Lilypad Surfing

Lilypad surfing-that's what the Webkinz are doing right now in the background as I type. Rutledge is lying sprawled across my lap, leaving my ankles throbbing in pain from his weight. Which, incidentally, only appears to be about 30.5 pounds with his clothes and a cloth diaper on, according to our dr's scale this morning. There's always something to feel guilty about when you are a parent, and right now it's Rutledge's hearing and speech for me. I took him in, thinking maybe I was being reactionary (do I just want to part with a $20 copay, Kerry wanted to know), because he has been waking in the middle of the night every night for the past 9 or 10 weeks with a wet, uncontrollable cough. I have also wondered whether he has fluid in his ears, since his speech is still very slow developing. At his age, we should be understanding 70-75% of what he says, and I'd say that a generous estimate is 25% right now. I wish we had done something earlier. He has only had one ear infection that I know if in his life, but he has frequently been found to have fluid in his ears when he has been in for other minor illnesses or well visits. Now I'm feeling like I've created a disability that may affect all of his early years because I didn't push to have tubes put in his ears months ago (not that anyone offered, or that it was even offered that we see an ENT). The game plan now is to give him an antibiotic for two weeks, then see an ENT in 4-6 weeks, have a hearing exam done, and perhaps go through the early intervention services in our county. If only I had insisted that we have surgery back in the fall, we could probably have spared ourselves a lot of grief!

This morning was fairly productive. The boys worked on their schoolwork--math, handwriting, and spelling, as well as doing the timed DIBELS tests, which haven't really revealed anything I didn't know. Ollie reads well above grade level, though I don't have any specific test that indicates just how far ahead. He can pretty much read anything and has comprehension higher than his actual decoding fluency level. Walter reads at grade level--around a 3rd grade level and meets close to the benchmark for end of third grade in terms of speed and fluency. My expectation is that both of them will be reading at least three to four grade levels ahead, but I'll take on target for now. I'm not sure how I feel about timing things. I guess it does show how much you know, or at least how well you can display what you know with someone breathing down your neck. But really, who cares if you can do 20 math problems in 1 minute or read X number of words in that amount of time. Isn't quality more important than quantity? Is pain the only way to learn?

I plan to use the summer to poke around through the options I have for approaches to teaching. You would think that four years down the line I would have at least a genearl philosophy all figured out, but I find that the longer I do this, the more that I see what I'm doing as a dynamic process. The only thing that is certain to me is that we are always changing, that what we need is evolving, that I couldn't have anticipated what a 9 year old was like (or what my orientation to a 9 year old would be) when I had only 7 year olds. Little snippets of information from here and there affect my attitudes toward where we are now, and dabbling in the descriptions of what other people do sparks my interest in trying something that I hadn't been open to before or that I might not have come up with on my own. Then I surprise myself sometimes, shocked that I care about something that I didn't think I gave a rat's ass about. It bothers me that Walter and Ollie can't spout off multiplication facts in under 3 seconds, for instance. Who knew that I cared that much?

So here we are, constantly changing, always feeling the ground under our feet, and hopefully still having fun and challenging ourselves along the way and not being worn down by the mainstream demands that I can't seem to ignore the way I'd like to.