Has your kid's room developed its own B.O.?

The boys' room has had its own B.O. lately. We change the bedding, vacuum, and air it out, which all helps, but it always seems to come back.

We are in the middle of Fall Cleaning, our annual deep-down, do-the-hard-jobs-you've-been-putting-off cleaning. When we came to the boys' room, we changed the bedding, put all the summer clothes in storage, removed the dirty laundry that had been stuffed in with the clean, cleaned the closet, vacuumed, moved all the furniture and vacuumed under it. We found dirty socks anywhere they could be hidden: under the bed, behind the bed, under the blankets, under the dressers, behind the dressers, in the toy box, in the bottom of the closet. We even found dirty dishes in the closet. And guess whose they all were?

Hooray! GL learned to use scissors today!

Goldilocks has many struggles with fine motor skills. We've been focusing on the most essential, but trying everything, and cheering and encouraging any success, however small. Scissors was one I'd just about given up on. He tends to hold the scissors backwards, with the blades pointing toward him, and even when we can get them turned around, he rotates his wrist so the blades are parallel to the surface he is trying to cut. Then the thing he wants to cut just slides between the blades, and he is once again convinced that the task is impossible: these scissor things just don't ever work! And since we're not doing a lot of kindergarten art projects, there are more urgent skills to work on.

He loves microwave popcorn. He can safely run the microwave (it has a popcorn button); he just needs to get the bag of popcorn out of its plastic outer wrapper first. Sometimes the end of the wrapper is two layers fused together, and relatively easy to separate. Sometimes there is a small notch to make it easier to tear open. Others are difficult or impossible to open without a knife or scissors. He was trying to open one of the latter packages this morning and asked for help (a good sign to begin with). I was about to do it for him, when I thought, "Let him try. What can it hurt? If it doesn't work, I can still open it for him."

So I handed him the scissors, and with verbal instructions and a little help with hand placement, he snipped a notch and tore open the package! Hooray! He may or may not be able to do this next week, tomorrow, or even later today, but at age 13, he successfully cut something with scissors for the first time!

So that's what he had in his pants!

GL asked to play outside. MB said, "Okay, wear a coat and stay in the yard."
A few minutes later, I went out to check on him. He was holding the waistband of his sweatpants as high as he could, and it was stretching to unbelievable dimensions. Something, somewhere was weighing them down. I asked, "What's wrong with your pants?" He said, "I've got a baseball!" He pulled on the elastic cuff around the ankle, and out rolled a softball.

It's amazing how much you can get done when you have a big enough project to put off.

Eureka!

First, let me say that Brother Bear is pretty sharp. He picks up new concepts quickly. When we got behind in math, he did two and a half years' work in 12 months. He knows his addition and subtraction facts and multiplication table. The problem lately is that he can't focus. It will take him a minimum of an hour and a half—usually two to three hours—to do one page in his math workbook. If you watch him, he spends about thirty minutes of that time actually doing math—calculating and writing. The rest of that time is spent pausing between problems, or between steps in a problem, pencil in the air and eyes staring into space, then finding his place again and again. Of course, if there is anything more interesting than empty space to look at, which there generally is around here, that doesn't help matters any. And he doesn't even realize he's doing it.

I had the same problem at his age. I didn't realize my mind was wandering until it had been absent for some time. Then, "Oh, there's a paper on my desk. With some numbers on it. And my Math book. I think I was supposed to be doing something with it. Now where was I?" My teacher's solution was to make everyone who hadn't finished math stay in from recess to work on it. I never had recess that year. The number of students kept in from recess varied from day to day, but there were three of us who were always there. We provided each other with additional distractions. Not that any of us needed any help not thinking about math. I finally got another kid to sit next to me and read me each step of the problem. "What's 7 + 5?" "12. Carry the 1." "1 +3?" "4" "Plus 6?" "10, carry the 1." etc. I finished in a fraction of the time, but I wasn't allowed to use this method in class, so I'd make a halfhearted effort until recess, when I could finally get down to brass tacks. Toward the end of the year, the teacher decided that keeping us in from recess wasn't working, (Oh, really?) so she spanked us, which also didn't work.

With practice and helpful reminders, when I could get them, I eventually learned to recognize when my mind was wandering and bring it back. The next year, I nearly always finished my math on time, and I never missed recess. I just wandered around the playground, wondering what to do.

I tried reading the next step whenever BB was obviously out to lunch, but he just got angry, insisting that he had been working on the problem until I distracted him by reading the numbers. I asked him how I could bring his attention back when I saw it was wandering without making him angry. We agreed that I would just say, "Next," but that got the same result.

For the past week, I've been writing the numbers he dictates. He tells me what the next step is, what the answer to that step is, and where to write it. He's been completing two pages in an hour every day this week. His mind does occasionally wander, but not nearly as often or as long. I wait with pencil poised, and he can see that I'm not doing any math, even though he couldn't see his pencil stopping in the air the same way.