This is What it Has Come To

A friend sent me a text (at 9:30 PM, no less) last night, wanting to see if I want to run a 10mile race with her on Sept 5 (i.e. less than two weeks from now). And of course, I said yes. I’m probably slightly mental and a bit sleep deprived, or maybe bolstered by the excellent run I had yesterday (4 mi). Or perhaps I was drunk on the chocolate frosting I nicked out of the bowl while making b’day cupcakes for my dad. Take your pick.

Anyhow. The kids started gymnastics last night. The class officially started last week, but we went to a going-away party for my cousin instead. Tabby is probably the oldest kid in the class. I put her in level 1 so I could just take them to one class. There’s not a LOT of difference, but there’s some. Mostly in how the kids behave. Ben is one of the youngest. He just runs around in circles and makes excellent use of the bouncy floor. And spring board. And anything to climb on. He genuinely seems to WANT to listen and “be good” but the urge to MOVE is great in this one. And even if Tabby is a bit advanced for the rest of the class, she’s having a great time being with her brother and advising anyone who will stand still long enough to listen.

I have been reading a lot. I am working my way slowly through JD Robb (Nora Roberts)’s “In Death” series. They are nice kind of fun reads, but formulaic enough that they don’t really stand out in my mind. The two most awesome books I’ve read recently are Nurture Shock and Bossypants.

Nurtureshock is about all the findings over the last 20 yrs or so about how kids learn and grow and develop. It is incredibly interesting and useful information and I highly recommend it to ALL parents and caregivers. We also learned that the curriculum our public schools use for the preschoolers and kindergartners is a really really well respected curriculum with amazing results and bragging rights. It’s called Tools of the Mind (check out the website, it’s got great info) and I’ve started implementing some of the ideas it uses with Tabby when we’re at home, including play plans (where the kids write out what they’re going to do during playtime) and buddy-reading (we read a book to Tabby and then she “reads” it back to us).

Bossypants on the other hand is its own kind of great information. It’s Tina Fey’s extremely funny book. Sort of part biography, part show-biz anecdotes and part life lessons (many learned from Lorne Michaels). It’s short, sweet and made me laugh out loud at least 10x as I read it. Excellent photos as well.

I have about 6 actual paper books in my queue right now, one on running, two dealing with nutrition and kicking the sugar habit (see reference to chocolate frosting drunkenness above), one about two society girls who came to the CO frontier to teach around the turn of the century, and a couple of new cookbooks plus about 10 magazines I haven’t cracked yet. I plan to drag them with me this weekend and see if I can make a dent.