March Grab Bag

I am, as usual, exhausted.  The kids have this horrible living-in-a-polluted-city-in-the-mountains respiratory thing that has been dragging on for weeks, and neither is sleeping well.  We have literally 5 different medications for them, and slowly, slowly it's resolving, but in the meantime. . .blech.  Lots of whining in the middle of the night, punctuated by utter sobbing due to the associated ear pressure.  Poor things.  And SB sounds like she has whooping cough.  (It's NOT, right??!)

We just found out we have been accepted into not one, but two preschools for SB.  One is crazy expensive but would be a few blocks from where we will be living; the other is exponentially more affordable, but a hellish commute away.  Fortuitously, both are bilingual, so I am very pleased to have options.  T thinks we would be utterly insane to even consider the expensive one; he thinks it would be nuts to spend that much on preschool.  I had to remind him that we spent nearly that amount on Miss M when she was that age, and that the benefit of the giant payment is proximity and our sanity.  He is still not convinced.  We are still waiting to hear from a few more places, and I'm hoping that she gets into another place, and it will be that magical combination of both affordable and easily commutable.  Sigh.  It's all so very complicated.

Finally, finally, we seem to have a departure date.  We'll be heading back to the U.S. at the beginning of June.  I really have to start cleaning out closets, now that we know when we are leaving.  I don't know how we've managed to amass so much crap in just two years.

I've been working with Miss M on some school-related things, and I immediately saw what her teacher was talking about when she told me that when things are hard for her, Miss M does not like to do them and tries to avoid them.  She gets frustrated, angry, and/or very tearful very, vary quickly.  It surprised me, because I haven't seen her behave like that.  But, she is very upset at her inability to identify some letters of the alphabet (d, p, and b are particularly hard for her).  The teacher says she is behind; the pediatrician disagrees, given that she just turned 5, but schools are strict here (play based learning hasn't exactly made its way to this city, as far as I can tell--even SB sits at a desk and chairs at age 3).  I am guessing that because of the pressure they put on little kids here, she is behind her classmates, and that is embarrassing to her, and accounts for her frustration.  And, given the severity of her father's learning disabilities and the high probability of him passing those genes on, there is a chance that is part of it.  But whatever--I am trying to make learning FUN, and support her and make her feel confident and happy about her ability to play/learn, and make her understand that hard can be FUN, too.

I have had several surreal experiences lately that remind me of The Help, but I am too tired to continue.  But, I have to remember to blog about them, because. . .well, just because.  When life looks like 1950, it's worth mentioning.