Seasons Changing (week 465)

The regular season for the Shetland Black baseball team and the U10 AYSO Pirates came to a close last week, as well as did school for the Thanksgiving break.  Chris wasn't too depressed about the conclusion of the baseball season, but I was a little sad to see the soccer season end.  In fact, Chris has been playing great soccer in the Sunday Scrimmages, and really gets into playing the with families and the kids. We have hope that maybe he will want to come back to the league next year.

Meantime, we had our Parent-Teacher-Conferences this past week and boy was it not good for us! Although both Chris and I are both doing very well academically--speaking, reading, and writing good Spanish--our teachers both ratted-us-out as having a hard time listening and following directions.  Of course, this just sounded more like bad parenting to both our parents and did not work out well for us.

Apparently, Chris is the kid that pretends to not hear people (as Mom has experienced since he turned one).  His teacher Sra. Feirrera loves to have him in the room; he is speaking great Spanish; and, his drawings are incredible.  It is just that he would rather keep working on his book or his drawing in the corner of the room and pretend he didn't hear the teacher ask everyone to cleanup and move-on to the next thing.  When he finally does get busted, he just smiles and says he didn't know.

On my end, Sra. Valdez totally crushed me on following the rules.  She gave the whole speech about how much fun I am and how I rally all the guys to play games on the playground.  She even told them how well I do on the tests--when I slow down and follow the directions.  Apparently, she feels that I rush through everything so that I can (a) be done first, (b) win, and (c) get to the playground.  As a result, my binder is a mess, I always lose my multiplication table, I regularly ask to redo my homework because it isn't in my backpack or binder...and you name it.  And to top it all off, apparently I haven' really been on "Verde" each and every day of the week as I have been reporting to my parents.  In fact, I am a majority (3 of 5 days) of the time on "Amarillo".  It's rarely about behavior, but almost always about following directions.  Well, now I have to have my behavior contract signed every day.  Man.

Needless to say, my parents took our teacher's side of the story and we are now under a whole different routine each night of checking binders and homework and everything else.  Man...what a beginning to 3rd Grade and the holiday season!