Time Spent with Each Boy

Good grief I'm tired. Craig and I tried very hard to stay up and watch President Obama's speech last night but then woke up on the couch at 1.30am. I guess we both just passed out with tiredness. Then I had a full day's work, followed by a charity donation run and a PTA meeting tonight. Then bedtime routine with the kids, which should be called bedtime "hell" not simply routine. It never gets better.

At the moment I'm reading the first Harry Potter book to Jack, one chapter at a time. We are up to chapter 5 and doing well. A chapter is about 15-20 minutes of reading which is the max for Jack's attention span. And I'm trying to be an animated story-teller.  I have Hagrid's accent down already of course!

One thing we do have to work on is helping Jack with reading comprehension. He's doing really well at school with his social studies, art & music, maths, and science and some aspects of reading, but not all. So we have to have him read to us and for him to describe what's going on in the story and do tasks like "fill in the blanks". I will help him of course but isn't that errr, his teacher's job? Or are they just too stretched? I have already had some conversations about some work he's brought home where it's obvious he doesn't understand the task at hand and of course I'm mega paranoid that not holding him back a year is backfiring on me. But I would hope that he's getting the attention he needs and not being compared to some of the kids that are a year older than him.  We meet for a teacher conference next week, so more on that topic later.

Tomorrow we have a teacher conference at lunch-time with Danny's pre-k teacher. Last week he spat on the teacher's young daughter. Not just any kid but the teacher's daughter. Thanks for that Daniel. He apologised finally, wrote her a note (well I did and he made a scribble at the bottom) and his teacher is lovely, but still. He cried when Craig and I talked with him and said he did it because he wants to stay at home. I also think he is severely lacking in attention sometimes, since Jack is like an attention seeking mine-sweeper.  On Friday I have taken a day's vacation and Danny and I are going to have fun together. I love him so much and he's such a lively, funny, gorgeous little lad. I just need to make more time for him. Just him.