We were delighted today to find a letter from the library in the mail today responding to Hallie’s note about the misbound book:
July 14, 2010
Miss Hallie Turner
1108 Tonsler Drive
Raleigh, NC 27604
Dear Miss Turner,
We just found a note you left for us in the returned book, Young Cam Jansen and the Substitute Mystery. Your note let us know that the book had been assembled incorrectly with the chapters in the wrong order. Thank you for telling us about this. We can return the book to the publisher and receive a replacement copy, hopefully with the chapters in the correct order. We may not have found the mistake without your careful detective work!
Read the rest of this entry »
Hallie checked out a book from the library which was bound incorrectly, getting the chapters out of order. Not one to let a problem go unreported (she takes after her dad), Hallie write the library a note to bring this to their attention.
The note reads:
To: Library
The Book Young Cam Jansen And the substitute Mystery is totally MIXED UP! The chapters should go like this 1,2,3,4,5. In the book, they go 1,2,4,5,3. No wonder it doesn’t make sense! It was bound out-of-order! Somebody already wrote the correct Page numbers in the book. I know it isn’t good to write in books, but What Are You Supposed To DO When You Find A mystery in a mystery?
-Hallie Turner,
age 8
Today’s Facebook status update: We spent hours at a playground yesterday, where our kids and others ran us ragged and far outlasted us. Last night, Mark left for a friend’s birthday party right before the kids’ bedtime. Travis wanted to know why grown-up parties were held so much later than kid parties, “when grown-ups always get tired way before kids do.” He had a point!
I’ve been on a mission this weekend to organize Hallie’s room. We’ve made tremendous progress! In the process, we’ve been sorting dozens and dozens of Hallie creations, mostly writing and drawing. She has about a dozen notebooks, all nearly full or partially completed stories, poems, and imaginary lands.
It’s hard to organize them because each notebook covers many months or years, with entries made in arbitrary locations. I do want to try to date and organize them at some point, but that’s a job for another weekend. Right now it’s nice to have places for things to go and things in their places–for the time being, at least!
As I was flipping through notebooks, I discovered something I’m guessing Hallie wrote fairly recently. When she was so down about dynamics with her not-friend, she had a lot of trouble falling asleep at night. I hate that she felt they way these words describe, but I’m impressed at how she captured what she was feeling:
When sleep won’t
come I’ve had my fun
and misery’s come in
my way. When sleep
won’t come, my day is
done and the night is
wasting away. Minutes
are tickin’ by. Passin by
my watchful eye and
I don’t know where to
start. Oh the hours
are passing by. Passing
by my watchful eye
and I’ve got a broken
heart.
The other evening we got a phone call from our neighbor, Miss Ruth. Miss Ruth, who will turn 79 next month, seems about 20 years younger than her age and is just as sweet as they come. She called because she wanted to bring something by for Hallie’s birthday. What she brought was a beautiful, handmade quilt/blanket with colors picked especially for Hallie. That she even remembered Hallie’s birthday was remarkable, but to have her make such a special gift was incredibly touching.
We stood on the porch chatting for a while. I was pushing her to tell me her exact birthday. I got her to confirm it’s in July but she wouldn’t tell me a date–she says she doesn’t celebrate birthdays anymore. I told her we have ways of finding it out, though.
While we chatted, she apologized for being late with Hallie’s gift. She said she couldn’t remember whether Hallie’s birthday was the 14th or the 15th. I told her it was actually the 4th but assured her it didn’t matter in the least. Travis, ever helpful, immediately piped up with the following gem: “Even if it was the 14th or the 15th it would still be late either way because today is the 16th.”
Fortunately Miss Ruth has a great sense of humor and got a good laugh out of T’s response. On the one hand, I wish he had a bit more of a filter. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but be impressed that he knew the date and could apply it so quickly.
H&T and I spent some time playing bananagrams before bed last night. We weren’t really following the rules, just flipping tiles over and spelling out words. Travis joined the game late, so Hallie and I had a few words down already. I know Travis is a good reader and speller. But I was still impressed when out of his first ten tiles he pulled all but one letter to spell “elephant”–and promptly added it right on to our game, building around the letter he needed from one of Hallie’s words. Oh, and he was standing across from us so he was reading all of our words and spelling his upside down.
It was a busy spring, leaving me with lots of posts to catch up on. Two of the biggies for Travis were his kindergarten orientation and his graduation from preschool. Both were very nice–and both felt rather anticlimactic.
I’m sure a lot of my reaction comes from having done all of this before with Hallie. But it’s also because all that he’s transitioning to is already familiar to Travis. He’s spent so much time at Conn, knows lots of his new classmates and many of the teachers, and is more than ready for the work he’ll be doing there. So while he really enjoyed his orientation and came out excited about kindergarten, it wasn’t the thrilling, novel experience it was for Hallie (and thus for the rest of us). Read the rest of this entry »
For years Mark has wanted to take me and then me and the kids to Carowinds, the amusement park near Charlotte where he worked as a teenager. I loved amusement parks as a kid and a teen, and my folks were kind enough to endure our family visits more often than I’m sure they would have liked. Still, I was really not excited about being on the flip-side of that dynamic.
Given the choice, I’d rather be hiking or camping or on a family bike ride than trudging around a dirty, hot sea of asphalt and metal with what I expected to be whiny, cranky kids. But I dragged my feet as long as I could. Mark’s enthusiasm, the kids’ excitement, and discount tickets all conspired to wear me down. And amazingly, I had a really good time! Read the rest of this entry »
Over the years the kids have been given all sorts of gifts, some more immediately popular than others. I have a pretty good sense of what each of them will like, but there are always surprise hits (and surprise misses). I’ve learned over the last year or so that a gift doesn’t have to be an immediate hit to become immensely popular or have staying power.
There are several things that I could have written off or packed up for lack of interest. Hallie dabbled in her origami kit but soon sent it aside for several months. Neither kid was too interested in the opera for kids cds Gum and Gup sent them. Hallie’s microscope from her last birthday came out of the box once, maybe twice over the course of the next year. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Hallie interested in Anne of Green Gables. And Travis’s commitment to his erector set waxed and waned for several months before we finally finished his first project. Read the rest of this entry »
H&T had their six-month check up at the dentist this week. First the good news: Hallie got a perfect check-up. The hygienist was literally raving about her teeth, declaring in several different ways that she’s never, ever seen a child do such a good job of brushing as Hallie. I’m very proud of my girl!
Now, the bad news: Travis. A year ago I was blind sided when his x-rays showed 5 cavities between his teeth–cavities that surprised even the dentist, who thought until he saw the x-rays taht his oral hygiene looked great. We got those all filled and have been good about brushing, flossing, and fluoride rinse ever since. So I was dismayed to find that he’s now got a cavity developing in the side of each of his newly emerging six-year molars. The teeth aren’t even in far enough for the dentist to do anything about them, so we just have to wait for them to finish coming in. Read the rest of this entry »
