School, and all the other little things that make you gray!!

We are half way through the first semester of school already. Seriously. Scary and serious. MB starting off with a BANG!!! Out of the gate, lots of A's. I am so happy for him that we started the "A clip" on the fridge. Basically, if he gets an A of any kind it goes on a magnetic clip on the fridge. You see, I do this because MB is a bit "high drama". If you know him or me or my husband at all you know it's true and you know where he gets it from. Not pointing fingers, draw your own conclusions. LOL.

Anyway, MB can get really down on himself when he gets a bad grade, so I continually refer him to his A-clip. Hooray for mommy....I'm such a good mommy...pats for the mommy......

Until 2 weeks ago when MB brought home his first official F. Yeah, I said F. FAILED FREAKED FRACTURED non-FUNCTIONING EEEEEEEFFFFFFFfffffff. Mommy is a failure. My world collapsed. My boy got his first F. In my attempts to not over-react, I grounded him, took away TV privileges and cried for hours on the sofa lamenting his F and my obvious failure as a parent.

Well, no. I really didn't do ALL of that. I did do some of it and I will not tell you which thankyouverymuch. So now I am on a Perfect Mommy quest to find ways to help this child not flunk first grade and permanently harm his educational reputation. How will he ever get into an Ivy League school if he flunks out of first grade. It's truly the end of his educational prowess isn't it.

His teacher is a sweet lady, who I am beginning to appreciate more and more. She is willing to give him special spelling tests because I am beginning to believe he may be dyslexic because of the way he gets them wrong. But apparently they do not test for that till third grade. I wonder why.

Well, we brought home a D last week...essentially KILLING his A that he earned on everything in the first half of the semester. Somebody help me with ideas on how to help this kid. His teacher gave us a GREAT website called spellingcity to type in his words and let him play with them (www.spellingcity.com) check it out. I like some (but not all) of them. The hang mouse is good and pick the missing letter...but the mixed up word has extra letters, not good when we are already adding extra e's to everything.

So, mommy is trying to lick her wounds and get over baby not being as eager in school as she always was as a kid and MB is trying to work harder and hopefully smarter. We have made a few adjustments to schedules like no TV on school nights and no more Spongebob or Fairly Odd Parents or just plain old mind numbing TV shows. It's gotta educate in some way. He can watch PBS and he can watch Dora for all I care, but no more mind numbing gahhhahhahahaaaa or Squidward.

I wonder if we can undo the damage we have allowed. Lets reharness that love of books and nature and all things wonderful and educational.

I was serious about the ideas people.