Reading awe

To top off the school's difficulty in finding her 'perfect book,' she finished the last book of the Harry Potter series a few days ago.  She has now moved on to some of Gail Carson Levine's books.

I am in awe of her desire and ability to read.

Principal's office

She gets in the car on Thursday and I, as usual, ask how her day was.

"I went to the principal's office twice."

Turns out, this is horrifying to hear.  Even when it's rather unceremoniously announced.  It wasn't a big deal to her.  I didn't think it could be for something bad.  At the same time, she wasn't exactly volunteering information.

"...uh...for what?"
"For reading"
"...uh...What were you reading?"
"My perfect book"

At this point, it clicked a little bit.  The teacher had said something about them getting their 'perfect book' this week.  Something that they don't totally understand, but understand most of and can learn from.  They were having her read to find her perfect book.  Apparently this involves the teacher and the principal listening to her read and asking her questions.  I guess it's a nice way to get them comfortable with the principal and take the negative connotation I have out of the principal's office.

She is the only one in her class that she's aware of that had to go twice.  Apparently the first time she understood all of the books they gave her.  The second time, they found one that she didn't completely comprehend.

She wasn't very willing to talk about it (nothing new), but I got bits of information out of her by just continuing to talk about it as we discussed other things.  Chrys wonders if she finally got bored with it.  It doesn't sound like she did.  She is proud that they finally stumped her.  I am *very* curious to see what that means.

Texas policy was that they couldn't test them beyond a maximum for their grade level so I have truly had no idea what level she actually understands.  She has maybe 50 pages to go in book 7 of Harry Potter at this point so it's not that she has trouble reading things.*  She can explain things in the movies based on data from the books when Chrys asks her questions so she seems to grasp most of what she's reading.  Nevertheless, it will be nice to have a better understanding of where we should be pointing her.

*Even if her pronunciation of some of the words is wrong, she understands what they mean.  The best example was 'conjure' which she understood to mean creates, but she pronounced 'con - jhoor'.  It's been impressive to see her progress.

On another brother

We had our 'big' ultrasound for Thing 3 on Wednesday.  It's a boy.  There were many tears shed by the girl that has wanted a sister for 5 long years.

Thursday morning, she walks in and throws herself down on my bed.

R: "Mommy, what happened to all of the girl sperm?"
M: "I have no idea, sweetie.  No idea."
R: "Why couldn't they get the directions right?  Why didn't they beat the boy sperm?  Are they lost somewhere inside your body?"  (The stream of related questions was seemingly endless.)
M: "I don't know, sweetie.  Nobody knows what makes some sperm get to the egg better than other sperm."

She keeps going with the questions until I advise her to take it up with her daddy.  Then she walked away, defeated and sighing.  Poor kid.  Too much knowledge of human reproduction can be a bad thing...

On safety and television

Ryanne was up making her bed this morning.  Corin wanted to turn on the fan.  We discussed how it wasn't safe right now because she was sitting up.  She listed quite a few things that could get hurt by the fan with her sitting there.  I added a few more.

Corin then asked if we could do it when she was laying down.  I said no because she didn't always lay perfectly flat and we didn't want her to accidentally sit up and get hurt.  She said wiggled down to the end of the bed and looked over the rail out her door, "Yeah, and sometimes I get distracted by Chuck."

Looking at the angle...that requires some impressive acrobatics.

Slow down, little one

Ryanne decided she wanted egg salad for breakfast today.  I told her there were four hard boiled eggs in the fridge.  She got them out, peeled them, sliced them (with the egg slicer) and then came to ask for help getting spices.  I put salt and dill in it because she still has some trouble controlling the flow of those and I didn't want to have to throw it out because it was too salty.  She grabbed a spoon and the mayo and put some in the bowl.  She didn't want to stir it up so I got to do that.

Now, she's happily eating her creation.  One of her major comfort foods.  It took me a while to realize that it was a comfort food for her.  I guess all of those Fridays eating it in Japan really stuck.

I'm still not sure I'm ready for her to be that self-sufficient, though.