Is this thing still on?

OK so it's been over a year since I blogged last. I don't actually think that anyone has noticed but I'm back. I love to keep journals about the happenings in our family's lives but I've been terribly slacking at that too lately. I blame the DVR. I used to journal during commercials to keep myself occupied. Now that we have cable and that wonderful invention called the DVR I don't watch commericals anymore... sorry advertisers! Somehow I do spend a lot of time on the computer so I'm going to try and put some of that time to better use and at least blog some of the things that we do. Maybe I'll even print them out at some point and put them in our journal. We shall see.

So entry #1... Claire had a "mental health" day today. Yeah a first grader needing a "mental health" day. It's been a tough year for her in school. Academically she is doing fantastic (again this journal is for me so if there is an extraordinary amount of bragging involved so be it). Socially things seem fine too. She loves recess and all the jump roping that entails. What she is struggling with is as she puts it "All the talking!" She has a very chatty class and my dear sensitive child feels that it is her responsibility to make sure the class is being as responsible as she is. As many times as we have told her that she can only be responsible for her own behavior and that if the teacher is reprimanding the class she is really only talking to the people who are misbehaving Claire takes things personally. (Oh yeah the comma on our keyboard is broken so bear with the strange grammar.) So we have gone through many mornings of tears and "I don't want to go to school today." It breaks my heart to send her when I know she is miserable but there really isn't the option to let her stay home when she feels like it either. She has to learn to deal with situations that aren't easy. But we have also been in a couple of times to talk to her teacher and try to come up with some options to make things easier for Claire. Her teacher has been very understanding and supportive and we have found some things that seem to be working. We haven't had tears for awhile now. And most of the "I don't want to go to school"s seem to be habit.

So since she hasn't really asked for awhile I surprised her last night by telling her that she wouldn't be going to school today. I told her it was her reward for doing so well in school this year. She's the 2nd person in class to read 100 AR books and the 2nd to get her monkey to the top of the math facts tree. She really is an awesome kid. (I warned you about the bragging!) I had a free ticket to the Aquarium of the Pacific so I only had to buy hers and off we went. We got there right at the 9:00 opening. There are horror stories about field trip kids taking over the place so we were hoping to beat the rush. We did fine. We zoomed straight to the sting ray tank where she could say good morning to her favorites. We were the only people there for a good 20 minutes or so. The rays were still happy to be touched and swam right up to her. She was in heaven! We toured the rest of the aquarium and saw just about everything. It did start to fill up while we were there but we just kept avoiding the largest groups. When we were done we walked a little around the outside of the aquarium and found a nice bike path that I'm hoping we can bring bikes back to some time this summer. It was a good day. Claire needed it and I was happy to get some one on one time with one of my favorite people in the world.