Oh Frabjous Day!

It is X's birthday. She is 12.

 I just stuck birthday notes all over the living room/dining room/kitchen, including the quote from Jabberwocky, above. She quotes that poem all the time, without even meaning too. I will make her the usual heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast. (Usual on her birthday, that is.) She will go off to school with her book report in backpack. She will go sing with the choir at a local supermarket this evening, so no birthday dinner until tomorrow.

Now, the book report is a big deal. She has to do a couple, maybe three, reports per "marking period." Last year, this was torture. Every time she had to write one, I sat with the way overly complex rubric, prompting her to write some sentences about "a conflict, external or internal, and how it was resolved." What saved her last year were her creative book jackets or other artistic expression of the book. She had to write two reports over the summer and it just about killed us both. But for this one, X noted: "And I didn't even break down."

This, of course, after I went to the teacher to make my plea for informal accommodations based on X's difficulties with writing--which I suspected were brain based, although I had not had her tested for any of the vague categorizations such as dysgraphia. The whole incident follows one of those parenting rules: Just when you think you can't stand some condition your child has/is in, just as soon as you are poised to do something about it, the whole thing changes. At least that is the usual case for me. Maybe all we are facing is X's immaturity compared to her classmates. Anyway, the teacher said to call if X was crying over her book report. But....oh frabjous day!...she wasn't!