And While I'm Bragging About My Kids. . .

Last night Mia and I were out having dinner at her current favorite Panda Express (sigh). We were chatting about school, and she told me her second-grade class was working on fractions. "I can do ANY fraction," she said, clearly enthusiastic about her new skill. "Give me one!" I didn't know exactly what she wanted, so I asked what I needed to give her. "Well, if Ms. Waters [her teacher] tells me there's a circle divided into 4 sections and 2 of those sections are colored in, I can tell her it's two-fourths."

"Oh, I see," I said. "but do you know what else that is?" She thought about it for a few seconds, and then she gave up. "I don't know what you mean," she said.

So I picked up the paper plate in front of me and divided it into 4 sections with a pen. Then I shaded in two adjacent sections. "So, what's that?" I asked her. She smiled and answered immediately, "two-fourths." "Exactly, but what ELSE is it?" She looked at it for a minute, and then her face lit up. "Oh my gosh, it's one-half!" "Yep," I said. "And look what happens if I subdivide the four sections to make eight sections. Nothing changes. It's still one-half and it's still two-fourths, but what ELSE is it?" "Four-eighths!!!" says Mia.

And then she looked up at me, really excited, like we had just discovered electricity or something, and she asked, "Do you think Ms. Waters knows about this?"

I was mightily amused.

"Up in Smoke" or "Another Great Moment in Parenting"

Zoe has been working on a writing assignment for a while now. It has taken longer than it should have because we left the country in the middle of it and then it was forgotten. The assignment was to write a letter to an imaginary cousin from the Old Country either suggesting that they come to this country or not. To do it right, the kids had to put themselves in the character of a child of the early colonies over 200 years ago.

For some reason, this assignment really spoke to Zoe. She started out putting "-eth" on the end of all her verbs and taking a silly "old-fashioned" approach. But at some point she got pretty serious about it. She did a little research into the appropriate language of the time and corrected her draft accordingly. She found some manilla construction paper to use as parchment paper for her final draft. She painstakingly wrote her final draft in "old-fashioned-looking" cursive script, with curly-ques between the paragraphs. She brought her beautiful final draft for me to admire, and then said, "I don't think it looks old enough" as she crumpled it into a ball.

That's when I had my great idea. "We could burn the edges to make it look even older!" She loved it, and we got right to work over the kitchen sink. I started out small, singing a corner her, a hole there. But the third time I touched the lighter to the paper, I didn't blow the flame out quickly enough and things got out of hand. As the flame grew and started to race across the paper, I realized that I was burning up hours of my daughter's work. As I frantically blew at the growing flame and considered turning on the faucet to make it stop, I knew that she was going to have to redo the whole thing.

Aggggghhhh.

I finally put the fire out. The bottom left-hand eighth of the paper was gone. No getting it back. I looked at Zoe, knowing she was going to be furious. But she was grinning from ear to ear. "That looks GREAT!!!" she says. "So you're not mad?" "NOOOOO! It's COOL." I pointed out that you could no longer actually READ a good part of the letter, but she said she was going to present it as an artifact and she would read from her rough draft and say it was the version she decoded during her research.

Strange bird that she is, I've got an amazing kid.

Exactly!

Click HERE for more great behind-the-scenes inauguration photos from Newsweek.

Yes!

History

I can't watch anything about the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama without dissolving into tears. I've never been prouder to be a citizen of the United States of America. I don't know whether or not Obama will be able to turn things around, and I fear that people's expectations for what he should be able to achieve may be unrealistically high. Nonetheless, the simple fact that this man will be our president speaks volumes about the potential of this country to improve itself.

I was talking to my girls this weekend about what a big, big deal this inauguration is, and I realized that there's no way they can possibly understand the enormity. And frankly, that makes me very happy.

It's Been Over a Month, I Know

I really *should* try to write something. Maybe tomorrow.