(no subject)

I have about ten minutes before we have to leave to go have "Thanksgiving dinner" with Mari's preschool class. I hate that they planned it like this. I dropped her off at 9am, the dinner is from 10:30-11:30, but preschool isn't over until noon. And it takes 20 minutes to drive there! Arg. I think I'm just gonna take her home after the dinner. Or, I suppose I could take the other two girls to the playground for 20 minutes or so. Why couldn't they plan the dinner for 11-noon or something? Weird.

I went to the most awesome store a few days ago. It was called Lakeshore Learning Store. It was part a teacher supply place and part just learning toys and games. It was sooooo much fun! I bought way too much stuff. My favorites are the preschool tanagram cards and tanagram blocks. I can't decide if I can wait for Christmas to get those out or not. I LOVE tanagrams! I also picked up several more K-1 workbooks for Mari, since she is flying through these things. These looked a little more involved and challenging. Some of them involve cutting and pasting which is something she definately needs some work on. I don't know why letting them have scissors to work with stresses me out so much but it does. Even safety scissors. I'm soooo afraid someone will sneak them away again and cut someone's hair. Judging from the work Mari brings home from preschool she really needs some practice using glue and scissors. She tends to bring home paper so saturated with glue I don't even know how to get it to the car without dripping and I feel like a horrible mother wanting to trash it instead of bringing it home. What are those teachers doing while Mari has the glue, anyway?

Luci's been having some really hard days lately. I'm not sure what to do about it. We are doing the same diet stuff we've been doing for awhile now, nothing has changed there. She is still on her Zyrtec. We haven't changed our routine or expectations. I called to get her three year well child visit scheduled and her ped is booked until mid-January. I wonder if I should just make a sick visit to talk to her ped about this. I'm at a loss again. I don't know how to calm and soothe her, how to keep her from melting down twelve times a day. Going potty has become a major battle. It is so strange because there doesn't seem to be any pain associated with it, she is pleased when she goes on the potty, she very rarely has an accident, but she just refuses to stop and take the time to go 90% of the time. She holds herself and dances, but when you suggest the potty she runs away screaming. Distraction sometimes works to get her there, but I can't always come up with something really distracting. Poor baby. It is just too late in the game to go back to diapers, not that she would wear them anyway. I feel like I'm on a roller coaster with this kid *all the time*.

(no subject)

Another parenting dilemma for all you wise people to help me with now.

While my MIL was here she told me that if she was Mari's teacher (she was a kindergarten teacher for several years before becoming a mom) she would recommend that Mari's speech be evaluated. We had her speech evaluated right after she turned three and they said she was fine. Totally fine. Actually, better than fine, a little precocious (I told them her huge vocabulary was from all the reading we did and I still think my kids have unusually large vocabularies). Anyway, I never gave it much thought after that. My MIL concern was over her "lazy" pronunciation she said. I have always been careful to correct the pronunciation of words, at least as far as I thought it was possible for my kids. And, thinking back on it, I've had to do it a lot more for Mari than the other girls, often breaking words down into syllables and repeating them over and over (she thinks it is great fun actually.) Since my MIL said this though I've been paying closer attention and I noticed that she does have some strange problems with pronouncing words. She cannot say the "L" sound at the end of a word to save her life. She has no trouble with l at the beginning or in the middle of a word (Luci, slow, allow, etc.) But at the end of a word the sound comes out like a "w" or "oo" (hill, bill, will, etc). This is true of "r" too. At the beginning, no problem, but in this case if it is in the middle or end of the word it is a "w" sound (Laura is Loh-wa). Another word I've noticed is basket. She says "bas-tick" consistantly. There are lots of others I can't think of right now. I should make a list. I guess these sounds seem like obvious things to have trouble with for a young child, but at what point should she be able to correct them? She will be five on Christmas Eve. Should I have her evaluated? Or should I just gently and consistently correct them for awhile and wait a little while longer?