kindergarten

My oldest child started full-day kindergarten last week. He seems to like it. His teacher is 22 years old and fresh out of college. As a friend of mine who teaches elementary school in another state told me, I could get the one who takes this year to figure out that this is SO not the profession for her, or I could get a natural. We'll see, I guess.

So far she neglected to look in his backpack for a lunch and just assumed I sent neither lunch nor lunch money. On the other hand, she bought him a lunch.

Her description of where my son should be at the end of the year academically is discouraging in numbers/mathematics. He's past there already.

He's past where the class will be starting with reading, but he doesn't really know how to read yet. (He reads a few dozen simple words right now.) I assume this means the classwork will quickly catch up to where he currently is.

He likes kindergarten as far as I can tell. And happily, he already knows a few of the kids in his class. They went to preschool together. I hope he has a good year. I plan to do everything I can to make it happen.

a birthday approaches.

well, my youngest child is about to have her first birthday. our intention has long been that she would be our last child, so i occasionally get a bit misty about never having another baby. especially as this baby prepares to leave official baby-hood. indeed, she is working hard on learning to walk, and is using more "words" now than just a few days ago.

but i still feel, deep down (probably in my hip bones, they haven't completely recovered from my last pregnancy) that three kids is the right number for this family.

so i need to plan a birthday party, whether i feel ready or not. i think this party will be pretty small. heaven knows this child doesn't need more toys or clothes - though i think the party itself will utterly delight her. she adores getting attention. what third child doesn't? but i don't want the house overrun and i don't want to make a really big deal out of this transition. i want her to be a baby a while longer.

for me, that's the funny thing about parenthood. it is simultaneously about my children and about me.

more harry potter thoughts

in the first book, when snape realizes that quirrell is trying to get the stone, why doesn't he tell anyone and try to get help with stopping quirrell?

i adore harry potter, but ...

i adore harry potter, but there are things about it that bug me. maybe some of these criticisms will be answered by the 7th book, i hope so.

for one, wasn't the philosopher's/sorcerer's stone safer before harry went down in there to "save" it? he got it out of the mirror, quirrell couldn't. if harry hadn't gone down there, presumeably quirrell would have spent a lot of fruitless time nattering to himself in front of the mirror of erised, and then d'dore would have come down and caught him and been done with him. harry was wonderful and brave and all, but what he did, in the end, served no real purpose.

and i want to know how voldy got his wand back. he says to his DEs that he couldn't hold a wand after his attempt to curse baby Harry backfired. no one takes credit for getting it back to him. he gives no one credit for it, either. so will the wand deliverer be revealed in book 7, or did JKR just mess up?

another thing: If D'dore didn't really believe that the prophecy was "truth", ie, it wasn't Harry's destiny unless he chose it to be (and he says so in HPB), why did he wait so many years to reveal the prophecy to Harry?

I've long thought that prophecy thing was the weakest part of OotP, maybe the weakest part of the whole series so far. If Harry had just known the prophecy (and D'dore could have told it to him at any time, or let him stumble across it in the pensieve if he didn't want Voldy looking at him through Harry's eyes) then in essence the whole book wouldn't have happened. And, not unimportant, Sirius wouldn't have died, either.

and who cares if voldy wastes time and energy going after the prophecy? what mattered (to me, to harry) is that HARRY went after it. sirius went to the dept of mysteries to rescue harry. the prophecy had nothing to do with why sirius was there, except that it was why harry was there. if harry hadn't tried to "rescue" sirius, sirius wouldn't have died. just what voldy was banking on, really.

if instead harry had been told, say 3/4ths of the way through the book, what the prophecy was, he wouldn't have gone to the dept of mysteries that night, it wouldn't have mattered that snape stopped giving him occlumency lessons, and voldy would have spent (wasted) lots more time and energy trying to get the prophecy.

i just think it's weak.

cute things children say

I went to the zoo with my kids and had this conversation with my 3yr old daughter:

We look into the elephant area and she says with authority: "Elephants can't hurt me."

I don't want to scare her but I want her to be careful, so I say something like "Well you know, they are very big, and they could hurt you without meaning to, if you got too close ..."

This really upsets her, and with a tear in her voice she exclaims: "But EEE-muh, elephants can't hurt me! They don't have STINGers!"