have my sword!" is just from the LOTR movies, as I totally did not remember it from the books (yes), and he mentioned that Gimli said "You have my axe!" right after he actually fractured his axe (which I also had forgotten from the movies), and then he said, "And then of course there's Aragon, with the Sword that was Broken..."
And tonight he gave me this.
:DDD I laughed SO HARD!
