Just so you know it’s not always a bed of roses around here…
I’ve been in a bit of a funk since my children acted like monkeys at the doctor yesterday. The poor PA was trying to have a decent conversation with me - it was the first time we’d seen her and she was actually being supportive and helpful about JediBoy’s allergies. She was trying to talk through all the symptoms, including the cat allergy that has developed since we had JediBoy tested a couple of years ago. She was patient, kind & thorough, intelligent but not condescending. And she encouraged the kids to open up, smile and talk to her.
Whoops.
The kids opened up! JediBoy insisted on: carrying BabyGirl piggyback, practicing his white belt kata, tickling BabyGirl, crawling under the furniture, and talking loudly to BabyGirl in a sing-song voice. Even after he had been asked, repeatedly for each action, to stop, to calm down, to model good behavior, to knock it off already! BabyGirl figured out how to: open the door of the room, get up on a chair and call for a pig-gack ride, grab the pens and papers off the desk, and lie down on the floor and demand more nummies even though she had clearly finished her baggie of Cheerios.
It was an exhausting 45 minutes, and left me feeling drained and discouraged about this whole parenting thing.
JediBoy asked me to take him out for calzones after the appointment. I did not. He asked if he could watch a movie while I was trying to rest and recover my sanity. He could not. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do to make me feel better. There was not.
Even today, I’m feeling the residual effects of this anger that I have almost never felt. How can I be angry with them? They were just kids being kids. As much as I can understand what was going on (JediBoy even said, “I just wanted her to know that I was smart, and strong, and a good big brother,” letting me see his motivations for acting so wild), I’m still emotional about it. Phooey.
So today has been a little strained. I decided it was a good day to take the kids out and run some errands, because we could drive peacefully from place to place, listening to the radio, and so I could see them behaving more appropriately in public. It worked fairly well. We picked up our Halloween portraits at the mall and then went to the craft store to look at frames for those and a list of other supplies for other projects I have planned. Then we went to JediBoy’s basketball practice and came home to have sandwiches and soup for dinner. I’m hiding with the computer now, and breathing deeply, and believing that soon I will feel fully myself again.
I did have a nice email conversation with F, who commented on my Learning Notes post this week. She asked my opinion on the Magic Tree House books, since there are several negative reviews on Amazon (citing run-on sentences and poor grammar). Here is my response:
Ah, the “twaddle” debate! What do we do about books that aren’t the greatest literature, but our kids love anyway?
I will always have a soft spot for the Magic Tree House books. #3, Mummies in the Morning, was the first chapter book that JediBoy would sit still for, at 3, and not only would he sit still for it, but he insisted on having that book for bedtime every night for several months! Today, at 6, as you’ve seen on the blog, he reads them all constantly.
I can’t recall any glaring examples of bad grammar from the MTH books I’ve read, and from what I recall, the books are more prone to sentence fragments than run-ons! The choppy style is meant to be easy for young kids to read, I suppose. They are not well-written books, but personally I don’t think they’re so bad that I’d keep them away from my son.
They do introduce historical and scientific topics - not enough to really teach about them, but enough to make kids aware of them, and ideally make kids curious enough to learn more about the topics. I know that my friend’s 4th grade classes in a local public school read Revolutionary War on Wednesday as part of their curriculum.
In the end, I guess, I see these books as brain candy. If the MTH books were all he read, or all he heard, I might be concerned. But we do lots of other reading together and I’m confident that he has enough models of better writing that he’ll not be harmed by the MTH series.
There have been several online discussions about “twaddle” or “fluff” recently… but I’d love to hear your opinions too!
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