Basketball season is upon us once again. This season, seems shorter than last season…thankfully! Last season we did a lot of driving around in the bitter cold with lots of snow on the ground!

This year David is doing so much better. He’s understanding the mechanics and nuances of the game much better and is playing more. Brian has been bailing out of work on home game days at 5:00 so he can see the whole game, which David loves. This season also has his grandmother, Aunties, and a cousin coming to the home games. The big difference is that last year the home games were actually played in Regent which is about 12 miles away.  While the Mott gym is smaller, it does make for a much larger turnout and it also means less driving for mel…YAY!

David is also getting much more playing time as well as carrying the ball and shooting…all skills have really improved over last year…the added height doesn’t hurt either! LOL!

Just had to share a few pics from Tuesday’s game.   I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting more and posting here more!

You want to know what the 3 most important things are when navigating your child through their education? Question, question, question. Only, I’m not joking.

When I was growing up, my Daddy worked for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). He retired from the LAUSD with almost 40 years under his belt. Dad was not “certificated”, didn’t hold a teaching certificate, he was “classified” which was the term given to all other LAUSD employees. Because of Dad’s time with the “board”, as we called it, I also started my working career with LAUSD. Nepotism ran rampant in the LAUSD.

All those years spent working for the LAUSD was a HUGE blessing that I am only realizing now.  They exposed me to the inner workings of the second largest school district in the nation, but more importantly it taught me what each child is entitled to in terms of a public school education.

The second blessing came when my son started at Lummis Elementary in Las Vegas. It was a wonderful school with an incredibly caring staff of teachers and administrators. I was lucky to learn how to be a “parent of a school-aged child” there. Everyone was so willing to share their knowledge, calm my fears, and answer my questions.

Now we are in a “new” town with a very small district…where things are done differently then I may be used to. Fortunately, I am not afraid to ask questions.

Tonight there was an informational meeting with our School Superintendent and some concerned parents. This meeting was prompted by some letters that were sent to both the Primary and Secondary Principals, the School Board, and the Superintendent.  The point of the meeting was to address the concerns addressed in the letters.

It was a tough crowd, tough subject, and the Superintendent took a beating, verbally.  Being removed from the situation it was plain for me to see that there was a lack of communication…parents didn’t know that a complaint wasn’t considered “formal” until it was put in writing. If parents didn’t put it in writing it was considered a “concern” and would probably not go any further. Parents didn’t know how to get on the school board agenda or what was appropriate for a school board meeting, versus some other venue. I could go on and on.  Suffice it to say, there is a moral to this story, actually there is two.

The moral of this tale is to question everything. Don’t take one person’s word for it, maybe they misunderstood the question…keep asking, go to that person’s supervisor, and their supervisor, contact the state’s education office and ask them to direct you, ask other parents…YOU ARE YOUR CHILD’S ADVOCATE SO ADVOCATE.

The second moral of this tale would be to FOLLOW EVERYTHING UP IN WRITING. I don’t care if it’s just a quick email summarizing a two second conversation in the hallway…if it was important enough for you, the parent, to bring up, then write it down and forward a copy to the person you spoke with and ask for their input. And for goodness sake,  hang onto it! It’s easy for someone who is bombarded with paper all day to say “gee I don’t remember that conversation”, and then you have a copy that jogs their memory.

I think if all the hurt parents had known to do these two things, tonight’s meeting would have been unneccesary…I’m glad they know now…and so do you.

So our house is physically put together, the walk-through was done on Friday, and I have house keys…four to be exact.  Four separate house keys; a different one for each doorknob lock and each deadbolt.  When a “model” house is built for a showroom, they just slap knobs and deadbolts on and don’t bother to re-key them to one of the keys.  That is something, another thing, on my ever-growing list of “TO-DO’s”.

We didn’t move in this last weekend….because….we don’t have utilities yet.  The weather has been so wet and rainy/stormy, that the electrician really doesn’t want to wire my A/C to the power box.  The plumber is another one that doesn’t like to work in the rain…nor does the gasman.  Bunch of friggin party-poopers! We’ve now, officially been 2 days dry…although I did get the truck stuck in the left over muck, today.  I believe the utility guys will return tomorrow to finish what they have started.  Lord willing and the weather stays nice, as forecasted, I may be able to move in this coming weekend! YEAH!

During the daytime hours yesterday and today, though, I was able to get the kitchen about 90% unpacked.  That was FUN!  Seriously, I’ve never had so much storage space in a kitchen, I LOVE IT!!!  In fact, since I can post to Facebook from my phone, I’ve been updating there a little more frequently, just cuz it’s so easy.  If you are on Facebook and want to add me as a friend…I would love it.  Just comment that you read my blog.

I had to take crappy pictures with my cell phone and post them to Facebook with the heading…”Happiness is setting up my brand new kitchen”.  Cheesy, I know…it’s the little, odd (weird!) things that give me such pleasure (I could make a really obnoxious comment about my husband, here, but won’t…ROFL).

I am so loving the layout of the house…still lots to do…build a deck off the front door as well as the back door, build a garage, get the carpet seamed (hard to do, I found out, without electricity!), put a doggie door in, fence an area for the dogs, find an internet provider for the house, make arrangement for satellite TV.  Now Brian is dreaming of barns and arenas at night…and he bitches about the Percheron I want…what the hell is he going to do with an arena? Stare at it? Save it for “good”? OY!

Anyway…so much to do and all stuff that really needs to be done before the end of September…not sure when the first snow could fall and then we are screwed for the whole winter.  But all that stuff costs money and well…while I am playing the lottery…my numbers have not all come up at the same time…YET! So that means the juggling we all have to do at some point…UGH!  But everything always works out, just not always when we think it will.

So after getting stuck in the mud behind the house…wait, that’s kind of a funny one.  So I had this bright idea that I would drive around to the back of the house and back up right to the back door.  Since there are currently no steps out the back door, I thought I would open the door and stand in the bed of the truck just shoving boxes into the utility/mudroom.  On the way to the back door was when David and I got stuck.  Well, I rocked us out of that mess and we unloaded stuff the old-fashioned way…trudging up and down the front stairs.

So when I got home, I decided I was going to water my herb filled window boxes.  I shifted one of the boxes and saw something flop between the box and the wall…there to my surprise, was a very small (2.5-3 inch long) BAT!  That was a shock! I didn’t know there were any bat species that were indiginous to North Dakota…come to find out there are about 15!  This little guy is called…are you ready for this…it’s pretty ingenious…the “Little Brown Bat”.  By the time I got back outside with my cell phone to get a picture, he’d parked himself on the brick face of the building.  After spending some time studying bats (and many other animals) during my high school years at the Los Angeles Zoo…I’ve come to love these little creatures, although my fave bat is called a “Flying Fox” and looks just how the name implies…don’t freak, he’s a fruit-only bat.

Anyway, this little guy is an insect eater…I wish he’d stuck around, he was cute.  Someone on my Facebook commented that she had “bat houses”, like bird houses…I’m going to have to check into this.  Although bat guano is nothing to mess with…maybe a bat house isn’t such a great idea?

Last, but certainly not least, we got David registered for school today. It starts a week from this Friday!  He is excited, he’s already signed up for band as well as the basketball team.  Basketball is to North Dakota what football is Texas.

I did spend some time reviewing the school year calendar and that was interesting.  We have a lot of “Teacher In-Service” days…more than we did in Vegas…but what sucks is that Winter Break is only 8 school days long instead of 10 and Spring Break is 2 days at the beginning of Spring then we have the 2 days following Easter off…so it’s a total of 4 days instead of 5.  And school is longer 8:30-3:30, but the kids get out of school for Summer almost a whole month sooner than Vegas kids.  You can tell farming has a lot to do with the school schedule.  Although, this year, with the long, wet Winter and longer, wetter Spring…they haven’t started the harvest here as yet.  Wheat is still maturing in the fields and I have yet to see mature Sunflowers or Corn also.  It’s been a really interesting Summer here.

Well that’s a long enough update on us here in the wheat fields!  I will try to put the next batch of updates in their usual singular post style! LOL!

Love from the Heartland!

Oprah started out the episode talking with two Mother’s whose middle school aged kids had killed themselves as a result of being bullied.

As the parent of a child who has been picked on and taunted, it was so very scary to watch.

I’m glad Oprah is repeated at 4pm today.  David doesn’t know it yet, but he and I are sitting down and watching this together this afternoon.  We have a lot to talk about.

David’s Spring Concert was last night.  This is video of the choir singing his and my favorite song, “Sing with Jubilation” by Jerry Estes.

The choir sang a total of 8 songs with one being a “Suite” of four songs called “Four Seasons” – no relation to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”.  Then the Guitar group came up on stage and played one song and the audience sang along with the second song.

David was a bit peeved when we left for the concert at 5:40 when he didn’t have to be there until 6pm and the show didn’t start until 6:30. For the winter concert, we got there when the parents were supposed to drop the kids off at the music room and half the seats were already taken.  Since I wanted to record the show for Daddy, I wanted to make sure that we got there early enough so I could get a front row seat.  We were actually the second set of people there!  David was able to help out Ms. Dotts while we waited for the 6pm arrival time so it worked out well.

As the Principal pointed out last night.  In these days of economic challenges, especially in the schools where budget cuts are an every day concern.  Kim, Ms. Dotts, shows up at school, at least 90 minutes early three days a week to work with the choir one day, the guitar class another, and the percussion group yet another day.  And she does it all with grace, positivitiy, and no additional pay.  Yep, she does it voluntarily.  She is an incredibly special lady!  Incredibly gifted as well.

Thank you again, Kim, for all that you do for our kids.

The choir performance was so good!  Mrs. Dotts does such a fantastic job with the kids!  David mentioned to me, one day, that there were 100 kids in choir.  I thought he was exaggerating!  Mrs. Dotts was there and she said that they had 98 kids!  Can you imagine wrangling 98 4th and 5th graders???  Mrs. Dotts said it was easy because they were so motivated.  God Bless her!!!  She has the patience of a Saint and is one of the kindest people I have the pleasure of knowing.

Mimi was able to come, even with the early hour.  Breakfast in the Multi-Purpose Room started at 7:30 and was served until the bell indicating the start of school at 9am.

David got to have breakfast with Mimi, then they came to the courtyard where my pal, Jan and I were taking photographs to commemorate all the special people that came this morning.  Then David and Mimi checked out his classroom and the Scholastic Book Fair we have going on.

The PTA then has Jan and I process the photos and upload them to Costco’s photo department so the kids can have a memento of the day.  David loved having his Mimi there.  This was the first time she’d come to this particular event and David was in his element.  Me, I spent the whole time photographing the groups, maybe, one of these years, I will get to be the “someone special”???  Probably not, and that’s OK.

Rant ahead…whining, complaining, kavetching rant ahead.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my son’s school really doesn’t have much in the way of parking.  Primarily it’s street parking along the perimeter of the school.  This year, it seems, that there are more, a record number, of parents driving their kids to and from school.  Even with previous gas prices in the $4-$5/gallon range there were huge amounts of huge cars jockeying for parking places on the street.  I’ve purposefully been scarce so I could avoid all the craziness.  Normally if I am driving David to school, I plan to drop him or pick him up from the drive thru area.

The drive thru area is just what it sounds like.  Actually, it was a bus loop from when neighboring schools were under construction and Lummis was schooling the kids destined for those schools…way back when.  But, back to the drive thru area, it’s exactly what the name implies…pull into the loop, wait your turn to get to the gate area, when you get there apply the brakes, kick your kid out of the car and drive off…taking care not to run anyone over in the cross walk at the exit.

Today, I dropped David off at school for choir and neglected to tell him if I would be picking him up of if he would be walking home.  So I figured I had better go early, find a spot to park, and wait outside the door to his classroom so I wouldn’t miss him.

To finally get to the whole point of this post…I was sitting on the street in my car and was amazed at a variety of occurances.  An opportunity to sit and observe never ceases to amaze me! One of those amazing things is how FAST people go through a 15 mile/hour School Zone.  And I’m talking about parents with their Lummis School Students are zooming through the school zone!  BUT what absolutely KILLS me is when the SCHOOL BUSES zoom through the school zone!!!  WTF????  School Bus drivers, of all people should be observing the school speed zones.  RIGHT???  Or am I just being logical, yet again????

One day, I got chewed on by one of the school bus drivers!!!  I was going to drop David off at the front of the school one day at the end of the school year, last year.  I pulled in behind the bus and the bus’s lights started flashing red, and little lighted stop signs extended out from the left side of the bus.  So I let David out while the bus was dropping off it’s passengers.  I sat behind this bus with it’s flashing red lights…waiting for all his occupants to depart.  I waited and watched. I waited some more. I watched the teachers that greet those students take them into the building…all the while the red lights are still flashing.  So I quit waiting, assuming the driver had forgotten to shut them off and decided to go around him.  He, the bus driver, made a point of screaming (no, not yelling) at me that “STOP means STOP! And what part of that can’t you understand?”…I had a few choice words for him about what he could do with his red flashers!!!

I could swear it was that same bus driver that went flying past me earlier today in that 15 mile/hour school zone!

My baby finished his 3rd grade year today! I’m so very proud of him…he did so well…as always. Not that I am surprised! LOL…proud Mommy! I’m always so ready for Summer when it gets here. I’ve been fighting with David to get his homework done for the last two weeks…and I’m ready to not have to wake up early and fight with him to get ready for school. By the time the new school year rolls around, I will be ready for him to go back.

I’m really going to miss the 3rd grade teachers! They are some really cool ladies…one is moving on to the local middle school. One is moving back home to Chicago…her Dad is fighting prostate cancer and she wants to be with him…completely understandable! The other 4 will still be there next year…and I will harass them every chance I get.

I’m looking forward to the Summer…I don’t know what it will hold for us…just an adventure waiting to unfold!