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Myrna in her natural environment. |
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Check out my new “Ten Tips on Raisin’ Brains” at www.squidoo.com/giftedparent |
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June 2008
Tuesday, June 3: Darleen called last night to tell me about their family’s dinner conversation. Apparently they discussed the facts of life over a plate of spaghetti. Their son, Parker, who recently turned eleven also recently missed the “puberty” talk at school, so his loving family decided that would make a terrific dinner topic. Anything to help Parker. Darleen asked the family if anyone had a thought to share--that’s when her hubby took over. He’s a visual teacher, and since the nearest visual aid happened to be the spaghetti on his plate, he went through the entire birds and the bees from beginning to end, using spaghetti noodles to illustrate his points. He formed a zygote out of a noodle and then formed a group of racing sperm, explaining that only one sperm would win. Eventually he moved on to, ahem, other things and finally finished with the shape of a woman’s body and how it changed during pregnancy. Okay, if anyone out there has ever learned the facts of life thanks to a father and a pasta demonstration, please let me know. Otherwise, I believe this is a first. Hopefully, Parker doesn’t experience any harmful side effects from this atypical presentation. He could develop an aversion to spaghetti, or maybe, in later years, he might blame his future excessive weight gain on his obsession with Italian food.
Friday, June 6: This has been party week at our house. We’ve been celebrating summer, which has yet to arrive. Maybe we should call this season “unwinter.” Pandora invited several friends over for a sleepover on Wednesday. Our house was full of giggling twelve-year-old girls--giggling, screaming twelve-year-old girls. I don’t know how they manage to keep secrets, because they do not know how to talk quietly. I now know all of the local middle-school gossip. More than I want to know. Rupert is having a party this afternoon. Originally, I was more apprehensive about a group of eight-year-old boys, but I think the girls have raised the bar on the noise expectations. Rupert is having Star Wars party. He’s an absolute SW geek. He was watching the movies on an old video camera that we gave him. He can only get the pictures and not the sound on the camera, but he said he didn’t need the sound. He had all of the lines memorized. Then he proceeded to prove it by saying all the lines aloud as the movie proceeded. Kind of scary. Also kind of annoying-and yet amazing.
Tuesday, June 10: The wind is a blowing. From what I hear, we may actually experience a little bit of summer next week. The kids are eating snow cones and hot dogs in an effort to convince themselves that it really is June. The word is we may get snow tonight. Magnolia is taking summer school as well as some online courses. She wants to graduate at the end of her junior year next spring. So, it doesn’t quite seem like summer vacation, between the weather and a child still in school. I certainly don’t get to sleep in, which to me is the epitome of bliss and the most highly anticipated perk of summer. My perfect summer involves ice cream, happy children, rain at night and sunshine during the day, and late nights in bed with a good book--which means sleeping in the next day. Too cold for ice cream, too cloudy for sunshine, no late-night book binges, but at least the kids are happy. I’ll take it.
Tuesday, June 17: Hurrah! Summer is actually here! Maybe now my spindly tomato plants will grow some new green leaves. Rupert and Pandora had their first soccer practices of the season yesterday. They both complained about heat and dehydration, so we bought bigger water bottles and some spray bottles. Last week, the water would have frozen in its containers. Darleen and her family stopped by yesterday. I enjoyed their visit, but I was particularly impressed by the pictures Darleen had on her cell phone. She had a few shots from the pasta/puberty presentation, and I must say, her husband is quite the artist when it comes to noodles. I think he’s found his medium. I’ll bet there’s not a lot of competition out there either.
Friday, June 20: I have another film maker in the family. Rupert’s fascinated with Star Wars is taking him to the next level. He now spends hours watching the extra DVD features on how the movie was made. His conversations with others now include subjects like “blue screens” and “green screens” and why one works better than another when a lot of red is involved in the background. His little eight-year-old brain is racing at the speed of light as he contemplates the options available to him with our limited filming capabilities and a lack of a film studio. Time for a little creative problem solving.
He has decided he wants to make a movie similar to Star Wars, but not the same, because he doesn’t think it would be right to copy someone else’s work. Hence, he has come up with the name Galaxy Wars for his own production. He reminds me of those days in elementary school where we had to write reports on subjects we were unfamiliar with, and we were told to find our info in encyclopedias, but we couldn’t plagiarize. So, we took each sentence out of the encyclopedia article and rewrote it by moving a few words around or changing an adjective. Then we went on to the next sentence and repeated the process until we had the required word count. I’m sure Rupert’s Galaxy Wars will develop from a similar process. It’ll be a grade-school-report version, filmed in crayon and smudges, but deep in learning opportunities. Rupert told me the other day that he wants to be an “accomplisher.” I guess it just remains to be seen exactly what it is that he will accomplish.
Monday, June 30: Last week I went to a church girls’ camp up in the mountains of Idaho. The first event was a 7 1/2 mile hike up and down the mountainside and in the heat. Let me tell you, spending hours in front of a computer screen does nothing to prepare a person for uphill climbs. Nonetheless, I’m very proud of myself--I did it, and with relatively little problem except for the moment on the way back when I thought I was going to pass out due to dehydration. I had been afraid to drink too much water up to that point, as I’m just slightly squeamish about the lack of restrooms. But lesson learned. I guzzled my water down and was fine. Magnolia was there with me, and kept insisting on carrying my backpack for me. I didn’t want her to, as I was fine with the backpack and I wanted to be able to say I did the whole thing without any help. But she was so insistent, and I realized that she wanted to help. How can I turn that down? So, she carried my backpack and hers for the last two miles. It wasn’t the physical improvement that I appreciated--it was the emotional/relationship effort that she made that touched me.
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