Talented

Both of my parents were artists, whether they got paid for it or not. My dad earned extra money doing lettering and pinstriping on boat transoms, and he was an avid carver when he was retired. My mom taught watercolor classes and could have sold her own work, if she had the interest. Dad could build furniture; Mom could make kick-ass Halloween costumes.

I inherited the interest, but not the grit required to practice something until I was really good at it. I can’t draw or paint, and my furniture-building skills only look good if the furniture in question is on a stage and the audience is pretty far away. I’m good at copying things, and I’m good at following directions, which is why the needle arts have always come easily to me. My knitting and crochet may not always be beautiful, but it’s generally RIGHT, even if I had to fudge a few things to get there.

When Liza started showing interest in art, I did everything I could to support her. Supplies, lessons, attention, dedicated space for her to work ... look back through the blog, it’s all there. And to my surprise, she’s kept at it, even when things weren’t working out to her satisfaction. She’s putting in the hours, and it shows.

My dad passed away before he really had a chance to see Liza’s talent bloom, but my mother stuck around long enough to see the first flowers. She was always so proud of Liza’s work, always happy to have her art on the fridge or in a frame. They did some projects together, back before Mom got sick, and I wish they had been able to do a lot more. My mom would have been so proud to see how much Liza has improved in the last year.

Boy, does this annoy me

Them: "So where does she go to school?"
Me: "Menlo Park Academy.  It's a community school for gifted kids in the Westpark area of Cleveland."

This conversation embarrasses Jason, who believes we shouldn't be advertising the fact that our child is gifted.  It smacks of bragging, he says, and he was horrified to hear Liza describe her school as being "for smart kids like me."

Apparently the fact that we're sending our child to a school for gifted kids SO SHE WON'T BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT BEING SMART has escaped him.

Or maybe he hasn't had the conversation 14,000 times, the way I have.  I've tried his approach, which inevitably goes like this:

Them: "So where does she go to school?"
Me: "Menlo Park Academy.  It's a community school in the Westpark area of Cleveland."
Them: "Oh, what's the focus of the school?" (which is always the immediate follow-up question, because charter and community schools are a bit topic around here)
Me: "It's for gifted kids."

If Liza attended a school for the arts, or a school for kids with developmental delays, or a private school, I would have no problem including that information in the answer, so why should the word "gifted" make anyone squirm?

I don't whip out statistics about how it's for kids whose cognitive abilities tested in the top 2% in the state.  I don't say my 5-year-old has an IQ only slightly lower than Einstein's.  I don't immediately tell people she's been reading since she was three and is now reading at an 8th grade level.  I don't allow Liza to compare her own performance - academic, physical, or artistic - to anyone else, for good or bad.  I don't say she's smarter than anybody else's kids, or act smug about it, or talk down about the local public school districts.  I answer their questions about the school fully and truthfully, without a hint of embarrassment.

Being gifted isn't an achievement to be proud of, it's just part of who Liza is.  She's blonde, has size 13 feet, is kind to bugs of all kinds, likes to tell fart jokes, and is gifted.  I refuse to let her think I am ashamed of any part of her, least of all her brain.

Yet another reason I like my online "friends"

Post A: discusses an article on inappropriately sexy children's clothes called "Parents, don't dress your girls like tramps"

Post B, responding to A: I agree dressing girls like hobos in dirty clothes and ripped up baggy pants and shoes with holes in them etc sends the wrong message.

Post C, responding to B: Wait, no, wait! Shit. That’s how I dress my kid.

I applaud you, C, as someone whose daughter regularly attends public events looking like this:

(you can't even see the level of crazy that was going on under that jacket - it was epic)

Magnum Opus

No, not a really big one of these:

I'm talking about this:

She developed the plot, characters, and dialog.  I helped with spelling, she wrote everything down.  I suggested that some periods and question marks might be in order; she decided where to put them.  She proofread it and realized she had left out a word; I helped her erase and then write two words really small so it fit in the space of one original word.

And for clarity's sake, the cat is going to have "babies," not "badies."

I am so very, very, very proud.

Next stop: capital letters and quotation marks, followed by intents and paragraphs.  Possibly with a side trip through Prounounville.

Well, that's not something you hear every day

My daughter is watching a rerun of the Punkin Chunkin special on tv and trying to explain the difference between a trebouchet and a catapult - to her Pillow Pet. It's both cute and freaky, with the freaky possibly winning.

Bookworm

I had to bodily remove her from the car because she was so entranced in this book that she wouldn't stop reading long enough to get out under her own steam.  Then I set up the hammock and she retired there, cup of Trix in hand, and I didn't hear a peep from her for an hour.  It would be totally charming, except the book she's reading is The Adventures of Captain Underpants. It's about two fourth-graders who write their own comic strip, play pranks on their fellow students, and hypnotize their principal into believing he's the titular hero.  Not sure this is a good influence on the kiddo ... although it does make for a blessedly peaceful afternoon around here.

Can you guess what she's been listening to at bedtime?

She saw me writing limericks and wanted to write a poem of her own, and this is what she came up with. At least it was easier for me to help her spell than, "In Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen. "

The Bear and the Rabbit, by Liza Woods

(Liza drew the pictures, did the title page, and narrated the story; I wrote down what she told me so it didn't take 6 months to complete a book)

______

______

______

______

______

Baby's first poem

When I suggested the other day during our homeschooling work that she could practice her handwriting, she said, "Sure! I'll write a poem!" And while I rummaged around for more practice paper, she made this:

I'll have to see if I can get our own little Beatnik to perform this on camera, because it really is too priceless. According to Liza, the correct reading of this is (descriptions mine):

Picnic! (very excitedly)

Mmmmm ... (like Homer Simpson)

Oh! Oh! (like uh-oh, only with two ohs)

Rain. (disappointed)

(I believe "rain" got written at the top because she ran out of room at the bottom of the paper.)

My daughter

Liza had a hard day today, what with having to gleefully watch my podiatrist relieve me of gallons of blood through the bottom of my right foot, and having to share her favorite playground with 75 other 4-year-olds from her school, and having to watch Handy Manny for an hour while I toiled with shovel and hoe and 4,000 bags of sand in our swampy new flower garden.  My goodness, her life is tough.

So it wasn't really a surprise that she wouldn't go to sleep right away tonight, wanting to be rocked, and then wanting to get out of her room altogether.  I told her she could stay up and ruin her mood for tomorrow if she wanted, but I had work today (thank you, mermaid costume purchaser!).  She played quietly in her room for almost an hour, and the only things I heard from her involved needing ice cubes for the water glass by her bed.

At 9:15 she called out and asked me to help her cover up with more silkies.  I go in to see what's going on, and she insisted it was necessary to sleep on her bed ...

 - sideways

 - on top of her pillow, with a smaller pillow under her head, so she's actually letting all the blood drain slowly into her brain

 - while wearing her polarfleece bathrobe

 - and not using any sheets or quilts

 - but instead using nine 3' square silkies piled on top of each other as blankets.

I drew the line at cuddling with the 20-pound beanbag chair full of stuffed animals, though, which I confiscated on my way out the door.

She's still in there, sideways, on her pillow, wearing a robe, covered only with silkies.  I figure she only sleeps through the night half the time anyway, so tonight's quirk isn't really going to hurt anyone, even if she wakes up all freaked out.  Plus, it will be fun to see what color her face will be in the morning.

Easy Reader, that's her name*

So, in between all the gore and knitting, my kid managed to complete the last of five Hooked On Phonics sets, which means that she's now reading at a 2nd grade level.



Um, yeah. Hooray?



She finished last week, and we've been taking a break from doing any "lessons" since then. I had started reading Pippi Longstocking to her a few weeks ago, so we finished that up during the time we used to use for her phonics stuff, and now we've moved on to Puff the Magic Dragon. I have to say, she's handling that book better than I expected, what with all the scary giant pirates and dying stars and stuff. Usually that sort of thing sends her screaming for the hills, but now she seems to be fine as long as I tell her ahead of time that everything works out okay in the end.


Meanwhile, she's been reading to herself for pleasure, without me having to encourage her in any way. We've got a basket of books next to the potty, and I know my services are going to be needed soon when she disappears and I hear her reading to herself. And last week she managed to read a new joke from the toy she got in her kids' meal, which she thought was just the coolest thing ever. (It was actually new to me, too, and pretty funny, at least the first 400 times: Knock knock - who's there? - repeat - repeat who? - who who who!).


She's still working through the Hooked on Handwriting stuff, although I haven't really seen that it's doing a lot to help her writing skills. We're filling up the house with the practice activities, though, so don't be surprised if you get an inappropriately-themed postcard from us with barely legible words on the back. Why someone decided to have "Viva Las Vegas!" as one of the cards in the practice pack, I'll never know.

Today she dragged out the Hooked on Phonics Master Reader set (which was stuffed behind a bunch of other stuff in my office) and wanted to look through it. It's a completely different format than the first module, and it's obviously geared toward older kids. Actually, it's obviously geared toward older boys, because the whole module has this sort of gritty robotic look to it, and a lot of the stories are about sports or scary animals. But there's a computer game, and the stories are on cool little cards instead of in a workbook, and there's a progress chart with stickers, so of course Little Miss Way Too Advanced For Her Age wanted to get started right away.

The new module is laid out a lot differently than the previous ones, and all of the actual lessons are in the computer game. There isn't a lot of explanation, at least in the first lesson, which assumes that you know what "syllables" are. That's not something Liza and I had discussed before, so we had to take a break to talk that over, but after that she was pretty quick to pick up the game. And she made it through the first story pretty well, with most of her stumbles more than likely due to the late hour when we attempted it instead of her inability to read them. So it looks like we'll be pressing on with this, at least whenever she asks to do it.

Lest you think I'm a total slavedriver, I will also admit that (at Liza's request) I've been using the library's Handy Manny DVD as a babysitter quite regularly over the past week or two. You'd be surprised how much flooring you can get laid in a bathroom during 90 minutes of "You break it, we fix it!" Plus, now the kid knows the names of most of the things in my toolbox, which was handy when Jason was working upstairs and I was downstairs and we needed someone to run tools between us. It's amazing how much faster things go when you've got someone to find the flathead screwdriver for you :)

* Don't remember Easy Reader? Morgan Freeman does. Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_PuAqRQLKA

A week among the animals

This past week was Liza's spring break from preschool, a time when all of her playmates were out of town and all of the play areas and museums are totally swamped with families desperate for entertainment. Jason had to go to Germany on business for the whole week (poor guy), which left me faced with seven straight days of no school, no playdates, and no escape.

So we drove to Kentucky.

Yeah, I know, but it makes about as much sense as anywhere else you can drive on one tank of gas, plus we have friends down there who were desperately in need of swaddling blankets and crocheted stroller blankets. Right?

On the way down we stopped in Columbus to visit the zoo there with some friends. It was alternately pleasantly chilly and viciously cold and rainy, and we weren't really dressed to stand it for long, but Liza and Joy had fun chasing each other around the inside exhibits.

The zoo has a brand new baby elephant - as in, "born two days before we got there" new - which wasn't out where you could see it, but they had shuffled the pens around and the male elephant happened to be in the area closest to the observation area in the elephant house (where Liza and Joy were running endless laps around an interior wall). Let's just say that he had some impressive junk, especially when he decided to pee the entire contents of a wading pool all over the floor. For five minutes straight.

As soon as we left the zoo the weather cleared up, and Liza enjoyed the sunshine as she spent the next four hours "reading" her new fairy tale books and listening to The Princess and the Pea audiobook over and over and over again.

Our first morning in Richmond was a bit chilly (we had to scrape the ice puddles off the bottoms of the slides), but that didn't keep us from enjoying one of the 5,086 parks in town. We proved that she's now fully capable of conquering every slide that previously caused her to quake in terror.


We enjoyed the spring flowers, which are several weeks farther along than the flowers in Cleveland.


One of my main reasons for visiting Richmond was to eat at some of the restaurants we have missed since we moved. The Thai place was still there, and Sonny's, and Madison Garden, and Giovanni's, and Sonic. Yeah, should have brought more elastic-waist pants on this trip.

We had gotten the basic "Hooked on Math" for Liza before we left Cleveland, and I accidentally left the first set of flash cards in my purse when we left for Kentucky. Liza was perfectly happy to "do her cards" while we waited in restaurants, and she was super excited when I proposed that she take her first "quiz" while we were killing time at the hotel one evening.
We spent lots of time at the hotel pool, but unfortunately there aren't any photos of that because I wasn't about to get the camera anywhere near Little Miss Splashes For No Reason Whatsoever. I can highly recommend that parents of preschoolers find hotels with indoor pools whenever they go on vacation. Not only does it give you something to fill the dreaded two hours between dinner and bedtime (when the kid is tired, you're tired, all the playgrounds are closed, and there's nothing on television that you'd let them watch), but it also makes a great threat to enforce good behavior. "Sit down in that chair this minute or we're not going in the pool when we get back to the hotel" is remarkably effective, especially when the kid knows you're just mean enough to follow through on the threat.

What with everyone having babies within a day or two of our arrival, the schedule was a bit, um, flexible, but we managed to catch up with many of our Richmond friends. Here's Liza and her cohorts trying to trick the geese into thinking that the grass they're throwing is actually something tasty.

Liza and I made it up to the geese on a later visit with Cheerios purloined from our hotel's breakfast buffet. That's another thing I'd recommend to other parents - snagging extra stuff from the buffet to use later in the day. Liza is notoriously picky in restaurants, ordering food and then not eating it and then complaining of hunger later on. I knew she wasn't going to eat anything at the Thai place, so I brought a yogurt and an apple from the buffet, and she was perfectly happy to eat those while I had my spicy pineapple chicken. Mmmmm .... spicy pineapple chicken ....

The last day of the trip was busy. We stopped at the Newport Aquarium on our way through Cincinnati, and it was totally worth the lines and the crowd inside at the main exhibits. Why? Because I shelled out the extra cash so we could pet the penguins.

Yes, I said pet the penguins. As in, those adorable little fishy-smelling beasties in tuxedos were actually willing to be handled (gently) by strangers. And my adorable little yogurt-smelling beastie managed to hold off her naptime tantrums long enough to make it through the whole thing without startling the little guys. She thought it was cool, but I don't think she understands what a rare treat this was. After all, Mr. Rogers got to do it, and now we just pulled in off the highway and petted them, so how special could it be?

Speaking of special, the final reason we went down to Kentucky was to get Liza's portrait done at the place that's done all of her past photos. Remember how I was joking about going back down there to get future ones done? Not really joking.

The proofs from that should be up by the end of the week, so I'll link so everyone can see how absolutely freaking incredibly awesomely well the kid did. In the meantime, while I was cruising around the studio's site, I found that one of Liza's earlier shots is in their advertising portfolio (scroll down, she's on the right side). How cool is that? Not as cool as petting a penguin, but still - it's pretty chilly.

Educational outing

Today at the natural history museum, Liza:

1. Journaled about the favorite animals she saw, including polar bears, caribou, and otters. Thank you, Sid the Science Kid, for giving me an excuse to sit down for five minutes in between trips to run up and down the hall to the planetarium. This also gave me an excuse to encourage her to think about whether they had long legs or short legs, long tail or short tail, horns or no horns, etc. And we had a rather enlightening conversation about what the Inuit might use polar bears for, and exactly why Pop-Pop hunts the deer on his farm.

2. Visited the outdoor (live) animal exhibits for the first time. The deer and turkeys were pronounced "cool," the hawks were a good excuse to see if we could identify which variety lives near our yard, and the otter was the biggest hit. Liza insisted on using my camera to take photos while it was rapidly swimming laps up to the window and back, which means I have a dozen photos of streaming bubbles and otter asses. At least this one has a picture of the photographer in the reflection.

3. Completely failed to notice that Righthand Raccoon was humping the daylights out of Middle Raccoon while we were walking past. This picture was from a few minutes later (on our second pass through to see the otters), and doesn't Righty look like the phrase should be "raccoon ugly" instead of "coyote ugly?"

4. Visited the dinosaurs, which was the initial intent of this whole trip. Liza announced yesterday at 2pm that she wanted to go to the dinosaur museum, but I couldn't stomach the thought of driving for an hour, going to the museum for an hour, then fighting downtown traffic all the way home. Instead we had a pretend dig for dinosaur bones on her bed (mixed wooden spools in with wooden blocks on her bed and she used a plastic basket to sift through the "dirt" for the "bones") and went today. Liza wanted her photo taken with the triceratops, especially once I pointed out that it starts with "tri," just like the triops. It's never to early to start learning the meanings of prefixes, now is it? When, later in the day, someone in the gift shop asked her whether the dinosaurs liked Liza's sparkly shoes, she scornfully informed them that dinosaurs aren't alive.

5. Wanted to read every book in the kids' section of the gift shop, except for the one seriously twisted Gary Larson book that I kept out of her sight (and then bought for myself because duuuude, this is soooo not appropriate for children - check out the synopsis on the Amazon page I linked to).

44/365

1, 2, 3, 4, 5: Liza made this for me (with no help from me or Jason) while I was fixing dinner.

Why yes, thank you for asking, the blue thing with three eyes and a long swirly tail is a triops, as mentioned in the hit song by They Might Be Giants, Triops Have Three Eyes. It's like her favorite song ever, or at least it has been for the past month or so. And now that it's stuck in my head (again), I'll return the favor and get it stuck in yours, too. Hah!

43/365

1. Liza's first encounter with antibiotics (thanks to a completely random strep infection that manifested itself as a sore stomach and a fever that didn't start until AFTER she started the medication) has been completely benign ... I don't even have to bribe her to take the stuff. Must taste better than what I grew up with.


2. Tag-teaming the tax preparation and child care for two days = done and filed in plenty of time.


3. The odd hybrid crocus in our front yard ... out of the hundreds of light purple and dark purple flowers by our front door, this is the only striped one we found.

4. Liza spends time each day making up her own theme music and narrating the storylines of whatever she's pretending that day. What she comes up with usually sounds like the main song from Jesus Christ Superstar, and involves some variation on "She transforms into super rainbow flower star." This morning we wrote down the best bits, because she's actually getting things to rhyme now. Here's what we got as she was fixing the wing that fell off of the airplane we were riding:

"She's got the power to read and sing.

She's got the power to fix the wing.

She knows just what to do.

She fixes the wing with her rainbow glue."

5. Jason let me sleep in while he and Liza bought donuts for breakfast this morning. Score!

Again with the bullet points

Sorry to go MIA, folks. Not dead or institutionalized, just leading a life that is mindnumbingly un-blog-worthy. Rather than bore you with the details, I decided to skip it. In the interest of catching up, here's the best of the past few weeks:

• Jason has been buying these miniatures he needs to play Warhammer 40K with his gaming buddies. His army has a couple of people called "librarians," which I think is pretty funny. And he's got some kind of motorcycle thingees that are pretty cool now that he's got them painted and everything. But the other night a friend suggested that he retrofit one of the librarians onto the motorcycle, and I decided that combination should be called the Bookmobile, and I just about peed my pants I was laughing so hard. See? This is why I haven't bothered blogging.


• Also, tonight Jason decided that one of Liza's kids' magazines was called Your Big Backside, which I think would be an awesome fitness magazine for obese preschoolers. Get to it, NWF.


• Liza drags home a couple new pieces of art from preschool every week, and that combined with what she produces at home has gotten us to the point where we were taping stuff to the walls in the dining room. Four rolls of ribbon, a few nails and washers, and some clothespins fixed that problem: From now on, if it doesn't fit in the art gallery and it doesn't mark a milestone, it hits the trash.


• Today Liza finished the third level of Hooked on Phonics workbooks. Sometime in the past few days she started actually recognizing a lot more things as words, rather than letters, and she read the second half of her final book pretty fluidly. Here's an excerpt from it, just so you know what I've gotten myself into: "Then Dad and Tim woke up. They looked at the camp. 'Who set up the tent?' Dad asked. 'Who got the sticks for the campfire?' asked Tim. 'Who got the nuts and berries?' asked Dad. 'Who got all the fish?' asked Tim. 'We did!' said Kim. 'My pals Fox, Skunk, Chipmunk, and Frog helped me!'" She got three mylar balloons from the dollar store for finishing the level, and you'd have thought they were dipped in gold, she was so excited. Of course, if they were dipped in gold they wouldn't float too well, so it's just as well they were plain old balloons.


• Last week after we got back from my parents' house, I started letting her look through her Bob Books while she ate lunch, mainly so that I could read my book at the same time. She was actually reading them, not just flipping through the pages, which was the first time I've seen her reading casually.


• Speaking of my parents' house, Liza was unimpressed with the flower show. She was only lukewarm on the train ride, perhaps because we went the day after the giant snowstorm and it was blowing 40 mph and about 3 degrees at the (outdoor) train platform, and the train was late. She was in favor of the cupcake at the Reading Terminal market, but she lasted for about five minutes in the actual flower show before she started whining about wanting to go home. Here's her attitude during the parts of the show when she wasn't whining: She liked the family lounge, which had movies and games and crafts and animals visiting from the Philadelphia Zoo. There was a bunny - that kept her busy for a few minutes while my parents saw the show. She was also in favor of the Fuzzy Wuzzy plant I let her get, which is currently dying on our less-than-sunny windowsill.


• This weekend she started reading road signs to us ("Do Not Block Drive" is her favorite). Tonight she started reading the back of Jason's cup to us while we were eating dinner. OMFG.


• Liza liked the natural history museum we visited near my parents' house. Can you tell it started off as some rich guy's seashell collection? Liza visits the "big fucking shell" corner. It was cold the day we visited, so we didn't get a chance to walk through the gardens outside, but we did visit at least one of the bronze statues they have on the grounds:
• Speaking of cold, when we got home from my parents' house, this was in our front yard: As usual, winter can officially bite me.
So help me god, if you so much as bruise that crocus, Charlie and Lola are going straight back to the library and they're staying there forever.


• We've gotten a lot of rain in the past few days, and the river is a little, um, full. I think this shot was upstream from the bridge: And this shows roughly the place where I was standing when I made the video ages ago:

Yeah, okay, so that's enough for today. Hopefully something interesting (or at least infuriating) will happen soon so I have something to talk about.

10/365

1. When Liza's preschool teachers tell me that they would recommend that I put her in the "advanced" pre-K/not-quite-kindergarten class next year instead of the regular class for 4-year-olds ... except her birthday is a few months after the cutoff date. Whew - that's one fewer decision to make.

2. Looking at the "DO SOON" section of my desk and seeing only one or two things, some of which are gift cards I need to spend.

3. Jason has given me the green light to go ahead and plan a trip to Disneyworld around Liza's birthday.

4. Nutella.

5. Battlestar Galactica is back starting Friday!

Liza tells a story

"This is the sky, and this is the sun. This is the deck, and the grass. This is a little squirrel hopping along, and see this red stuff over there? That's the squirrel puke. And this brown thing is a butterfly flying along with the puke bucket, and the squirrel puke just swings into the puke bucket.

The End"

Thank goodness for good lighting

The sun came out this afternoon, and the combination of the afternoon sun and all the light reflected from the 2" of snow we got last night was enough to illuminate my office sufficiently for some videotaping.

Which is a fancy way to say, check out my daughter the well-lit reading genius!

Oh, and the parts when she is staring off into space happened when she got distracted by the Hooked on Phonics game I left idling on my computer while I got her to read for the camera. I know it looks like she's having some sort of episode, but she's just really, really into that game.

The fat cat sat on the mat.

So, after completing the first lesson in the "big girl" Hooked on Phonics set earlier today, my daughter can officially read most three-letter words that end in -at. Except "sat," which for some reason she has to sound out every time she sees it, even if she just read it two words ago.

She read the little cartoon at the end of the lesson in the workbook, although I didn't manage to get it on video because I was too busy trying to be all encouraging and shit. Once we managed to convince her to actually look at the words, rather than just telling us what was happening in the picture, she got the hang of it relatively quickly. I still had to remind her that the words "is sitting in a big chair" hadn't appeared in the earlier lesson, so maybe "sat" would be a better choice, and for some reason whenever she couldn't figure out a word she thought it was funny to insist it said "pig," but after a couple repeats she had it down cold.

A few hours later (after doing nothing educational at all) there was a lull in conversation at dinner, so I wrote "The fat cat sat on the mat" on a piece of paper and handed it to her. She read her 'secret message' right away with no help (sounding out the offending word, of course), despite having never tried to read a mix of sight words and phonics words before then. So she's actually reading, not just guessing from pictures or memorizing placement in lists of words.

I don' t know who is prouder - the kid or us. No, wait - it's us. She's freaking brilliant, this one.

And she's asked me three or four times since dinner when she gets to do the next lesson. Hooked on Phonics, we love you!