Saturday in the Basement
The renovation is almost done -- just the floor and outlets remain...
Day 4: St. Augustine
Orlando Day 3: Heading to St. Augustine
Universal Day 2
Universal Day 1
Orlando Arrival
We made it to Orlando about nine hours after we left the house. With three breaks along the way, I consider that pretty good time to go a little over 500 miles.
When the kids saw the pool from our hotel room, they immediately decided that all else had to wait until they had time to swim. Only in Florida — swimming in an outdoor pool in March. When texting with K, she expressed some concern about the temperature, but we assured her that while it’s windy and thus cold out of the water, the pool itself is warm — a heated saltwater pool.
Then the Boy saw the arcade, and the next destination was set — no question about it.
“Daddy, can we please go to the arcade?” What was I to do?
A good way to start our short spring break vacation.
Another Conestee Walk
Saturday in the Yard
Today was the first Saturday we really spent in the yard this nearly-spring. We still have a few days to go until the official start of spring, but it feels like spring.
I spent most of the early afternoon working one little bit of our yard — our newest flowerbed.
For most of the rest of the day, I didn’t really take the time to snap any pictures. It wasn’t until the end of the day, after dinner, when we were out for walk that I thought to take a few more shots.
All of them with my phone. The truth is, I use a camera less and less often. In fact, this evening I experiment with writing the whole post on my phone. I got to about here, but then switched.
And this is just another bit of nonsense to keep a ridiculous streak going…
Left Behind
“Pick it up!” she yelled. We were at the end of class when A, who’s always a bit of an immature prankster, pushed K’s materials off her desk. K, who has issues with impulse control (i.e., she’s a chronic disrupter) doesn’t like when her world is disrupted, and she grows verbally violent when it happens. A was walking away smiling, which of course led to K feeling even more aggrieved. “I said,” she began, taking a deep breath, “pick it up!” He walked out the door. She walked out the door herself — not to accost him in the hallway, not to get help from an adult. No — she declared as she walked out, “Well, I ain’t pickin’ it up.” Bear in mind: these were her materials. She literally walked into her next class without her materials, thinking she was perfectly justified in doing so.
I picked her materials up and stowed them in my cabinet. Part of me was justifying it with the thought that it would teach her a little lesson; part of me did it, I think, just to irritate her further. That is, I’ll readily admit, somewhat childish, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of irritating her. I wanted her to go through the last two periods of the day without her materials to provide an object lesson to her: “Do you realize how many of your problems in school are of your own creation?” I’d planned on asking her when she got her materials back. “You had to go through two periods explaining why you didn’t have your materials, and I guarantee all your teachers responded the same way: ‘That’s your own fault.'”
Ten minutes into the next period, she was knocking at my door. A student let her in. She stormed back to her seat, and discovering her materials were missing, turned and yelled to the whole class, “Where’s my stuff!?!” She proceeded to rant for a while, completely disrupting what we were doing, but I just let her rant for a while. After about thirty seconds, I said, “K, I need you to go back to your class now.”
“But where’s my stuff?!?”
“I need you to go back to class now.”
“But I’ve got to get my stuff.”
“I need you to go back to class now.”
“I have to have my stuff. Where’s my stuff?”
“I need you to go back to class now.”
Her teacher came to the door, a puzzled look on his face.
“Mr. A says I need my stuff.”
“I need you to go back to class now.” I’ve found that the best way to deal with such situations is just to be a broken record, and as it always does, it worked: she huffed and started out of the room, then turned and walked over to a friend and started talking to her.
This is the kind of behavior teachers have to deal with every single day. Every almost single class. In some classes, every single minute.