jennickels | still alive

That's great the kids are doing it. Bella (my 9 year old) is giving it a try and started tonight... she is shooting for 1200 so far she has 269. Sam (my 6 year old) wanted to try too... word count still stands at 0 for her *L*

I think Brenna will have to up her goal to at least 1200. At her current rate she'll be done by next week, lol.

If you think it will help them (so at your discretion) you can tell your kids that I'm watching their word counts go up, and cheering them on towards their goals.

Obviously if they would think some old grownup they don't know in Vermont perving on their word count is just creepy and disturbing, then don't tell them!

It might help them to know I've taught kids swimming for 38 years now, I was a daycamp counselor for many years, I used to teach French as a parent volunteer in the local elementary school, and I have four kids of my own. One of my sisters teaches 5th grade math. The other one is too busy with her own three kids. So clearly, being fond of kids and cheering them on to success is a family way of life!

I'm kind of hoping that your kids will give you permission to publish what they come up with. After all, if people post comments that are less than respectful, you can always purge them before the innocent can be hurt.

(Re: the legend on the icon, I often read it and whisper to myself "But fun!")

Meagan won't even let me read her story, lol. I was trying to explain how the word counter worked and was highlighting stuff on her story but I was so lethargic and slow she got all defensive and was like, "are you reading it?!?" *eyeroll*

I was way too out of it to read anything. All I remember was that the title was The Flock.

Nora will love to share. I'll have to scan it though so you get the full effect of the genius that is Nora. I thought her random writings she kept showing me were gibberish until PTC. Her teacher gave me a sheet to help me decipher her writing and showed me some of her school work. Now I understand about kindergarten writing and how she sounds things out so the words usually just have a beginning and ending sound. I was actually able to figure out some of what she wrote without her help.

Although she knows how to write love. She used that word a lot so far.

Alas, it sounds as though Meagan is starting to becoming that object of dread, the teenager. They get this over-developed sense of self and privacy, and are suddenly convinced that everyone wants to ferret out everything about them! She may not be physically a teen yet, but psychologically, she's on her way!

The year I turned 13 and entered puberty, there was a humorous article in Ladies Home Journal about how to tell if your child is a teenager. The first thing it said was you definitely have a teenager if you go up to your daughter's room and ask her to do something simple and straight-forward like pick up her socks, and she looks up at you, says "Oh, MoMMMMM!!!" and bursts into tears.

So my mother mounted the stairs. She looked at the floor of my room. Socks.

She looked at me, smiled and said "Pick up your socks!"

I said "Oh, MoMMMMM!!!" and burst into tears.

She grinned, said "Yup. A teenager!" and went downstairs.

Of course it piqued my curiousity, so I dried my eyes, picked up the socks, put them in the hamper and went downstairs, and got my mom to explain. When I thought about it, it was pretty funny, so we shared a good laugh.

She tried it again on my youngest sister at the same age. She instead went around the room, picking up the offending items, all the while muttering mutinously "I won't pick up my socks! It's ridiculous! You can't make me!" At that point, my mother declared that she really ought to have started with her fourth child. It was all so much easier with her.

I can't wait to read Nora's opus. The enthusiasm that they bring to these things at that age is just heart-melting.

If I asked Meagan to pick up socks it would start a tirade about how none of them are her socks and it's not fair that she has to pick them up because nothing that needs cleaning is ever hers and everything is not fair.

I dread puberty.

It's hard to tell with her because she's had behavior problems since she was 3-4 years old. All the issues I had with her at 9 sound exactly like a kid going through puberty except she hasn't hit puberty yet (that I can tell). She's always been emotional, with violent mood swings, attitude problems and always causing me grief. I can only imagine puberty will magnify these issues.

Hence, why I dread it.

Plus, most likely Brenna will start around the same time Meagan does, if not before her. She'll be 9 on Tuesday.

Just earlier today I was thinking that next Christmas I'll have a 12yo, 11yo and a 10yo. Brenna-10? That can't be. And Nora will be 6 1/2 and Jack will be 2 1/2.

I don't know why I think of that stuff. Like 5 years from now they'll be: 16, 15, 14, 10 and 6. That's going to suck. Three teenagers and a tween in one house, sharing one bathroom. Plus a 6yo to drive them all crazy.

The one thing I like about having the first 3 close together was that the phases ran back to back. I always felt bad that Nora was so much younger than Brenna except she's maturing much faster than Brenna did so they'll probably eventually be on the same level emotionally with the same friends at some point. They already play with the same group of friends (that are 7 and 8).

But Jack, I look at him and I realize he will be left out. A lot. It's going to be him and me a lot of the time while the older kids are off hanging out with their friends and doing big kid/teen stuff. There aren't any kids his age in this neighborhood right now (except I think one of the girls' friends has a 2yo brother but I've never seen him).

Oh, I do the same thing.

We have a running family joke that my husband and I plan to live to 208, and die in our sleep, together. It started when our eldest first started to worry about how her parents (being, oh say, 35, and therefore oooold) would die and leave her behind. We would point out that we weren't going to do that until we reached 208, in our sleep.

So then I would find myself going "Now let's see. If we're 208, then Eldest Daughter will be 181, Only Son will be 177, Middle Daughter will be 171, and the Whirlwind will be 164." How ridiculous.

The Whirlwind is the same way as Meagan as regards mood swings, rebellion, and utter passion of emotion. In every stage of her life I've taken everything I've learned raising the other three, and had to learn more, because it's the Whirlwind. If Eldest daughter was the A.B. in child raising, then the Whirlwind is the post doc course. I'm terrified of her adolescence. Abjectly terrified. Not that it will prevent it, delay it, or make it go away.

Did I mention that she has precocious puberty, held back by drugs, and that she will get a further implant in February, which will come out in the February following, and then at the age of 10 1/2, there she'll be in the full rage of puberty? *whimper*

And now I and my over-long attention span really are going to bed!

LOL, I've never thought that far ahead. 10 years seems like a stretch of my imagination. I'll have a 21yo, 20yo, 19yo, 15yo and an 11yo. That just seems strange. I might even just have 2 left at home by then.

I've been lucky with the kids and puberty. So far none of them have started that I know of. The girls haven't shown any signs besides mild mood swings (which, like I said, isn't really an indicator for Meagan). Neither is developing or any of the other physical signs which I started years before I got my period. I'm kind of glad. I was already a freaking C cup when I was 12 and started my period a couple months before I turned 12 in the 6th grade. Meagan will be 12 in June.

We learned in school (back in the dinosaur age, lol) that you need a certain percentage of fat on your body to kick start puberty in girls which seems to explain the now common early onset of puberty in 7 and 8 year olds because of this "obesity epidemic". Makes sense to me anyway. Meagan has almost no body fat on her. In PE she learned she has like 4% body fat and is considered underweight although she looks healthy to me, just really skinny. She needs to put some weight on before she puberty will start in her.

Brenna, on the other hand, has a normal percentage of fat. You can see the difference just looking at them. Since they were babies I knew Brenna would start developing first and probably go through puberty before Meagan even started. They are so very different. I dread them starting at the same time. Ugh.

And I just realized Meagan will probably kill me if she ever knew I was talking about this stuff on a public blog, lol. I'm a horrible mother. :) Hopefully she never finds out.

Re: the Meagan would kill me if...

That's why I am pretty darn careful to not link my lj/DW identities to any of my rl identity. It's not that I'm protecting myself, it's that I don't want any of my kids taking a contract out on me if they find out that I've been saying things about them on line!

Re: Early puberty.

Excess weight can be a factor, but it is not the only one. The Whirlwind is really slight and bird-like in her build, and for 18 months (through May of this year) she didn't grow in either height or weight due to her ADHD meds which severely reduced her appetite. Body fat? Hers was waaaaay below norm, but still she was entering puberty. We found out from the pediatric endocrinologist that other factors include childhood starvation, familial inheritance, blows to the head, prematurity, brain damage, and certain glandular conditions and diseases. The Whirlwind was a preemie whose birth mom is developmentally disabled, so she isn't a very good reporter. She said that she got her own first period at 9, but she also says all her friends got theirs before her, and she felt left out, so we don't know what to believe on that one.

I was taught as a teen that puberty generally starts for girls after they reach 110 lbs., and sustain that weight for a period of time. This cannot be an absolute, or there would be a bunch of 70 year old slight, bird-like five foot tall little girls wandering around! Obviously there has to be another trigger as well.

"Obviously if they would think some old grownup they don't know in Vermont perving on their word count is just creepy and disturbing, then don't tell them!"

Lol! is a word count really something you can perv on? :)

Well, no. But that's the way that kids ...oh... nine to eleven use the word, because of course they are a little young to really make the connection, and they've heard older kids saying things like "Oh, man, I'm really perving on that Ferrari!" and they really don't get the implications of the word as it's used there.

Wow, I hadn't heard that before in either of those contexts. As time goes by I get more and more out of touch with kid lingo... I've even had to look up words in urbandictionary just to understand some of my younger cousins' facebook posts. :) I guess I'm officially getting old!

I'm probably older (I'm 53) but my kids are - by age - 26, 22, 16, and 9, so they help me stay in the loop. Mind you, given that the elder two are showing no signs of settling down, I may have a period where I am very out of the loop soon, due to lack of grandchildren to cue me in!

lol, I guess the kids do help :) I used to work more with high schoolers and that helped a little, but it's been a while. Of course, to them, we're all ancient :) I remember a time when I was in grad school and I was telling a group of high schoolers I was working with that I'd be gone the next week because my husband was having his wisdom teeth out. They looked at me and nodded sympathetically, and then one said, "Oh, and it's so much worse when you're *old*!" I think he was about 24 at the time, lol!

That's okay. My kids are in that range (9-11) and I've never heard them use "perving" at all. They don't use a lot of slang and only do it when they want to be funny, not in regular conversation.

Great news on the start that your fic-writing zombies/nerd/hippie have gotten on only the 1st day. :D Are they hand-writing or typing?

Also, SUCK IT UP. We're gonna worry about you whether you like it or not. NEENER NEENER NEENER.

Nora and Brenna are hand writing.

Meagan is mostly using the computer. I had to practically drag her away just to make that post earlier. Then I bribed her with a purple pen to get her to write in a notebook. She probably added another 100 words to her total before bed.

She wants to be a famous writer now.

*izproud*

You set a good example!

I never showed my parents stories I wrote when I was a kid. They never even knew I had a journal because I hid it as a random collection of loose papers in a file folder marked "receipts".

still alive

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