We Love Our Puppy

Cordelia and Argos have been practically inseparable since we brought him home almost a year ago. Here they are playing on the kitchen floor.

I think I'm going to try posting just some pictures sometime soon. The videos are great, but they can be a hassle to prepare and sometimes take forever to upload. Plus, photos are usually higher resolution and Cordy is always cuter in high resolution.

No, Absolutely Not, No Way, No How, Nope

Yesterday was Cordelia's 22 month birthday. And as you can tell from this shocking home video, she is getting plenty of practice in for her Terrible Twos. Tammy and I are really excited and looking forward to the joys of parenting a two-year-old.

All I can really say is that it's a really good thing they take a couple of years to reach this stage... if they came out like this... well, I doubt the world population would be a concern. Ever.

Pop Rocks

Well, this video is self explanatory. I was hoping for more shock or surprise, but it's still cute enough to put up for friends and family to see.

Struggling With Algebra

Cordelia, the wonderfully bright child that she is, loves books and apparently is interested in math, too. Here she is taking the initiative of getting her hands on the teacher's edition Algebra book and searching for the perfect equation.

Just moments later, she suddenly and surprisingly showed off her latest immitation of mommy and daddy. The camera was there to catch it as it unfolded! (It's really quiet so you may need to either turn up the volume or just know that she's clearing her throat)

The Long-Suffering Tammy

Well, Tammy has submitted her resignation to Granite School District, though she’ll be finishing out the month. This has been a long and difficult decision for her, and it’s got me a little worried about finances, since she makes more money than I do, and we are generally only barely getting by, month-to-month, but it was a decision that needed to be made.

For the past three years (since about the time I met her) Tammy has been teaching high school math in Granite District. The first year she taught at the Juvenile Detention Center where all of her students were in a locked-down facility awaiting trial. She rarely had the same student for more than a few weeks at a time, though she often that the same students come back every few weeks or months. It was a very disheartening job, so the next year she moved to teaching at ARTEC West, which is still in the youth correctional program, but this school is an open campus (for most students), and a mental health facility, as many of the students are suffering from chemical dependence issues or come from backgrounds and situations that have rendered these children incapable or unwilling to integrate successfully into a mainstream public school.

Unfortunately, the level of professionalism brought to the facility by the “advocates”, who are not teachers or even qualified mental health professionals, but are actually just paid volunteers who come with the presumed intention to help communicate the needs of the students to the school faculty and vice-versa. However, these advocates, more often than not, actually turn out to be nothing more than enablers and excuse-makers for the students.

After two years of the frustration of working in that environment, Tammy made the somewhat difficult choice to leave friendly co-workers who she truly enjoyed working with, and made the move to mainstream public education. She began at Kennedy Junior High School in August of this year, and had regrets almost from the start. She was given 7^th and 8^th grade algebra and pre-algebra classes. Since receiving her BS in Teaching Mathematics and Statistics, she’s been teaching in structured environments, but in public school, the sense of entitlement that seemed to be a symptom caused by the advocates at ARTEC has been replaced in mainstreamed students by a vacuum, a lack of respect for themselves, their fellow students, their teachers, or anybody. Making things worse is the lack of disciplinary actions available. She can send students to the principal’s office, but that doesn’t do anything. She can call the students’ parents, but she can almost never reach them, and when she does, there are other problems, including the fact that many of these parents don’t speak English; and occasionally there is an appalling lack of interest by the parents.

Additionally, she even has some students that don’t speak English, and Tammy doesn’t speak Spanish or Vietnamese (the languages her students who don’t speak English are fluent in). This change has been overwhelming, but would have been tolerable if not for increased illness. Since she became pregnant with Cordelia, Tammy has been sick. An ovarian cyst burst when she was only 6 weeks along, about the same time she developed morning sickness, by 10 weeks, she couldn’t breathe if she was lying down. She saw every imaginable specialist in breathing, heart, back, lung, asthma, or allergy that each previous doctor could think of, none of them could put a finger on the problem. Once Cordelia was born, she could breathe again, but has had intense chronic back pain ever since. In recent months, the back pain has been occasionally debilitating, resulting in an ER visit several weeks ago (they discovered that she had Strep Throat, but it was completely unrelated to her back pain). About the same time that the back pain became so bad, she also became constantly nauseated. For the past 2-3 months, she’s not been able to eat more than about one meal each day, because after only a few bites she becomes ill. Her doctor had her go in for an ultrasound of her gall bladder (no result), he prescribed her an antacid, in case of ulcer (no result), currently she’s taking yet some other medication he prescribed (no result as of yet).

So she is resigning for medical reasons, and she’s going to start working from home. As luck would have it, the job her mom does from home has an opening and can start her training this week (from what I understand it can sometimes take weeks or even months before they have any openings). We’ll keep everybody posted about how it goes.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Yowza!!!!

So today I took Cordelia shopping, leaving Tammy home alone to grade homework. We took our time, first Wal*Mart, then Sam's Club, and finally PetCo. Cordy was excited to go see the animals. They had a beautiful short-hair black cat named Venus who I wanted to adopt the second I saw her (as I always do when I see cats in cages). They had their usual stock of bunnies (both floppy and non-floppy varieties), ferrets, fish, birds, and rodentia. While we were admiring the little white mice, we got to watch a treat. I crack up every time I watch this.

Enjoy!

Ahh, My Child, the Prodigious Wonder

Cordelia has loved music from the moment she was born. The first song she ever heard was Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer, sung to her when she was but a day old by her daddy in and attempt to calm her down. And it worked. Since then she has seemed to have an affinity for music, and is drawn to pianos and piano-like instruments (such as organs and her little-tyke piano-xylophone thingy).

Last week at church, Cordy and I were tracking down Tammy who was still in the Young Women's room (for anybody who is unfamiliar with the LDS church, "Young Women" refers to girls ages 12-17, so the "Young Women's" room is not the lavatory, it's just a room where the young women meet). I opened the door and Cordelia pushed through and climbed right up onto the bench and started plunking away. I pulled out my camera-phone and took the following vid.

Various Cordelia Vids

This is a catch-up video blog. Lots of vids of Cordelia doing cute things (as defined by her parents).

While video chatting with Grandma Gwen, Cordelia wanted to spin, so I was spinning her. Argos decided he wanted to spin too, so up he jumped. It was cute and all was fun, until...

Went to the fair with my dad, my brother Shän, and his family. That's my niece climbing up the tire.

There were a couple of other nice videos that I was going to put up here, but they were too big. Maybe if I get brave some day and resize them I'll post them, but for now these two will do for this blog.

App-O!

The other day, I was in the backyard playing frisbee with Argos and Cordelia, when Cordy found a freshly fallen apple. She picked it up, despite my assurances of “It's yucky! Ick!” and requests for her to put it down. She brought it right over to me and said, clear as day, “App-o.”

Excited, I asked her if she wanted to eat an apple, and she nodded approvingly. So we went inside, I grabbed a nice crisp Gala apple off the counter and handed it to her, while my video recorder initialized on my phone. The following video is what happened next.

Yardwork

A month or so ago, I was raking up apples that had fallen from our two backyard apple trees, and Cordelia wanted to be outside with daddy. She's a great help around the yard, and has been all summer. Earlier in the season when I was uprooting dandelions, she helped by taking freshly popped weeds and depositing them in the pile of weeds next to the green-waste bin (which had strangely gotten further and further away as I picked and dug and pulled). So, since I knew how much she loved to help, and since we have a rake that is just-her-size (it's for raking small areas, like flower beds, I believe), I got it out for her and she went to work.