ten year-old boys ask for “tie-on” ties and a sport coat for Christmas? Just wondering.
Archive for the 'Andrew' Category
Last night, Andrew was given his yellow belt certification in taekwondo! He has now officially moved from white belt to yellow belt and will be training in a more advanced class. Due to a shipping delay, none of the students were able to actually receive their new belts at the awards ceremony, but they will all get them at class tomorrow.
The judges used E (excellent), S (satisfactory), and N (needs improvement) to rate each student testing for yellow belt on 21 specific moves and 4 general areas. Andrew received mostly S’s, only two N’s (on his “inner forearm block, back stance” and his “answer ups” – loudly saying, “Yes Sir!” when addressed), and E’s on each of the following:
forearm strike, front stance
turning round kick, middle stance
crescent kick, front stance
hook kick, middle stance
uniform neatness
push-ups
We are really proud of Andrew’s accomplishment. He has learned a lot so far and will be making even more progress in the coming weeks and months.
Great job, Andrew!
Patty’s Wed Nov 11, 2009 email to Scott:
“This afternoon, Andrew knocked over the big filing cabinet in our office. Thankfully, no one was hurt and amazingly, the big printer still works. However, the top file drawer cannot be closed, which means that the middle file drawer cannot be opened.
I will let you deal with Andrew on it. I don’t care what (if any) consequence you give him. If there is one, I would like to know (in writing) what it is, so I can carry it out. The one thing I would ask is that you try to figure out a way to get the middle drawer open. . .”
Scott’s reply to Patty:
“How did Andrew manage to do this? That is not an easy feat. . . Have you tried to scan or copy anything since it fell?”
Patty’s explanatory email back to Scott:
“He is a man of many skills, some less obvious than others.
“The story goes that he went up to sharpen his pencil. Note that he had three sharp pencils in his school box on the dining room table, but… While up there, he decided to play with the file cabinet drawers, pulling them out and pushing them in. As you know, if you happen to get two drawers out at once, there’s enough weight to topple the cabinet, so I guess that’s what happened. We heard a scream and then an enormous crash.
“Once Jessica ascertained that he was all right, I decided to stay downstairs for a while and not look, while the three of them worked to set things right. Trying to reduce my stress, you know.
“There was much grunting, groaning, and breathless giving of directions.
“There’s a lot of slippery graphite under my desk (I guess where the pencil sharpener contents fell) and Andrew claims that the printer is scuffed. The top drawer of the file cabinet is a bit lopsided and won’t close. I am astounded that the printer still works. No, I have not tried to copy or scan.”
NOTE: The filing cabinet in question is a three-drawer jobbie, about three feet long (left-to-right), three-and-a half feet high, and nineteen inches deep. When you open a drawer, the endless reams of junk files are filed sideways, perpendicular to the front of the cabinet. Atop the file cabinet are positioned:
- the outgoing mail bin
- a four-tier set of plastic stackable in-boxes that hold paper, cardstock, and Scott’s incoming stuff
- two cell phone chargers
- an electric pencil sharpener
- an HP color laserjet multi-function printer
Furthermore, note that the printer, stationed atop the three-and-a-half feet off-the-floor file cabinet, measures (according to its online HP owner’s manual) 20.8 inches high, 22 inches deep, and 17.25 inches wide, giving it a volume of some four-and-a-half cubic feet. Loaded as it is with four toner cartridges, it weighs in at a whopping 48.5 pounds, and all that volume and weight came crashing down when Andrew tipped the file cabinet over.
It’s truly amazing that the printer still prints, and it’s more amazing that Andrew wasn’t hurt.
This morning, Scott managed to bang, beat, coerce, or forcibly twist (I did not personally witness the procedure) the top file drawer back into a shape that once again allows it to slide in and out as designed. Perhaps this is a sign that I need to sort and trash most of what’s been buried and unused in those three file drawers for the past ten or so years. Hmmm…
After a fun lunch date with a friend, I returned home at 1:40 PM to find the house smelling of fresh-baked cookies. Andrew had obviously been making treats to share with the other kids at church tonight.
However, we had to leave for our Springfield run in 45 minutes, and there were a few things I wanted to discuss with Andrew before we left, so I called (and called and called) through the house for him. No answer.
I opened the back door and hollered, then did the same out the front. No answer and no answer.
I thought maybe he had ridden his bike down the road, so I waited a few minutes and tried again, this time in my loud, piercing, falsetto semi-scream; the one that – when the wind is calm, as it was today – can be heard up to half a mile away. No answer.
I did the same thing in the house, causing mild-to-moderate hearing loss in two other family members. No answer.
I talked with Jessica and Josiah; neither of them knew where Andrew was.
We were down to less the thirty minutes before lift-off, and I really needed to find him. Jessica offered to ring the bell (our dinner bell), which, she reminded me, is loud – and it is, but for sheer carrying power, I don’t think it comes close to my loud, piercing, falsetto semi-scream. She rang it for about 15 seconds. No answer.
And then, being the loving and responsible mom that I am, I gave up and assumed that since Andrew knew we were leaving at 2:30, he’d show up by 2:30. I just had way too much to do in those remaining few moments to worry any further about his whereabouts.
About 2:20 PM, Andrew walked into my office. From his bedroom. Looking very frowsy. He had been ASLEEP IN HIS ROOM the whole time! When questioned, he said, “No, I didn’t hear you call me. I didn’t hear anything.” This despite the fact that during my 15 or so minutes of repeatedly screaming his name, anyone within 200 feet would have needed ear protection! I guess he was dead tired.
While playing Keesdrow today, Andrew wanted to know if he could use the dictionary to look for words. We all said no, but then relented, as he was decidedly the vocabularic underdog.
In this particular game, it is to your advantage to play words that use a given letter more than once, so imagine our amazement when he confidently (with open dictionary in one hand) played L-A-G-N-A-P-P-E. What the heck was that?
He grinned and read to us the definition: “a small gift given with a purchase to a customer.” Well, so it was, although with effort, I vaguely remembered seeing that word spelled with an “i” many years ago. However, after the “pupa” incident, I wasn’t about to challenge that, and Andrew continued to scan the dictionary and find interesting words.
Well, I guess if one is a gymnast, a sprained ankle is bound to occur sooner or later. It’s just that we’d expect it to happen while sticking a landing or something. Instead, Andrew was running across the floor at the gym, didn’t notice a piece of paper lying on the floor, slipped on it and fell, slightly spraining his foot and ankle. I will say that a whiny boy who cannot run and bounce – especially when the weather is this nice – does not add a fun dynamic to our Team.
He doesn’t like to keep the foot and ankle wrapped “because it hurts.” Then, it hurts because it’s not wrapped. However, between church and seeing Grandma and Grandpa, we have lots of fun planned tomorrow, and I am fully expecting the ankle to be feeling much better and even forgotten in the excitement of the day.
It’s time to measure angles in Singapore math, and Andrew needed a protractor. I though one would find such things in the pencils and rulers area at Wal-Mart, but not so. Protractors are located with the crayons and art supplies.
Singaporean students must use mini protractors (4″ long at the base and solid, as opposed to the 6″ cutout American version) because the lines of all the angles in the book that Andrew needed to measure were way too short to reach the markings on the protractors we had around here. I’m handing down our used math textbooks to another mom, so I really didn’t want to write in the book and extend all the lines. At Wal-Mart, the only protractor I could find with degree markings on the inside edge of the cut out (which the book lines were long enough to reach as printed) came in a pouch with a matching compass. That was okay. He’d need a compass someday, too.
I put the packet on his desk and the next day he attacked angle measurements with a gusto. That evening, out of the blue, he asked me a funny question. Almost all of Andrew’s comments and questions have nothing to do with whatever is occuring at the time. He’s very “stream of consciousness.”
“Mom, what’s that thing with the pencil and the dead pen that won’t write for?”
“Huh? Do what?”
“You know, that orange thing that matches my protractor. It has a little bitty pencil in it, but the pen won’t write at all. I think it needs to be thrown out.”
“Ohhhhh! THAT thing. It’s called a compass, and it’s used to draw circles of various sizes.”
“Well, the pencil will work, but they gave us a dead pen.”
“That’s not a pen. It’s a point that marks the middle of a circle. When you need to use it for math, I’ll show you how it works.”
I thought the “dead pen” description was pretty unique.
There comes a time in one’s life when having a birthday PARTY drops significantly on the priority pillar, but nine-year-old boys cannot be convinced of this fact. Yesterday, Andrew made a Dump Cake, just so we’d have a yummy dessert with our leftovers. It’s in a 9×13 baking dish, and personally, I can’t stand for the eaten edges of a cake to be uneven, so throughout the evening, I managed to straighten the edges – several times. This left about 2/3 of the cake with a bare swath cut down the middle. No, I don’t know why Andrew served us our initial pieces out of the middle.
Today is my birthday, and Andrew was very proud this morning to have located 48 of those skinny little birthday cake candles in the back of the phone book drawer. Hmmm… we never use the phone book. I wonder if we really need to devote 88% of a kitchen drawer to it. . . ? Anyway, Andrew inserted the candles – all 48 of them – in anticipation of his singing and my blowing sometime later in the day. I was a little disappointed because with candles covering all the remaining acreage of the cake, I really couldn’t do anything about evening up the edges, but I didn’t mention that to Andrew.
Katie called to wish me a happy birthday, and while we were talking, Andrew called to me. I was in our bedroom and figured that as long as it didn’t involve blood or fire, he could wait, but a moment later he hollered really loudly and Scott threw open the bedroom door saying, “Andrew lit all the candles. Can you come blow them out? Right NOW?” So I had to hang up with Katie = ( and I ran downstairs to see what could only be described as a significant conflagration. The cake was ABLAZE! Not only that, if you burn 48 candles for about two minutes, the resulting melted wax rainbow will cover most of the surface area of the cake. Trust me.
Andrew quickly sang and I began blowing. Even with his help, it took four tries, but we did extinguish the blaze. Andrew then collapsed into a heap on the dining room floor, crying. Why? “Because my cake is RUINED, totally RUINED! (sob, sob, sob)” I assured him that when the wax cooled, it would harden and we could pull if off and it would be fine. Thankfully, he was quickly consoled, but take it from one who knows. After you join the 40 Club, don’t allow your candles to be bit until you are present and a source of water is nearby.
I’ve been having a very hard time getting Andrew to do his piano work this summer. Don’t get me wrong; he loves to play the piano. That’s not the problem. He just doesn’t want to practice what Mrs. W wants him to practice, and he flat out refuses to do his Music Tree activity book. Instead, he plays only his favorite tunes over and over and over and over.
Jessica and Andrew have their lessons on Wednesday mornings, and mine are generally every other Wednesday afternoon. Mrs. W called me after the kids’ lessons to ask me if she could cancel mine. She was feeling really cruddy and had a terribly sore throat and hoped she could sleep some before her afternoon students arrived (I’m her first).
That was fine with me and (mercifully) gave me some additional time to practice. Of course I didn’t want her to be sick, but I also want to be ready for my lesson! While on the phone, I asked her how Andrew’s lesson had gone. “Fair.” He hadn’t really prepared for the lesson, so he didn’t get as many “dollars” to spend as Jessica did, and during her lesson, when he was supposed to be doing his theory, he was just staring into space! She finally told him that if he wouldn’t do his theory work – work that she KNEW he could do – then she’d have to call Mom and have me come to his lessons. Ugh for both of us.
I wanted her to know that with all the challenges we face in parenting Andrew, I have chosen to let HER be the brick wall he comes up against in piano – instead of me. I didn’t want her to think I was being a bad mom who didn’t care if her son progressed on the piano. Far from it! Mrs. W is fine with that and she’s capable of doing a really admirable brick wall imitation. She urged me to just leave him alone where piano is concerned and let the chips (or points or “dollars”) fall where they may. She and I both recognize that he has uncommon piano potential, and we both think it will be good for him to be forced to work hard for someone who is not his parent.
He got judgment and I got mercy. We’ll see who maximizes his opportunities now.
I have decided that gymnastics is a sport for rich people who also have unlimited free time on their hands.
First there is the cost:
$85/month local gym fee
$49/year USAG national registration fee
$20/year USAG state registration fee
$25 mandatory duffle bag
$50 mandatory warm-ups
$ ?? mandatory uniform
$35 each for two different sets of grips (one for bar, one for rings)
$ ?? travel, hotel, and food for Andrew and a parent for out-of-town meets
(5 or 6 meets during the “school” year are anticipated)
$50-75 (it varies) entry fee for each meet
~$50 all the gymnasts split the cost for their coach(es)’ travel, hotel, and meals and session fee for each meet
Then there is the scheduling. Right now Andrew has Team Gymnastics Practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:30 – 7:30 PM. He is also supposed to take a Power Tumbling class on Wednesdays 4:40 – 5:30 PM, but he only attends that one every other week, because on alternate weeks we have to leave early enough to got to the library before church.
The gym owner, Noelle, had scheduled an exhibition meet to be held at the local gym on “either Saturday or Sunday, August 9 or 10, either one’s okay with me.” This would be a time for the kids to show off their skills and would serve as practice run for the real meets that start in September or October. I said “NOT Sunday! We have church on Sunday.” So she planned it fro Saturday. Except that some other parents didn’t like Saturday, so she moved it to Sunday – at 10:0 AM!!!
We told her the earliest we could get there on a Sunday would be 1:00 PM. We attend the 10:00 AM service and church gets out a little before noon, in Springfield. So she said the girls would start at 10:00 AM and the boys would start at 1:00 PM.
Then Scott decided that we were cutting it too close, so instead of going to the 10:00 AM service, we’d go to the 8:30 AM one (yawn). That would let us get to the gym by 11:30 AM or 12:00 noon. The only problem with that was that Katie was scheduled to run the Song Show Plus and Jessica was scheduled to work in the pre-school class, both at the 10:00 service. So Katie had to tell her department head she couldn’t be there, and Jessica had to do the same. For Jessica, they switched her to work during the 8:30 AM service. With those adjustments, we were all set for the exhibition.
Today I was doing a lot of planning-type stuff, trying to get my calendar to match our lives. (This can be done, but requires large quantities of white-out.) It occurred to me that I had not heard a word about the exhibition and I didn’t know exactly when Andrew was to be there, what he should wear, etc. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t happen on Sunday at all. . . So I called Noelle.
“Hey, I need to get a little information about the exhibition meet Sunday.”
“Oh, we’re not going to do that then.”
“Oh, no?”
“No, we’re going to hold off on that.”
No explanation given.
I was a little miffed. This is the kind of thing we left the Y to get away from, but there is nowhere else to run to in this town. I guess this is just what gymnastics programs are like. (Sigh)
You may ask, “Why do you put yourself through this? Why not just drop it?” Well, the fact of the matter is that Andrew seems to be quite gifted this way, it’s good exercise, and he loves it. He many not have the traits I would have chosen, but as his parents, we are commissioned to train him up in the way he should go. I can’t make a second baseman out of a cook/pianist/gymnast.
End of vent.
