A BIG Reason Why No Matter How Much I Help, I Will NEVER Be a PTO Mom

Today, I missed all kinds of info because I was entertained at marvelling over our PTO events coordinator who has yet to appear at a meeting or any volunteer/school event in anything less than 3-inch spiked high heels complete with flawless and full make-up and usually short shorts or a short skirt. Seriously, 3-inch heels, people? I can't wear those even for special occasions, but traipsing around an elementary school? Are you kidding me?

I have such respect for moms like LadyBug who do so much for our schools, and I try to give my time in a more behind-the scenes way. But, today, as I realized I'd missed several important dates I should have been noting, it occurred to me that that this kind of distraction/observation is why I wouldn't be qualified to be a PTO president at any time in my future. Also, this could mean I may have ADD or something...I'm just sayin'...

You know you're too tired when...

...after two nights of horrible insomnia (falling asleep around 3 a.m.), you fall asleep while doing homework with your son...

What is more funny--when you wake up to the doorbell you discover that not only you has fallen asleep while helping your son with his homework, but HE has fallen asleep too. You wake to find both your heads leaning against one another and a long jagged pencil line across his homework page!

Parent of the Year, it's in someone else's BAG!

The First-Time Mother's Valentines Experience:
Spend several hours making special Valentine sacks filled to the top with fun treats for your 2-year-old to hand out on Valentine's Day at their school. Customize each sack with the classmate's name in a little "heart."Stay up until very late the night before making pink rice crispy treats cut in the shape of a perfect heart.

Wake up early the morning of the party, so you can dress both you and your adorable daughter in reds and pinks. Leave early for her school so that you can stop off at the store and buy both teachers a lovely (and expensive) potted plant in a cute Valentine's pot.

Arrive early to the party and distribute all the goodies beaming with Heart-Day love. Stand back and watch adorable child pose for the many pictures you and the teachers take. Hold back tears. This is your son/daughter's first Valentines party at school. Their first Valentines for friends. Their first heart-shaped iced cookie made by a teacher. Oh...it is just all so special!

Begrudgingly leave for home 15 minutes after the party was supposed to be over, looking over your shoulder as you go and feeling that "they're growing up too fast" emotion bubbling up once again. Go home a cry a little.

The Second-Time Mother's Valentines Experience:
Realize the day before the party that you have not filled out the Valentine's for your daughter. Address the Valentines (bought two days before at Walgreen's on sale) as from your daughter, but leave the "To" blank. (It just makes it easier for distributing them.)

The morning of the party, rush to find your daughter's only heart shirt and find that the only pants that work with it are some hand-me-down ones that had a small hole in the knee just one week ago. (Say a prayer of thankfulness that you actually stitched that hole, albeit somewhat sloppily, earlier in the week.)

Decide to leave late for school since the party doesn't start until 30 minutes after school starts. Realize at the time that you need to leave, that you never got treats to go with the Valentine. Decide it is better to stop and get those and be even later.

Arrive at school for the party, where you see lots of little girls in more dressy dresses than your child wears to church. Notice moms taking careful turn to put each Valentine "gift" in the already overloaded Valentine sack.

Help your daughter put her measly Princess Valentines with the lollipop attached into the bag, realizing that she is the only one who did not give out a gift "sack" of goodies. Daughter refuses to have her picture taken, so you stand at the back watching the other moms happily pose with their first born, glistening eyes as they hold back their tears at this momentous time.

Glance at your watch...15 minutes until you go home and the scrapbookers come to your house to play! Then, start stressing about your son's Valentine's party that you're coordinating as Room Mom for his 1st grade class.

Help the teachers hand out food while other moms continue to "glisten." Give lots of kisses and hugs to your little girl and leave soon after. Check the reflection in the window as you leave, to see if the word "BOOB" is on your forehead and you did not realize it. Feel extreme guilt for not going overboard as the other parents did, and not doing an extra special gift for the teachers. Then feel annoyed that you felt that guilt at all because, darn it, you did what you had always done for Valentines and it seemed special before you saw what everyone else had done.

Rush home to scrapbooking group. Instead of scrapbooking, cut out Valentines Bingo cards for son's party and create birthday invitations for father's surprise party. Leave early to pick up and spend too much money at Walgreen's buying the Dove Valentine's chocolate roses for your daughter's teachers and your son's for the next day. (Darn that guilt under peer pressure. Darn it!)

Try to cut yourself some slack. This is not your first child and you don't get as carried away, although you still love your daughter dearly. Decide that Parent of the Year award is definitely out of the works for you now...

We want O-U-T!

My husband uttered words I thought I'd never hear him say, the other night. He actually suggested that we might consider private school for our son if things get much worse. Private school? Really?

We are both the product of public schools and we felt strongly that was the place for our kids. We watched as our nephew attended a private school until middle school and developed a negative attitude about it from his experiences. He was never even required to learn how to spell correctly or even run the spell checker on his computer-typed papers. And, socially-speaking, he didn't know any of the kids who lived by him in his neighborhood because they all went to public school. Not that all private schools match my nephews experience, but it just didn't sound like our cup of tea.

But, after 2 years now at our "proud to tout that we're 'Exemplary' rated every year" elementary school, we want out of the pressure cooker. The adjustment has been harder for us, as parents, than it probably has for him. Last year, I wrote of how militaristically the school was run. Because of their numbers (last year he had 11 sections of kindergarten, at 23 kids per class), things have to work that way. I get that. But, there's a coldness to it that bothers me.

This year has not been any better. Academically, the heat on the cooker has been turned up. 1st graders are required to go up 10 reading levels in the course of this year, when they just went up 4 last year. They are required to write at a level that shocks me and the other day he brought home homework that asked them to read a passage, find the present tense verbs and then write the past tense version of those verbs. This all wouldn't be that bad, but 80 percent of the verbs were irregular verbs. So, they were expected to know "go" should be "went" AND be able to write and spell that correctly.

Now, if all of that sounds par for the course to you, take a gander at the message I got back from my son's teacher today, explaining their journaling that is required that he is not completing each day:

As far as their journal, I tell them that they should be able to come in and
practice their writing using an opening sentence, time sequencing words such as
first, then, etc, have details, wow words, and a closing. At this point, they
should be able to write about 10 sentences.

That is, 10 sentences in a very short amount of time. My son has been teased by girls in the class for his messy writing and he's trying to write neatly now. But, he goes VERY slow. To expect him to get all of this done in such a short amount of time seems amazing to me.

Am I off of track here? Being too defensive of a parent? Maybe so, but I just don't understand when our schools turned from the fun place of learning that I remember from growing up to the intense and stressful place it is now. Because of all the requirements testing, most of the teachers have to teach to the test and do not have time to add creativity into their jobs. And, it shows with things like this.

When I was in kindergarten, we learned our ABCs using the Alphabet People. We sang songs, did crafts, had a long recess and P.E., AND a rest time. Last year, I was told that my son didn't have to know how to read, but fortunately he did because really they expected that right away. Now, he's supposed to be devouring chapter books along with adding and subtracting two-digit numbers.

With all the other stress that is on our kids, is this really necessary? Yes, I know that the U.S. falls behind in education, but is this the answer? To raise kids who are cracking and crying from the pressure and learning to be so tightly wound that they're are bound to have trouble as adults. There has to be some better answer to all of this.

Until then, I have to figure out how to motivate my son, a typical 8-year-old boy who would much rather play monster trucks and football than write an essay in a journal any old day. Something tells me, I have my work cut out for me.

At Close Range with the Bully Friend

If you read my post yesterday, then you know I was in a "parenting pickle" with regards to my son and his new friendship with the class bully/problem child.

Well, we went ahead with the playdate, shifting it to our house under the guises of my son wanting to show his friend his newly decorated room. In reality, it was so that I could keep an eye on and both ears open to what this child would do.

In the course of an hour and a half, the following happened:

• Bully friend (a.k.a. BF) made a b-line for the bathroom when we got home, then took a huge man-sized dump and LEFT it there without flushing to stink up our entire upstairs.
  
• BF stood poised with what I THOUGHT was a laser tag gun between my daughter at the top of the stairs and me at the bottom and asked, "Who wants to get shot next?" He looked at my toddler and then me and said, "YOU do," and shot the gun, which was actually a Nerf gun with bullets at my temple and hit it DEAD ON target.
  
• BF later shot my daughter in the face with a Nerf bullet when she came to give him a picture she'd made. (He did apologize to her after, but this was after my Nerf attack and after I'd told him we did not allow shooting at people's heads in our house.)
  
• BF announced when he left our house (in front of his father) that he sure liked that we had a second story to our house, but he was pretty sure he "had WAY more toys" than my son did.

I don't know, I think it went pretty well. Don't you?

Another Parenting Pickle: Befriending the Bully

I'm in a bit of a "parenting pickle." You know those situations you find yourself in where you are completely sure you are ill-equipped to make a parenting decision, and yet you know your decision will affect a lot in your child's life. As tough as that pickle jar is to open, sometimes you make the right choice and open up to a buttery sweet result--and all is well in the end. Other times, once you pry the jar open and take a bite, you realize your choice left you with nothing but sourness. So, help me solve my latest parenting pickle, will you? Because everyone knows that bad parenting is a really big "DILL!" (OK, I couldn't resist that one...)

My rather shy-around-other-kids son has somehow managed to befriend the class bully. And, not only befriend him, but the child has told his mother that my son is his only friend in the class.

It all goes back to those values we have tried to instill in our son to be nice to everyone, even if they are different from you. And, I guess that lesson stuck with him, which is something that makes me proud. When he started the school year, he told me about a little boy in his class with a rather unique name. He said he remembers the kid from last year, because he always heard the coaches screaming his name out for misbehaving in P.E. This was my first taste of the "pickle" that was to come.

The year went by and, on occasion, my son would come home with stories about the bully boy. Usually, they involved the boy being sent to the principals office, or something really odd or funny that the bully boy said. I met the boy when I went to read to the class and found him peculiar, but entertaining.

At Christmas, my son brought home a hidden gift from bully boy in his backpack. The teacher had let him sneak it home, as they are not allowed to do gifts for kids as a rule. She told me later this was the only person the bully boy did this for in the whole class. When my son opened it, it was a leather bracelet with metal beads spelling out my son's name.

Then, came the boy's birthday where he invited my son and one other boy from his class. And, the mother mentioned playdates to come. And, I just sort of started to worry a little about it. It is one thing to be nice to everyone. It is another to be associated with a kid who has a reputation for misbehaving and being disruptive in class. Proceed with caution, my mind said.

And, then today I got a phone call from bully boy's mom. She was very upset and wanted to confide in me that the boy was going to be switching classes after tomorrow. She explained to me how she feels one of their two teachers has targeted her son all year, and gave examples of things that have been said and done to her son this year. I let her vent, expressed my sympathies for her son because I knew the other kids teased him a lot for getting in trouble. (Based on what she said, I discovered that bully boy has been sent to the office many times this year and his parents have regular meetings with the teachers and vice-principal.) And, then she asked for a playdate in a few days for our boys.

There is a very big part of me that wants to put the kibash on this whole thing. While I am not a parent who worries about my son being the most popular kid at school or getting in with the "in crowd, I don't want him associating with the opposite of that either. But, I am proud that he's shown compassion for this boy. In talking to his mom, it sounds like our two sons are actually very much alike--but their insecurities just come out differently. My son becomes quiet and withdrawn, while hers acts out. They are both smart boys who struggle with the same issues with the school system in general. So, another part of me thinks this friendship is a comforting thing. My son has never been a discipline problem though, and will his association with the boy either label him in the teachers' minds or influence his own behavior?

So, you can see how I am stuck between wanting my son to be accepting and friends with whomever he wants, and wanting to protect him from ruining his own reputation by being friends with a labeled "problem child." And, this has been a hard year for him. He's had very few invitations to play from his own class and doesn't really talk about anyone else but this boy.

OK, bloggers, parents, and educated minds out there: I am asking you--what would you do? Help me solve my parenting pickle! And, if you're currently struggling with a pickle of your own, blog about it and I'll link back to you. Maybe we can all help each other out here!