The Adventures in Kindergarten Registration and Screening

Today was the day, we went to visit the school where Matthew will attend Kindergarten next year. My husband went to this school, and it's a great place.

The playground is cool, too!

We had to go from station to station for different screenings. The first was with the nurse and was pretty uneventful. Then we were ushered down the hallway into the developmental screening. The teacher asked Matthew to take the blue and yellow bears and arrange them in a pattern...thanks to Nick Jr, errrrr, my awesome parenting skills, he easily arranged them in this fashion: one blue, one yellow, one blue, one yellow. (Phew, we were off to a good start, I was a bit worried that he would just stare at the lady.) She then asked him if he could write his name at the top of the paper. Now, we've been having discussions about this because he always just writes "Matt" on his preschool papers, but doesn't want to be called Matt. Why does he do this? Because he's so darn competitive and wants to be first at every-single-thing, and thinks by shortening his name he'll get done first. Too bad best little friend's name in class is RJ, but I digress.

He easily writes "Matt" on his paper and looks up at me. He knew I wanted him to write the whole thing, and says "I'm working on it!" Ok, I turn away because maybe he'll do better if I'm not watching. (I hear teachers giggling in the background.) But he did it, the whole long drawn out name. He then easily identified every letter, counted to 10, knew his shapes, and basic colors. Finally the nice teacher asks "Matthew, do you know what color my pants are?" He replied "chartreuse," then proceeds to insist on carrying my purse all by himself and left the room. Um.......... what 5 year old boy freely throws around the word chartreuse? The teachers were still giggling as I left the room to head to the next station...speech.

This teacher was very nice also, and had Matthew count how many puppies he saw on one paper, how many babies on the next, which cookie on the page was 1/2, and which was whole. He answered everything correctly! The last stop at this station, the teacher wanted to see what words he'd think of for different things. She said "If I'm freezing, you could say that I'm as cold as _____." I'm sure she expected ICE to be the answer. No. My kid says "Jupiter." She looked at me, I looked at her, and I just shrugged my shoulders. She admitted that she had no idea if he was right, and looked it up. And he was. Other questions were "If I was burning up, I'd be hot as ____," which he replied "Saturn." I'm just thanking sweet baby Jesus that he didn't say "Hell." Also, "If I was such a good swimmer, you could say that I swim like a _____." I would've said fish, but Matthew said mermaid. A good imagination that kid has!

He also passed his hearing and vision tests with flying colors, and he seemed to really enjoy himself. I can't even imagine that my baby boy will be getting on a big school bus very soon and going to school all day every day. It seems like just yesterday that he was just learning to walk!

Valentine's Day

I know that I planned to only write about the funny things that come out of Matthew's mouth, but every now and then things happen to me that just don't happen to normal people. For example, Valentine's Day...... A day of love, romance, a toilet, and a deer. What...what the WHAT?

My husband and I were reminiscing last night about Valentine's Day 2004, when we were renovating our house. This wasn't just a normal renovation, this was gutting the entire house down to a frame and building it all over again. I still say we would have been better off just running over the house with a large bulldozer and starting all over, but I digress. We were 3 months away from getting married, trying to get house ready enough to live in, and were shelling out a lot of money for all this crap. Instead of getting each other presents for Valentine's Day, we got the practical thing for our house....a toilet. Yes, a toilet. I wasn't exactly thrilled about this decision, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. Oddly enough, buying a toilet for Valentine's Day wasn't the weirdest thing that happened that day.

We had our mighty throne in the back of the pick-up truck, taking it back to our "house." We were within several hundred feet of our driveway when a large deer jumped into the road, and the car coming in the other direction smashed right into it. You might think he'd stop to see what damage was done, but no...this guy just kept on like it was a normal occurance. (I live in the middle of nowhere, so perhaps it is.) This poor deer wasn't dead, it was on the side of the road trying to run into the woods, but my husband decided he must put the poor thing out of its misery. Actually, I think he yelled something about a huge rack before he threw the truck in park on the side of the country road we live on. (I'll leave the pun to your imagination here....)

At this point, he grabs a large 2x4 piece of wood from the back of his truck bed, and goes in search of this deer. I'm sitting in the passenger seat, my driveway in my sight, thinking that he's not going to do what I think he's going to do....and then he does it. He's wrestling with this large animal, whose legs were broken and would suffer a slow death. He then takes this 2x4, lifts it over his head, and (I look away,) but see him out of the corner of my eye repeatedly hitting it.

(Imagine if you will....if you were driving down this long road, see a truck pulled over on the side of the road with a toilet in the back, then see a 6'2" man beating something on the side of the road. Would you think you've lost your mind? Would you call the police?)

Yeah. No one intervened or called the police like I was so sure they would. Sure, they slowed down with the complete look of "what the holy hell is going on," but no one stopped. Thank the dear Lord. A few minutes later, I see my husband emerge from the ditch with this deer over his shoulders. He proceeds to throw it into the back of the truck with my new toilet. There's a sight you don't see everyday. Thankfully we were close enough to home that I'm sure not that many people saw that, but seriously, WHO does this happen to? Me.

I've never been so happy to have a boring Valentine's Day every year since. For reals.

Hi, I'm New Here.

My very first post on my very first blog- where the heck do I start??

This blog is dedicated to my favorite little boy in the whole entire world, Matthew James. He is stubborn, loving, smart, and down right hilarious. We can't help but laugh about the things that come out of his mouth.

He's always been a very literal child. When he was 2, I enrolled him in a "Little Dragon" taekwondo class at the school where I'm a 1st degree black belt. He didn't say a single word until after he was 2.5 years old, but he knew every thing we ever said. In class, the instructor would say "Ok, touch the mat!" (Of course meaning the taekwondo mat we were standing on.) Instead of touching the floor, he'd keep putting his hands all over himself, and it took us a few minutes to understood that since his name is Matthew, he thought HE was the "mat." After we stopped laughing, we had to start saying "floor mat."

Once he turned 3, he started putting 2 words together at a time, and he never looked back. Now it's sentences, run-on sentences, and he just never.stops.talking. Whether he's telling someone in public that Grandpa had to pee outside, or that Grandma made him write "I'm sorry" 10 times for not being nice, we hear it all. And now you will too. :)