School "Daze"....

Please pinch me somebody...tell me it's all a bad dream...summer CANNOT be over already! Pictures below of the past couple of days activities and happenings...Hannah loves her teacher... she has 17 years experience! Just what we needed after the past 4 years of NEVER having a teacher that has taught before...we're looking forward to a very smooth, very organized, very stress-free 4Th grade...

The funniest part of Hannah's "after school" update, was the story she told me about a fellow classmate with rather large "butterflies". For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this is what Hannah calls the female anatomy below the chin (for a select few) and above the waist (barely for most! including myself). Anyway, apparently the rumor in the class was that this girl was brought back from 7Th or 8Th grade (she wasn't sure which) to see if she could pass because she wasn't a very good student. I asked her if she was exaggerating about the size of this girls "butterflies" and she insists no, she said they were floppy and jiggled whenever she moved. She apparently did not have them in a "holder thingy". I couldn't believe I was about to have this conversation with my nine year old, but here's how it went...I just explained to her that some girls are larger up top than others and that it's genetic and most of the time, you develop however quickly your mother developed...and maybe this girl's mother got "butterflies" really early too. I touched on how she shouldn't really judge the proverbial book by it's cover, and that she also shouldn't get involved with rumors about other people. I told her about a girl I was in 6Th grade with who had enormous butterflies and how kids made fun of her and she cried on a daily basis. I know Hannah would never do that, but I would like for her to be prepared to take up for her if need be. I was also shocked to hear that another girl told Hannah that her mother told her not to befriend another kid in class...apparently the mother saw at Open House that this child's parents wore their pants low on their rears and had tattoos. Hannah commented that the child was really nice however, and that goes back to that whole judging the book by it's cover thing, but I can't get over what parents feed their kids about other children. Wouldn't we all like to have children so perfect? I asked Hannah, "what if God looked at us and judged us by our outsides and attitudes instead of our insides"? (I was rather proud of myself for pulling this out of nowhere in the middle of such conversation, but in hindsight, it is essentially a parallel of what we were just discussing.)

Now, I am going to challenge myself to practice what I preached....I don't say it to my kid, but silently sometimes I think it. I dont' think it makes me a bad person, it just makes me human.

My Sonic/Bus Stop/Barn partner. She rides with me every morning.