April 1 - My extra victory, though, was with Ian. I hadn't checked his coursework last week and noticed today that he had skipped several days of math work. My kid can do complex calculations in his head with ease, so this seemed a little off. When we got to the section about finding the area of irregular shapes, he fell apart. So many tears. "What are all these numbers even here for??"
I sat with him and dragged out the legos, the graph paper, and the colored pencils. I have never been so grateful for my office supplies stash. I told him to draw lines to create his lego pieces and then get the area of each one. That it's just like adding walls in a house to figure out the rooms and add it up to know the square footage of the whole house.
We had to go over area versus perimeter. I told him he needed to fence in his cattle with the most grass to eat but the least amount of fence to install. Cattle fencing is expensive. Long skinny runs use a lot of fencing, but the closer to a square it is, the cheaper the fencing is.
We got through it and he was able to do his social studies and science work without a single tear shed.
April 4 - Now is a good time to clean out your child's backpack before anything in it becomes more fragrant or sentient.
April 6 - 7 shirts, 6 pants, 1 hoodie, 3 pairs of socks, 5 pairs of boxer briefs. Today marks the first day Ian did his own laundry. He untwisted his own pants and stain-sticked everything. He even said it was “satisfying”. I taught him to set a timer on his phone so he wouldn’t forget to move it to the dryer.
April 8 - It's been up and down over here. My highly sensitive child rotates between saying "I love you" and "I'm sorry" about everything all day. He did bust his toe up pretty badly on the stairs and was surprisingly chill about it, though. When he insisted on wearing slides outside, I may have said, "Fine, but if you break your ankle, I'm not taking you to the hospital."
April 10 - Ian: “I had a dream that we were in quarantine from our quarantine and we had to get on these boats that were giant rafts out in the middle of the ocean that were five miles long and three miles wide. That part was scary because we could have sunk and there’s stuff in the ocean. They said we had to stay for 655 days but they didn’t say why. The worst part was I couldn’t find you and there were 170 rafts out there but they were all 100 miles apart. They didn’t even say what we could do to save ourselves.”
April 22 - Ian: “Your mashed potatoes are the best. How do you mash them?”
Me: “With the hand mixer once they’re done cooking ...”
Ian: “...”
Me: “What?”
Ian: “So they’re *mixed* potatoes, not mashed ...”