vonRoeschlaub Family News

Had an emergency meeting with Claire’s principal today. He’s an old family friend, so it wasn’t a hostile one, but the problem was serious. The story was told to us by Claire, but confirmed by her classmate Genia.

Apparently the cafeteria had been acting up during lunch yesterday, and when dismissal was called, only Claire followed procedure. The person on duty decided to punish the whole cafeteria (130 children in second and third grade) by making them sit at recess for five minutes while Claire played in the playground.

I admitted to him the absurdity of parents coming in to complain that their child wasn’t unfairly punished, but he isn’t stupid and understood immediately why what happened was a horrible mistake. 130 angry children punished by being forced to watch our daughter play in the playground? As Diana said, it’s almost Lord of the Flies level of twisted. Who was getting punished?

Claire is still oblivious to what happened, and in a week or so we’ll see if it blows over or blows up, but either way we needed to find out what the #%$@# they were thinking.

Update: Apparently they weren’t thinking at all.

Diana heard back from the principal and it turns out Claire’s description was accurate.  The aides actually thought they were rewarding Claire for her good behavior.

Once again it is confirmed: no good deed goes unpunished.

Last night was Avery’s open house at school. Noni watched the kids while we toured the school, met his teachers, and saw what he was doing. Some stuff was pretty well on target, and some seemed horribly below his current development. Hopefully they can keep the alphabet stuff interesting for a kid who already knows his phonics, especially since he’s known the alphabet for about two years at this point.
The teachers were nice, and since the BOCES school is actually based in a real school the facilities are great.

We took Claire and Avery to the science museum in Queens today.  Victoria stayed with my mom, though we were prepared to take her if necessary.

The kids loved it.  Avery was pretty excited about the rockets at the entrance, but we headed for the Cyberchase exhibit that had just opened first.  Claire loved that, Avery not so much.  They had a bunch of puzzles from the shows that kids could try to solve, and since it had just opened everything worked.

Avery, however, spotted a demonstration of the standard normal curve in the mathematics section next door and couldn’t be dragged away from the falling marbles.  I looked in on a case of topology examples made physical.  Nearby were a bunch of optical illusions that kept the kids busy until hunger took over.

Lunch was expensive and not very good.  But afterwards we went to the space section and the kids had a lot of fun.  Mostly it was about the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system.  Upstairs was a section called “networks” that seemed to be more about connection machines. Claire had some fun on the surfboard simulator, but Avery hated it.

Overall it was pretty fun, and we have to go again.  hopefully next time we won’t get lost on the way.

Went on our annual apple picking trip with the Birnbaums. The kids enjoyed it, but not as much as last year because of the heat. The heat didn’t dampen their enjoyment of the rest of the day, however, and the kids had a such great time playing in the pool and later in the house that they didn’t want to leave, even as the clock hit eight.

On our trip back home Avery begged to go back, but we explained it was too late and he should just nap in the car.

“I’m too hungry to sleep,” he complained, despite the enormous dinner leaving everyone stuffed, “I’m so hungry and thirsty. We need to go back to Jason’s house so I can get something to drink.”

Avery had his first day of school yesterday.  We waited outside with him until his bus arrived.  Even Claire wanted to be there and we drove her to school afterwards.  He must have liked it because he was eager to get back on the bus again today.  His only complaint was that he took too long to eat a cookie at lunch and the teacher had to take it away.

Hopefully he will continue to love school.

Tonight, as I read Avery his bedtime story, the space facts book once again, we turned to a page he hadn’t seen before.

“That is an atom,” I said, “everything in the universe is made of atoms.”  (I wasn’t about to start a discussion on the nature of dark matter.)

“Even the Earth?”

“Yes,” I said as he looked closely at the floor, “but they are too small to see, even with a microscope.  Everything you can touch is atoms.”

“But even the Earth?”

“Yes, even the Earth.  Even you are made of atoms.”

“No, I don’t want atoms on me!” he shouted, trying to wipe them off.

“You aren’t covered with atoms, you are made of atoms,” I explained.

“No!  I’m made of food.  I don’t want to be made of atoms!” He started sobbing uncontrollably.

I realized this had got out of hand and held him tightly and tried to turn the revelation into something good.  “It’s okay.  Do you know where atoms come from?  Stars make them.  We are made from stars.”

“I don’t want to be stars, I’m made of food, not atoms!”

At this point I decided it was best to let t drop and he calmed down after a while.  At least he was willing to go to bed without looking at the book anymore.  I think he was just as afraid to restart the conversation as I was.

It’s just a matter of time before he discovers the awful truth, though.

Last night I was trying toget the baby to sleep after her feeding and it wasn’t working. I sang a bit to her, she always likes that, but quickly ran out of good sleeping songs. I tried to sing Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” but couldn’t remember all the words.

After a few attempts I went to YouTube and located a video using that as the sound track. She liked the song so I started going through our music collection. After a while I found that she liked the peppy songs better. It wasn’t long before I was dancing with her to a bunch of pop tunes (including “S.U.K.I.” which I used to bounce Avery to when he was a baby).

I was rather surprised when she fell asleep not in the middle of a nice slow ballad, but in the middle of “Banana Tengoku,” a mambo-style ending theme to the children’s cartoon “Donkey Kong.”