Oops.

I thought I had a partial post saved. Apparently not. *glare blogger*

Anyway. Alex is doing incredibly well in gymnastics. I am so thrilled to see him so successful.

His buddy was over here the other day and they were playing with the real globe and the inflatable globe, calling out names of places and finding them together. Or, fighting over who found it first. Or getting mad because the other kid called out a "hard one and it's not fair". But it was very cute and educational.

Today I was playing Katamari and Alex was trying to understand how big my Katamari was. It's labeled in metric, so we talked a little bit about how inches and feet compare to centimeters and meters. It was very brief but a few minutes later I was rolling around and Alex goes, "Your Katamari is about 6 feet." I checked and it was at 2 meters. He also directed me to spots to pick up good good stuff and in general helped compensate for my terrible sense of direction in 3D environments.

Now he will surely go out into the community with a Katamari and just roll everything up because of course kids are powerless to resist TEH VIDEO GAMES! It couldn't be that he learned something and we enjoyed our time together, cooperating and playing and having fun. Not from a a video game. No way, no how. :P

He watched a video for the second time through on allosaurus. He has another one on ancient crocodiles and omg they were so HUGE. It was pretty awesome.

...

Saw this article on Yahoo news. A third of boys are left behind

Basically, it says there is a significant gender gap in high school graduation rates. The gap shows up significantly in 3rd grade achievement, and grows in the 8th grade.Am I the only one with a little boy who is entirely unsurprised? Has anyone looked into an elementary school classroom lately? It's full of color and light and story centers and art materials. I don't see trucks, or monsters, or ninjas. I don't see kids at recess nearly so often. I don't see gross movement integrated into lessons. I don't see teachers reading Captain Underpants or Stink., I see frowny faces on drawings with guns or tanks. I see constant trouble for little boys who are doing nothing but being little boys. Fierce in their enthusiasm for everything BIG and FUN and SCARY around them, they move and call out and shout, and play fight. And it is simply who they are. To suggest that they may not be successful in an environment so clearly built for the still and quiet is to suggest that perhaps the sun may rise today. It's a miracle that so many of them have the successes they DO have.