Swimming

Sofia has kicked it in gear with swimming over the last couple weeks.  She has moved up position in her lane and is now second in her lane behind an older boy.  She is already starting to catch up to him on certain strokes as well.  I went swimming today and realized that in a 100meter freestyle Sofia could probably beat me.  I hope I could still will just from determination but if I did win I would be winded and exhausted and I think she would be fine!  Her dive is coming along nicely as well.  Here is a video or her dive and then freestyle the length of the pool.



Ali is struggling with her breaststroke but is steadily improving her freestyle.  She needs to build up her endurance now because she gets tired about 3/4s of the way down the pool.  Here is Ali's pencil jump with freestyle for the length.  Ali has not figured out the dive off the platform yet although I give her credit for trying it when her nine and ten year old classmates aren't even trying to dive off the platform.

Gymnastics

Gymnastics is going well and the girls are really starting to ask about going more than once a week.  I'm not ready for them to have an activity every night of the week nor do I want to spend the money on another night of gymnastics so we will stay at one day a week for now.  They do love it though.  They seem to come out of gymnastics with as much energy as when they go in to gymnastics.  It is almost like they actually get energy from expending energy!  I finally remembered to bring my camera last week so that I could snap a couple photos.  It is hard to take pictures though since as a parent we are not allowed on the gym floor and have to wait behind a glass wall until the children are finished and come out of the gym.  I am fine with this approach as it means I cannot wonder if I am suppose to correct my child's bad behavior or not.  Not that they often had bad behavior but like all kids they sometimes they have trouble focusing.  Anyway, last week they were on the balance beam which is right in front of the windows so I was able to get a picture of Ali doing a handstand on the beam. Again the quality isn't great because of the reflections from the glass.

Sleep Over

After working on Saturday the following week Jason as to go to Prague.  It was a quick trip but it meant he was gone from Wednesday until Saturday end of day.  My brothers were taking a guys weekend in Maine so my sister in law, Jen, and her son Michael came up to visit.  They came up on Saturday morning and brought my mom with them.  The kids played (first only Ali and Michael since Sofia was at a birthday party until 2:30) in the basement and the ladies hung out and chatted.  Jason ended up getting home about three in the afternoon but as you can imagine he was pretty tired.  My Dad showed up around 4pm and then we all headed to dinner at six.  After dinner my parents headed home.  The kids continued to play for a little bit but then it was off to bed.  It was so nice having Jen to chat with even though Jason was there.  As I told Jen, "Jason is here but he isn't".  I always try to chat with him when he gets home from Prague and he is always falling asleep or just doesn't hear me so with Jen there I didn't bother Jason and I still had an adult to talk to.

On Sunday we all decided to take a walk along the lake.  Jason and Ali had walked down that path before but Sofia and I had never walked on the path by the lake.  It is such a nice path!  The path goes all the way around the lake but we did not take it that far.  We spent about two hours walking and stopping at the lake.  The kids were so happy to be in the woods and to through things onto the frozen lake.  the edges of the lake were not as frozen and the kids had fun putting sticks into the water.  Watson enjoyed running on the path and fetching sticks out on the ice.  We never let him go that far out though since we were not confident of the ice safety (none of  the kids or the adults went on the ice).  WE did come across two standard poodles in our walk and it was very interesting to see Watson go into protection mode.  The kids were up ahead of us and Watson always tries to herd them back to the group but when two unknown dogs came up the path from the other direction he ran in front of the kids and started protecting them from the other dogs even though the other dogs ended up being friendly.  Fortunately for us the other dog owner was a vet and she was very good about the fact that Watson was barking at her dogs and ready to take them down if needed.  She told us to not worry about it that he was doing exactly what he is suppose to be doing, protecting our kids.  She said that Watson did not know her dogs so he instinctively guarded when they came running up the path toward the children.  Once we gave Watson the OK though he started playing with her dogs.  It was quite interesting.  It was a nice walk in the woods and we found the path from the lake that comes up into our neighbors yard so the next time I see our neighbor I will ask him he he minds if we use it.

Maine without Jason

Jason had to work on Saturday but since we had already signed the girls up for the multi week program of ski lessons I loaded them up in the car on Friday night and headed to Maine without Jason.  We hit traffic on the highway since there were two accidents so it took me an extra hour to get to Maine but the kids did great.  We stopped for pizza on the way and arrived around 8:30pm.  I let the kids run around and say his to Grammie and Grampa while I unloaded the car but then herded them right up to bed.  On Saturday the kids had ski lesson all day which meant I had the whole day to ski by myself.  I have decided I do not enjoy skiing all by myself when it is 10F with no sun and light snow falling.  I ended up coming in after only three runs because my toes were so cold.  It took an hour for them to warm up to the point of not being painful.  I had to focus on mot hyperventilating because i was in such discomfort.  I definitely could have used Jason there to baby me.  After finally warming up I decided I would do two runs top to bottom and then come in to warm up for 20 minutes.  This saved me the pain of freezing my feet and meant I didn't have to stay in for an hour.  I found a very short bumps run which helped with the cold since I actually had to do some work rather than just cruising down groomers and that was a lot of fun.  It is interesting how you learn things about yourself when you are all alone.  I learned that I wasn't really having a lot of fun just going fast down groomers that really my joy of skiing comes when I'm on a mogul run.  My new skis and boots make the moguls so much easier to ski now since I don't have to man handle my ski since my boot is so snug it immediately responds to my movement.  I finished up skiing for the day and brought my things back to the car so that I would be ready for the girls when they finished.  They had a great time skiing and were not cold at all.  Ali's only complaint was that her hands got a little cold because her gloves were all wet.  I was surprised to here that since we just bought her new gloves this season and they were meant to be waterproof.  She was not joking though.  I couldn't believe when I felt the inside...it was like a sponge!  We called it a day and headed back to Jason's parent's house.  The girls had a half day lesson on Sunday and didn't want to leave the mountain to go home. They seem to truly love skiing.

Sillouettes

Sofia's class had to write about what they wanted to be when they grow up.  I have not seen what she has written but the reason they were writing it was to put on their silhouettes to be displayed in the front entry display case at school.  So with that project underway I went in along with two other Moms and made silhouettes of each of the children in her class.  We had a good system going and we were able to complete the entire class in one hour.  I thought Sofia's silhouette was so cute I had to take a picture of it!

Meeting of the Eagles

Sofia's school has a "Meeting of the Eagles" every so often.  I assumed it was just an assembly for the children so I never attended.  The last meeting of the Eagles Sofia asked me to attend and proceeded to tell me whose parents were at the last meeting of the Eagles.  I told her I would go and when I arrived I was shocked at how many parents were there.  I had no idea this was a big parent event.  I had even asked at the beginning of the year and was told that I could come if I wanted but didn't have to.  This implied to me that it really was more for the children.  Anyway, I went into the gymnasium and had difficulty finding a seat becuase there were so many parents!  I saw Sofia and she was happy I was there.  I'm glad I went becuase it is more than just an assembly.  The kids sing and there are kids playing instruments.  The 3rd graders all played hot cross buns on their recorders while the second graders sang the song.  It was quite a performance.  I finally got to see Swoops, the school mascot.  It was nice to see Sofia there with all the kids around her.  The children all seem to have a good time.  One of the things they did was "The Coming and Going of the Rain".  It was quite impressive and really did sound like rain.  I'm still working on figuring out the video on my new camera so please forgive the quality of my footage but here are the kids making rain...

Report Cards

The girls received their first report cards of the year on January 20th.  I was looking forward to the report card to get a better sense of how the kids were doing in their new classes.  Since I am not involved as I was in Prague and I do not see the kids teachers on a daily or even weekly basis I feel quite out of touch with their progress.  Not surprisingly though I was disappointed with the report cards.  I am not disappointed in my children but rather in the report cards themselves.  The system is ridiculous and does not give an accurate depiction of how well the children are doing.  There is a four point system of which a 4 is basically unattainable.  The 4 is saved for the unusual genius child apparently.  So the highest you can really get is a 3.  The girls got all twos and threes which pretty much every child gets.  Now I will grant that I cannot grade my children in every aspect of their learning.  I do not know how well they are learning science concepts because there are no tests that come home with grades on them.  I can however, tell you how well my children are doing in math and reading since we work on these every night.  The goal for Sofia's class is to complete 60 math facts in 3 minutes by the end of the year.  Sofia has done this already.  Sofia does have math tests that come home and I will grant that the beginning was rough as she was learning the way to do math here as well as learning her US money but she has steadily improved and got 1 wrong on the last test and zero wrong on the test before that.  Her reading is well beyond her class level and she even scored top scores on the standardized reading test.  She has received the challenge spelling words every week except for maybe two weeks.  How she received a "2" on any math, reading and spelling is beyond me.  She also received a two in P.E.! She is highly coordinated and very athletic so how does that equate to a 2??  Ali's report card was just as poorly completed.  In the comments section Ali's teacher noted that Ali is reading "above grade level" yet when you look in the numbers section she has a "2"! How is that possible??

 I was quite worked up about the report cards as you can probably tell but I have calmed down a lot.  I  have decided to just ignore the report cards at this stage and not worry about it until there are firm tests in all subjects so they can receive a grade based on pure numbers and not on random assessments made by a teacher.  It just seems it is one more way to make all kids feel good by giving everyone twos and threes.  I do not understand why it is a bad thing if a child is really good in something to recognize him/her and when they are doing poorly to point it out so they can work harder to achieve.  Frankly it is a punishment to those kids who are really achieving since it makes them feel that no matter how hard they work they can never reach the best grade.