Rants, Rants, Rants

Did I say rants?

I came up with most of these last night, when the cat woke me up MEOWWWWWING at 5 a.m. As I stumbled, cursing, down the stairs, and gave the cat her F'ing food, because you know cats must eat at 5 a.m., they can't possibly wait a few more hours, Harrison woke up from the hubbub. So, I had to get him to go back to sleep.

Then I went back to bed, but couldn't sleep for a while. I tossed and turned, and did lots of mental blogging, where I come up with all sorts of things to write about in my head. Things that will be forgotten the next day. I really need to design a brain wave reader, so I can just hook something up to my head on nights like that, and the next day, happily edit what my insomniac brain came up with before it finally gave up and went to sleep.

I remembered that I've been mentally blogging for a long time. I remember in my pre-teen and early teen years, having a running narration in my head as I went about my exciting pre-teen life.

The girl finished brushing her teeth, got dressed, and headed into the kitchen, where she was greeted by her mother. "Good morning!" they said to each other. The girl decided to eat instant oatmeal for breakfast that morning, so got out a bowl and opened the Maple and Brown Sugar oatmeal packet....

Snore. Oh, sorry, did I fall asleep, too?

Anyway, back to the rants.

So, in addition to the cat waking me in the middle of the night (Friday night it was 3 a.m., so it's getting better), I have more rants.

The next one came from reading Greg's blog, in the comment section on this post, where Chris posted, "teachers teach to the tests now, kids don't learn HOW to learn, and we pile on homework that serves mostly to stifle curiosity and interest," and Allie posted that her daughter Natalie already has homework for Kindergarten.

Reading that, I felt my horns coming out. Hutton, too, has homework in his Kindergarten class. Now, I can understand this in theory. The idea is to get the kids used to bringing home their backpacks, and remembering to put their homework back in the backpack to take to school. But, here's the thing. Hutton is in Kindergarten. He has Autism. He doesn't think, "Gosh, I better get my special homework tube out of my backpack and do my homework." He thinks, "Gee, what can I play with now that I'm home from school?" So, guess who gets to be in charge of making sure the homework is taken out, completed, and put back in the backpack? If you guessed, "Laura" or "The Mom" you get a gold star on the homework chart! Oh yeah, I also get to fix the homework tube when it gets broken because Hutton wants to play with it.

And here's another RRRRANT about school. One of his "homework" assignments was to redo an assignment from earlier this week. It was a worksheet that involved coloring two of the peanuts in the picture, then circling them. The worksheet had groups of 2, 3, 4 and 5 peanuts, and apparently when they were teaching this at school, Hutton didn't understand and wanted to color ALL of the peanuts. So, the teacher wrote this on the worksheet and included an extra worksheet for him to practice at home. Again, I can see this in theory. It's good to get extra practice on something the kid doesn't understand at school. But the RRR in rant came out when I thought of it the other way. Here's an idea, why don't you, the teacher, TEACH the child how to do it at, say, SCHOOL.

In addition to Kindergarten, Hutton has 4 hours of speech therapy a week, and 6 hours of ABA therapy. It's not like he's just goofing off all the time at home, and if he were, hey, he's 5 YEARS OLD. They're supposed to be goofing off, playing. That's how they learn.

Which brings me to another rant. This one about Hubby.

Yesterday, Hutton and Harrison were playing with the Stomp Rocket, a very cool toy. The problem was, Hutton kept taking the Stomp Rocket out of the driveway, and moving it to the front walkway, and aiming it for the roof. He'd already done this before, and lost a rocket on the roof, so I told him not to aim for the roof, or the rockets would get stuck on the roof. That was one rule. The other was, not to use the Stomp Rocket inside. We're pretty mellow around here. Not too many rules.

So, after a few minutes (yes, I was sitting reading a magazine, so wasn't really paying attention. I'm not in the running for Mother of the Year, or even Mediocre Mom), Hutton ran up and said, "I need help with the rockets!" and I saw them all on the roof. I got angry and told him, "I've told you 100 times NOT to shoot the rockets on the roof!" As I climbed out my bedroom window, risking bodily harm to retrieve the rockets from the roof, I yelled to Hutton that we were done with the Stomp Rockets for the day. And as I was still cursing under my breath, Hubby asked what was going on. I told him, to which he replied, "That's how kids learn! By doing the things you don't want them to do. Heck, I put stuff on the roof all the time when I was a kid." So, I stormed off downstairs to watch bad tv by myself and let Hubby be the Perfect Father.

Later I took the boys to get their hair cut, and they both got balloons. When we came home, Hutton immediately let the balloons go so they flew up to the top of the stairs where only adults could reach them. I told him I wasn't going to get the balloons for him every time he let them go in the stairwell. Hubby got them for him a few times, then started getting short and told Hutton NOT to let them go in the stairwell again. When he did it again, I told Hubby, "You know, that's how kids learn."