Day: August 9, 2007

Every August I have to deal with the nail-biting issue of class placement. The teacher my child gets could be the difference between a wonderful school year and a disastrous one. It is not the only factor by far, but it is the one factor that affects all other factors. If I can not establish a rapport with my child’s teacher, that creates problems for the rest of the year. For some kids it doesn’t matter much. Kiki had a teacher in 3rd grade with whom I was never able to establish clear communication, but Kiki thrived that year. The teacher in question developed a good rapport with the kids and Kiki is highly motivated to seek teacher approval. The fact that I could not communicate effectively did not matter at all.

But this year my two kids in Elementary school are Gleek and Link. In both cases it is very important that I be able to communicate with the teacher. Link did not do well his first three years in school. During all of those years he had quiet female teachers close to retirement. I struggled to establish a rapport with each of these teachers, but never really managed to do so. Last year I met Link’s teacher and we were instantly on the same wavelength. She was young and energetic. We plotted together and Link had a great year. He finally closed up some of the lingering developmental gaps. Gleek has only had one year of Kindergarten. I liked Gleek’s teacher, but the teacher was very different from me in organizational and discipline styles. It made for an extremely rough start to Gleek’s Kindergarten experience. Toward’s the end of the year the three of us reached an understanding and it was working, but it took a lot of work to get there. I’d really like to skip the “extremely rough start” and jump right into the part where the teacher and I communicate well.

Today I got the placement letters for Gleek and Link. Gleek is in the class taught by my friend’s mother-in-law. From what I’ve seen and heard about this lady, she’s good. I was kind of hoping Gleek would get this teacher. It was really fun to call my friend and let her know. Link finally got placed with a male teacher. He’s been hoping for one for the past 2 years. I don’t know anything personally about this teacher, but I have good reports from my backyard neighbor. In short, I couldn’t be happier. Now I get to wait a couple of weeks until Open House when I get to practice my meet-and-greet skills to try to establish a rapport.

The plan for today had me getting up early and hustling to get the car packed and all of us out the door to go to my family reunion. I was going to have to move really fast because there were things that I should have done earlier, but didn’t.

At 1 am this morning Patches got out of bed and asked for a pot. He then used the pot repeatedly.

We have a family reunion every year and almost every year someone has some variety of flu. I have frequently bemoaned the fact that it is usually my children who are the vectors for this stuff. We bring new and exciting illnesses to share with all my relatives. Whee. Usually the illness does not manifest until after we have arrived and it is too late to prevent passing it around. We had one extremely memorable reunion where 20 of us all spent 2 days sick simultaneously. This time we are forewarned.

This morning we called around to talk to everyone and ask opinons. Did we need to exile ourselves to prevent passing the bug along? Everyone agreed that taking an extra 24 hours to observe would be a good idea. So instead of running out the door today, I have an additonal day to get things done.

The consensus is that if no one new gets sick between now and tomorrow morning, then we’ll proceed with the reunion as planned. We think that this illness is “Con Crud” that Howard brought back from Comic Con. Several people in our household have had various digestive discomforts over the past week. Patches is more prone to full on stomach flu than anyone else in the family. So we think that Patches is just the last one to catch a fairly mild bug. The Comic Con theory would also explain why my kids always have new and exciting germs to share. My family typically holds their reunions a couple of weeks after Comic Con. This is just about perfect for Howard to bring stuff home, vector to the kids, and then we share with everyone else.

Some day I’d like to have an Owens family reunion with no illness attached. If that is totally impossible, at least I’d like someone else to be the vector. I’d be almost happy to bring kids home sick, knowing it is only my just due for the quantities of illnesses that I’ve inflicted on others.