Rachel's Science Fair

For the science fair this year, Rachel did a study on the fourth-grade classes at her school to test whether or not reading a story and doing practice math problems (from a book called Bedtime Math) would reduce math anxiety in the classroom. 

I'll admit it was one of my contributions during our "what in the world should Rachel do for the Science Fair sessions," inspired by some background research I've been doing for a story idea I had, which in turn was inspired by a late-night nursing session following a late-night math review session.

I've had math on the brain lately and my story idea is, I think, hilarious. I told it to the older girls early in January and they spent the entire morning watching the kids so that I could finish writing it down. They want to see it as a book right away, but it still needs some work. And I need to figure out how to pitch it. But this is all besides the point.

Rachel had the four grade four classrooms fill out a survey about their feelings toward math, and then had the classrooms read either a story from Bedtime Math (the test group) or a fairy tale (the control group), told them they were going to have a pop quiz, and then administered the same survey about math anxiety (and then gave them a pop quiz). 

She found that the classes that had read the math story experienced an 8.4% decrease in math anxiety, even right before a pop quiz! The class that read the fairy tale saw a slight increase in math anxiety. There was not a statistically significant difference in scoring, but with a long-er term study it's possible a change in scores could be tracked. Her study gave similar results to some more long-term studies done by actual scientists (which she talked about in her paper). She suggests that teachers get in the habit of doing math warm-ups in a risk-free environment, prior to a math lesson or examination, in order to allow math-anxious children to do their best work.

Discovery

Last night Andrew and I watched an episode of Madam Secretary together because he didn't have to teach last night. Classes at the Salt Lake center were cancelled due to the snow—the first snow day in Salt Lake in twenty years!

I've heard rumblings and rumours about teachers being more excited for snow days than the students, but I'm not sure this is true. While it was, admittedly, nice to have Andrew home on a Wednesday evening (we relaxed! we watched a show! we actually had the kids in bed on time which I just can't seem to manage on my own!), neither one of us could really enjoy the unscheduled down time because we were both dreading the make-up time.

Next week I will now have two evenings when Andrew isn't home at all to help with the kids and two evenings when he will waltz in just in time to scarf down some dinner before helping put them to bed. So instead of our usual T-W-Th marathon, it will be a M-T-W-Th marathon, and I will say to him on Sunday evening, "Nice knowing you. See you for dinner on Friday."

That sort of thing really puts a damper on any excitement snow days might elicit.

The time off is nice, I suppose. But making up the time? No, thank you. I'd much rather accomplish my tasks when they're scheduled to be completed.

But I guess safety and so forth are important as well.

Anyway, last night we were watching an episode of Madam Secretary together and a commercial for a new Star Trek show came on. There was a little trailer before the title of the show flashed on the screen—Star Trek: DISCOVERY.

My poor brain had trouble parsing the all-caps font.

"Star Trek...Disco...?" I wondered.

And then I burst out laughing and could not stop. I finally managed to tell Andrew about the difficulty I'd had in reading the word disco-very and he, too, began laughing.

This morning when I sent my boys out the door (Andrew took Benjamin to school on his way to work this morning because the girls had left for choir earlier and Benjamin is a little too young to walk to school on his own) I bid them farewell with a, "Looks like a great day for disco, very."

Adventure is out there

Winter has me feeling so bored that I haven't felt like I've had very much to write about (it's also been an insanely busy week; I've spent hours editing papers or helping with science fair projects that I guess I could have been writing), but then I saw these pictures on my computer and remembered that we actually left the house to do some adventuring this past week!

It got so warm, actually, that we even went on our first family walk of the year this week. We haven't managed to go on many (uhhh...any) because our schedule is kind of wonky this semester, with T/W/Th being a marathon of craziness. By the time Andrew gets home it's either hours past the kids' bedtime or late enough in the evening that it's too chilly to enjoy a walk outside (that isn't to say that we aren't ever walking, just that we haven't all been out walking together, which is the definition of a family walk). But we did manage a walk this week and, I suppose, we could count our Saturday outing as a walk as well.

We decided to hit up Patrick Dougherty's exhibit at BYU's Museum of Art. Dougherty is an artist from North Carolina whose work my little North Carolinian children know and love. In fact, they are huge fans of his! He is the man behind the twisted twiggy pathway in the Hideaway Woods at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham where my bigger kids spent many happy childhood hours. 

It was fun to get to watch this exhibit take shape last semester (as we'd walk through the MOA on our way to organ lessons) and we figured it was high time we take the kids to visit it just for the sake of visiting. It was like a little taste of North Carolina, right here at BYU! The kids had so much fun playing a little hide-and-seek in the structures (and it was nice to have such a child-friendly exhibit at the museum).

Here are far too many pictures:

Alex and Daddy

Light at the end of a sleepless tunnel

Alexander slept from 8:30 until midnight. I put him back in his bed around 12:30 and he didn't wake up until after 7:30 this morning! 

It was amazing, and certainly something I think we should make a habit. 

I had Alexander give me a fist bump over it this morning, so it's basically an unbreakable pact now. 

Sleep has been such a forgotten figure in my life for so long that becoming reunited with it sounds lovely, almost magical. Imagine, instead of snatching 40 minutes here and an hour or so there that it is possible to sleep for consecutive hours. Like, one right after the other! 

A person could get used to such luxury, but I'm not going to hold my breath over it quite yet, otherwise I'll be disappointed when Alexander wakes up fifty times tonight.

Zoë zoologist

This morning I took Alexander and Zoë to story time at the library. They were very happy to get to go because Alexander likes to go anywhere and Zoë was starved for story time (we've missed the last few weeks because of sickness). I feel like I've been so busy lately that I haven't really had time to listen to my kids and the funny things they say, so I was grateful a few quiet moments with the kids this morning.

When the librarian asked the kids what they knew about penguins, Zoë confidently raised her hand and when she was called on she said, "They wobble and they swim, but they don't fly."

She 100% cannot hear the difference between waddle and wobble, so she was wobbling around like a penguin all day. In her defense, the words also have rather similar meanings.

This reminds me of when we were sitting around waiting for Alexander to get his cast last week. I'd brought an alphabet book with us and Zoë insisted on reading it herself. She "reads" a lot of books by herself fairly well. I'm amazed by how many books/stories she has memorized, which she will read to herself as she turns the pages. She'll even pull out books we haven't read in months and "read" them, though usually with a few more errors than the book(s)-de-jour that she has me read to her over and over again.

Anyway, the R page of this alphabet book features a rabbit, but when she got to that page she said, "R is for bunny. Buh, buh, bunny."

So I corrected her and said, "You're right. Bunny begins with a buh-sound, but this letter is R and R makes a rrrrrrr sound, so on this page they want us to say, ' R is for rabbit. Rrrrr, rrrr, rabbit."

"Mom," she told me with the full force of her toddler-PhD voice, "Bunnies are rabbits, so this is a bunny!"

Last Sunday

I mentioned previously that between the change in our church meeting schedule, sick kids, and substituting, I have yet to make it to Sunday School this year. Well, Andrew has yet to make it to a priesthood meeting. He wandered the halls with a fussy Alexander when I taught Relief Society three weeks ago and last week he came home with Alexander (because it was his turn to be croupy and I had taken Zoë home from church early the week before since she was too sick to attend her class).

We still dressed up Alexander in his Sunday best and took him to sacrament meeting, though. We decided to try on Daddy's old suit (Aunt Susan made it). It was still a little big for him, but he looked super cute (if not a little sick/stunned)!

Outside time

Winter is giving us a bit of a reprieve right now, which is rather kind of it.

I don't hate winter as much as I used to, it's still not my favourite season, but I don't loathe it like I used to. Part of me wonders if this change has more to do with my latitude or with my age or with global warming in general, but the grip of winter simply doesn't seem as strong as it once was. It used to seem to drag on forever, but now it's clipping along at the regular rate of (as my Uncle Bruce might say) one second per second.

Still, it's nice to get outside without a million layers on and without slipping on ice so we've been making the most of it while we can because we know there'll be a few more storms before spring (at least, one can hope).

We've been doing a lot of scooter-walks after school when the weather is warmest. I was so excited to get the kids scooters for Easter last year and they were, too...until they tried them out. Then they had nothing but complaints—their legs were tired, it was hard to balance, they can't steer—and we ended up with a few pretty good wipe outs. Rachel and Miriam got decent on them, but still didn't ride them very often. Benjamin was so bad it wasn't even funny.

"Just gliiiiiiide!" I'd urge him while practicing (and practicing and practicing) in the church parking lot. He wouldn't glide. He wouldn't balance. He'd just do this weird waddle-scoot thing that I totally agreed looked like a lot of unnecessary work. No wonder riding scooters wasn't very fun.

But somehow he figured it out—I don't know when, I don't know how—and this boy is a scootering machine now! He always wants to go out on his scooter. He zooms around, uphill and down, he rides far, far ahead of me and then circles back. It's been an amazing transformation.

Not throwing away his shot

Today I want, more than anything, to be as resilient as Alexander.

Yesterday he broke his arm. Today he is conquering the world (with his wee, bitty cast).

It took him a few tries to figure out how to climb his slide with his cast on, but he did it! He's been so cute to watch as he figures out how to do all the things he'd thought he'd had figured out before.

This morning he grabbed a block with his good hand and used it as a crutch—it made his good arm as long as his casted arm (since he's using the knuckles of that hand instead of his palm)—to hobble-crawl across the room.

He's been experimenting with walking on his knees and has even gotten up to walk (some very short distances) of his own volition!

Climbing isn't quite as easy as it once was because he can only grip things (ladders, benches, etc) with one hand, but that doesn't stop him from trying.

He's just as happy to colour a picture with his left hand as he is his right. He's also completely unperplexed by feeding himself with his left hand (though he did bite his fingers a couple of times already).

I've been fairly certain that his right hand is his dominant hand (because that's the hand he's always used to colour with or to hold his fork and so forth) but I'm wondering if this experience will cause his brain to rewire him into a genuine south paw. There's evidence that spending just two weeks with your dominant hand out of commission will lead to significant increases in non-dominant hand agility—but that's only for adults where a two week period represents only 1/468* of their life (for an 18-year-old!

Alexander is looking at having this cast on for a month. That'll be 1/16* of his life by the time it comes off (whereas it would only be approximately 1/429* of my life)! Having this cast is no small thing for him!

But he's taking it like a champ!

*Assuming I did my math right, and based on each year having exactly 52 weeks.

Right arm...broken!

For the past 11 years, 6 months, and 10 days of parenthood, Andrew and I have held an ongoing (joking) wager about which child will be the first one to break an arm/leg. When Rachel (who happens to be 11 years, 6 months, and 10 days old today) was a toddler and was climbing all over the place as if she wasn't afraid of gravity one little bit, we were certain she was going to break a limb.

She didn't.

When Miriam was learning to ride her bike and seemed to be magnetically drawn to any and every potential obstacle (and crashed around twelve thousand times), we thought for sure she'd be the first one to break a bone.

Nope.

Benjamin still has very high odds of breaking an arm, in my opinion. But whenever he, you know, "be's Benjamin," as Zoë would say, he has always emerged from whatever Benjamin-ism unscathed. We're constantly checking him for broken bones.

So far none.

When Zoë, who was barely walking, fell in love with jumping off the couch we thought for sure she was going to be the one. Just the other day we were heading down to the basement and Andrew offered to carry Zoë the rest of the way down the stairs. Instead of saying, "Why, yes, father. Thank you for offering," she literally just flung her tiny body down the staircase in his general direction, a crazy trust exercise of sorts. 

How has she not broken a bone?!

And then our little climber! Alexander can't walk (well) but he climbs, you know, anything and everything. The other day I learned that he can climb onto Zoë's high chair and from there he can get onto the kitchen counter. He has fallen off the table upstairs, multiple times (most recently giving himself a black eye). He seems to have a goal to climb over the back of the couch (which is an awful goal—Grandpa once caught him just n the nick of time, and Alexander twirled about, suspended in the air by his ankle, his head inches from the tile floor, wondering why Grandpa stopped him). I am constantly running to get him down from places and/or scooping him up off the floor as he howls, "OW! OW! OW!"

But he's only been alive for fifteen months. Sure, he's a bit of a daredevil, I thought, but surely he's as invincible as the other children!

Apparently not. 

FHE on the Plan of Salvation

We discussed the plan of salvation for FHE tonight. I set up a scavenger hunt around the house, which led us through all the levels of our house finding different parts of the plan of salvation, using the diagram from the March 1994 Friend Magazine.

We read Job 38:4, 7 and talked about the premortal existence and how we were spirits before we came to earth. I adapted a puppet pattern (from the gospel library) so that Benjamin could have a boy spirit and Zoë could have a girl spirit to carry around with them (and idea I had while reading this lesson plan).