Elizabeth’s Journal

First Entry of the New Year

Well, I thought I had set some very realistic goals for myself this New Year’s. Turns out I was still wildly optimistic! Boohoo. You’d think I know better by now. Next week I shall try to reset and begin again. Once the Xmas decorations manage to get put away (hopefully today—right now they are piled on our dining room table, as they have been all week long), perhaps that will help.

Kayleigh started crawling two days before the New Year, and she’s quite pleased with herself. Finally she can do all the things she’s been plotting the last few months; I could see the calculations going on behind her eyes as she would stare at things. She likes being under the kitchen table, pulling on the tea towels (hanging out of the drawer), and using the Sit-n-Spin to help herself stand up. She also seems to have quite a lot of independence; yesterday Dale & Jonathan were doing something in Jonathan’s room while I was in the kitchen, and as I watched she huffed and puffed (it takes a lot of effort to crawl) through the kitchen, right by me, and down the hallway to Jonathan’s room. Never once did she stop & look around, realize (or care) that she was alone, etc. She did the same thing this morning, although it was for Jonathan alone. Her big brother holds a great deal of fascination for her, and she lights up for him as she does for no one else.

Sometimes, I have to admit, she sounds like a kraken, which we have taken to calling her when our ears are ringing with her latest LOUD proclamation. As krakens go, she’s pretty cute though.

Speaking of calculations (see beginning of second paragraph), Dale and Jonathan had a conversation at lunch yesterday about negative numbers. I had told Jonathan about them when he asked what was less than zero many months ago, maybe as long as a year ago, but we hadn’t talked about them since. Yesterday after Dale had reminded Jonathan what negative numbers were, he started asking J. some questions about them. For instance, if you have -10 and you add -10 to it, what do you get? They agreed the right answer was -20. Then Dale asked what if you take -20 and add -10 to it? Jonathan thought about it and said -30. So Dale did a harder one and asked what if you take -20 and add 11 to it? And Jonathan got it right off the bat and answered -9. Wow! I just remember being pissed off by the whole concept of negative numbers when it was introduced in school (or by my dad). How could you have degrees of less than nothing? Grrrr.

In talking about this with Dale last evening, I said that sometimes I regarded my whole childhood (educationally speaking) as a series of betrayals—finding out that a blanket statement that had been made turned out to have loopholes, or subtleties not previously acknowledged, or controversies that had not been even hinted at. I still remember being in the classroom at McCoy Elementary in math class where fractions were introduced. The teacher said that multiplying fractions together produces a smaller number. Well here I’d been told for x number of years that multiplication results in a *larger* number and division results in a smaller number. No one ever said that was just for whole numbers and that when we learned how to do fractions we’d find out something different. I argued with the teacher for quite a while in class about this, to no avail of course. As you can tell, I’m still a little bitter about it :-).