Newton Famous

Last week, Gabe had his Ag Fair. Based on his end-of-school-year schedule, this was his "summation" event.

Unlike some kindergartens, Gabe's school doesn't have a kindergarten graduation. I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, a graduation for kindergarten seems ridiculous. It's kindergarten. Getting through it requires little more than a willingness to not eat so much glue that you spend the majority of the school year in the hospital. There's no real accomplishment there. Add to that the graduation he had from preschool and the graduation he will have for exiting elementary school and entering middle school (then the one from middle school to high school, and then high school, and then college, and then clown college) and there are very few years left that the act of just getting through isn't worthy of some kind of end-of-year pomp and circumstance.

On the other hand, though, Gabe loves these kinds of events and they are pretty cute. And, hey, Gabe didn't eat so much paste that he ended up in the hospital (or break his leg falling off the playground equipment--though I will be seriously surprised if this doesn't happen in the next few years), so that's worth celebrating, right?

The school does have Ag Fair, though. It is a day where the school kids present all of the various agriculture related projects they've been working on for the last several months.

 Each class was broken up into several small groups of three or four kids, and these kids were tasked with standing by their projects (for as long as their attention spans could handle it, from what I gathered) and explaining to any interested parties what their project was, how they did it, and what the purpose of it was. There were wind powered generators and compost piles and loads of different plants and some animals and all sorts of stuff.

Gabe had to man the newspaper flowerpot station in his classroom. Which he did marvelously. I was quite impressed, actually. As soon as we walked into the classroom he went over to his station and informed us that he needed to stay there to explain things to people as they came over (this was news to us--he hadn't given us any sort of straight answer about what was going on at the fair). And he did. For nearly an hour. It was a display of attention span that I would have thought impossible just a few  short months ago.

That doesn't mean that he focused on his duties, exactly. For instance, it took four tries for Libby to coax his explanation of what the flowerpots were and how they made them for the sake of this video. The first three videos looked a lot like the first video here:

But he eventually cooperated, and then he stayed at his post for far longer than I imagined he'd want to (I saw many of the kids from his class wandering around, so it was apparently a pretty loose responsibility). I even asked him at one point if he wanted to go walking around and look at the other projects--he told me he wanted to stay with his, but he told me that I HAD to go see the windmills because they were awesome.

After that hour, he started to get a little punchy, so we wrapped things up for the night. But, as far as I could tell, the night was a rousing success.

And then, yesterday, as Gabe got off the school bus, he was excitedly waving a newspaper at me. "I'm famous!" was the first thing he said to me as he handed me the paper. I looked, and, sure enough, there was this picture:

The article is here, but it's pretty short.

He was pretty stoked about it for the rest of the day yesterday, and he TOTALLY let it go to his head. The whole way home from school he and Norah had an in-depth conversation about what it meant to be famous (the entire world knew who he was, now, he said, and being in a "magazine" as he called it was the only REAL way to be famous as being on TV or the radio was just not as good) and he had lots of tips for how Norah could become famous if she wanted to (do something awesome and be in a magazine--when she suggested she could be on TV, he soundly rejected that notion).

Then, when we got home, he paraded around the house like the cock of the walk, with his self-involvement culminating about an hour before dinnertime with this little exchange:

Gabe: "I want a cheesy roll up" (shredded cheese wrapped in a tortilla and microwaved not-nearly-long enough to melt the cheese--the only food that he will consistently eat right now).
Me: "No. It's almost dinner time."
Gabe: Looking a little dumbstruck, "But, I thought you HAD to do what I wanted."
Me: "Why would you ever think such a thing?"
Gabe: "Because I'm famous. I was in a magazine. Doesn't that mean that you have to do whatever I want?"
Me: Laughing wildly, "Yeah. Good luck with that. You might be famous to the rest of the world, but I'm still the one that cleans your pee off the toilet and makes your dinner, so that means you don't get to tell me what to do."
Gabe: "Ah, man!"

And with that bubble bursting, Gabe came back down to earth and we made it through the rest of our day.

Blast Ball

So, it would appear that I've gotten pretty terrible at coming up with things to post on here. I mostly blame Norah. When Gabe was at home every day, his hyperactivity tended to create many wonderful topics for posting. Norah, sadly, shares too many personality traits with me. We're both hilarious, obviously, but it's more a cerebral humor than physical, and capturing that sort of thing on video is pretty difficult. But we have had a few things going on in the past few weeks worth mentioning for friends and family who care.

This past school year, we've been trying, and mostly failing, to find extracurricular activities for the kids to participate in that they would actually enjoy. Last year, Gabe loved soccer. This year, he spent all of the time he was supposed to be playing his games standing (or sitting on the ground) next to the ref or the coach, trying to carry on a conversation during the games and wandering around doing his own thing during practices. So we gave up on that about halfway through the season. Norah has had her princess fair dance camp again all semester, but, as the semester has gone on, her interest in it has begun to wane. Fortunately, it's nearing completion as well, and there's a chance that she won't want to go back again next fall.

We could, of course, force the kids to participate if we wanted to, but, frankly, we don't think these things are important enough to warrant that kind of family tension. We really just want to find things that they are interested in doing instead of forcing them to do something they don't want to. I'm not sure which is the better life lesson, to be honest. Most of their lives they'll be forced to do things they don't want to, so teaching them early to figure out a way to get through it and have a little bit of fun, if possible, along the way would be valuable lessons to learn. On the other hand, if they can dedicate themselves to the things that the enjoy doing, then that seems like a win-win. Again, though, I get the feeling that whichever method we decided was best would end up being the worst in retrospect, so we might as well avoid the drama of trying to force them to do something they don't enjoy.

The next experiment for Norah is blast ball. It's like a dumbed down version of t-ball. Yeah. They dumbed down t-ball. It's for four year olds, mostly, and the concept is pretty basic. Each team gets a few turns in the field and at bat. They bat through the lineup once then switch teams. The team in the field scrambles around trying to get the ball after it's been hit (well, the two or three kids that are paying attention and whose parents have obviously spent time practicing catch with baseball gloves do, the other kids just whine or sit on the field or pick flowers or pester the coaches--Norah pesters the coaches, for the most part). The batter runs over to an air filled base that they get to jump on. The base squeaks when they jump on it, so they know they got there, I guess. And they do that for thirty minutes and then it's over.

We thought Norah would take to it pretty well since she likes catching and throwing balls and she's pretty good at hitting balls off the tee that we have in the yard. But her enthusiasm for the game that she has in our yard isn't really transferring well to the public setting.

This last one I added just because it was in the file there. Norah drew a picture of herself. The picture is, clearly, a little creepy in and of itself, but mostly I included it because of her evil mastermind smile and hand gestures that she was making while the picture was being taken.

She had a process this first day, where she had to draw a line next to the bag and then run through some little warmup type things before she would hit the ball. It was all very professional. 

This video doesn't have anything to do with blast ball. It's from Easter. And I'm including it to illustrate what a terrible parent I am. For some reason, Norah didn't want her picture taken, so this is what I did in response.