9/6/11 Childproof

Katrina announced this morning that she "didn't know where we were" last night, so she decided to medicate her cough herself. Somehow she got the childproof cap off the child's Robitussin, and administered most of the bottle to herself. I think it was maybe 1/3 full, and she didn't quite finish it, but still, this was alarming information this morning. We put the bottle truly out of reach and gave a stern lecture to all the kids about self-medicating, and she seems to have suffered no ill effects.

I suffered some ill effects of Gabriel's homework though. Good heavens, just his math was about 26 problems, and most of them involved a whole lot of copying and writing. For example, a problem is to write three numbers in order from least to greatest. Not so bad if you can just write the numbers in order, but he's supposed to write them out of order first, show how many digits each has, assign them an A, B and C order, then copy them again in least-to-greatest order, and draw a box around the answer. Some of these numbers are in the hundred millions, so if you have to write 225,541,226 and 241,541,226 and 226,541,220 twice, in different orders AND with other markings around it, that can take a while. And those were the shorter questions!!

Gabriel had trouble finishing schoolwork today and lost recess for not transitioning, so I talked to him about that but also sent a note to his teacher to let him know that 26 math problems of that sort will take a 9-year-old over an hour with no breaks. Gabriel still has to learn how to get his schoolwork and homework done quickly, but I do understand why he'd frustrated with the homework -- lots of copying and busywork without any real advancement or reinforcement in learning -- he knows the content part just fine so far.

Seems homework is childproof too. 9/6/11