Marching on

Man, I'm looking forward to the school holidays!  I am looking forward to sleeping in and loafing round the house, and a little rest from my strenuous new timetable at tap (all my evening classes are now on Monday and Tuesday nights, which is great in terms of spending more time with the family, but physically more tiring) .  Mostly though, I'm looking forward to a rest from trying to keep Climber up to speed with all he has to do at High School, because at the moment, he, poor, tired, culture-shocked love, is the Mayor of Vague-Town.  Which means, to help him cope, I've had to ramp up my role as the Queen of Chivvy-Land, and may I just say, it's exhausting and boring.   I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy checking where he is (he drifts away to quiet rooms at home), whether he's done his tasks (usually not), and whether there's any extra stuff on the agenda that he's forgotten to tell me about (quite often). I do feel sorry for him.  It's not that he can't do this stuff, but he is so overwhelmed with it at the moment that he just wants to be when the day is over, to idle, to dream, to play.  And I have to keep bringing him back to homework, packing the school bag for the next day's lessons, flute practice, soccer training, uniform in the wash, lunch-bag on the kitchen-sink and so on.  I'm sick of always telling him to eat up! because we are rushing out the door.  I want the young dreamy dreamer to be able to take as long as he likes with his food, to have more time with his imaginary games.  So roll on, holidays!

On the whole though, High School is going well. He likes the teachers, the kids and the curriculum.  He's enjoying learning to play the flute, and progressing well with it.  (Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, one-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns is sounding rather good now.) We had one minor glitch regarding a science assignment where he had to email his completed assignment and couldn't (we think the file was too large but it's difficult to know with ipads, and of course it all happened on a night I was at work and unable to assist with IT issues) and his teacher was brusque and dismissive when a highly anxious and stressed out Climber, having given up his recess and lunch to try and solve the emailing problem, at last ventured to ask for help on what he should do.  However, I had some conversations with the teacher involved and the Year 7 Co-ordinators and we have agreed that whilst it is understandable that teachers get sick of the computer ate my homework type excuses, they could perhaps be mindful of not brushing off stressed out Year 7s who are new to the system, just in case they give the impression that asking for help in high school is a waste of time.

In other news:

The kids played soccer in a Cup Tournament last weekend on as savagely cold and wet an Autumn Day as you could imagine. That's Melbourne for you: heatwave one weekend, bitter wind and rain the next.

 

Both their teams got soundly thrashed, and Climber came close to dropping his bundle as goalie against a particularly ruthless and efficient team.  He felt better next game when he played defender, but owing to his fragile self-confidence, he let one tough game in goal overpower a whole season of good goalkeeping last year, and declared as we left the ground that he was no good as a goalkeeper. This is our year of trying to help him with his self-confidence.  My approach at the moment is to stamp down hard on negative self talk, and we'll see where that leads....

 

Also, I've been to Craft Camp!  It was super.  Of course it was; lovely companions, fine food and bonus, an air-conditioned environment and an outside temperature a good 4 degrees cooler than heatwave-stricken Melbourne on that weekend.  For the first time ever at Craft Camp I made something for Mister Fixit, who surely deserves a bit of handmade love for being so encouraging of giving me time away.  So I made him, as a surprise, but based on conversations where he'd said he wanted one, a Hawaiian shirt.  A really, really bright, lairy Hawaiian shirt!  And actually a little too big, but it's the sort of style to be worn a bit oversized so it totally doesn't matter. I had some very good help with the collar, thank you, my crafting sisters.  I think it looks like the real thing.

 

I also had time to run up a purple corduroy frock for winter, which came up very nicely.



 I love Craft Camp.