Transformer School

Preschools are ridiculously expensive here, so I've been teaching Rocky at home in the hopes of preparing him for Kindergarten next year. Rocky's home preschool was just becoming too much fun not to include more kids, so a few weeks ago Rocky's best friend Silas and his little sister Nyla began their training at Jodi's Transformer Preschool. (I'm thinking of patenting this).  The picture above is the cover of the boys' lesson worksheet binders. Because of recent birthdays and the plethora of people we are proud to call the kids' grandparents, we have acquired a decent collection of Transformer toys that are now displayed at each lesson as bribery for the kids' participation. For every lesson they complete, they get to pick a Bot for playtime. It has amazed me how well this has worked. I have assumed the role of Optimus Prime, commander of the Autobots and master of letters and numbers, valuable tools to equip them in their fight against the evil Decepticons (so I've told them). To call them to their seats, I don the Optimus helmet, speak through the robotic voice mechanism and introduce the topics for the day. The altered voice is effective in getting their attention, and I feel cool. I always did like to dress up.

(David took this picture... intimidating, eh?)

We meet for 3 hours a day, 3 times a week. Activities include playing Optimus Prime Says, Optimus May I, Transformer Twister, Decepticon Charades, Autobot Aerobics and Find the Cube (Hot or Cold) as well as robot-related crafts. Yesterday, we made Transformer mirrors with cardboard and aluminum foil that (to my pleasant surprise) actually made our images in them look distorted and robot-like. During the lessons, I have designed a Superhero method of teaching vowels and action figure cut-outs help us form words. I think I am having as much fun as they are.

Nyla is in Robot mode. She prefers to assume the identity of Bumblebee. Her lessons are simpler, consisting of colors, animal identification and shapes.

Jack runs around giggling hysterically, holding his mini-board books up to his ear, talking to them like a phone. I'm happy if I can keep him from climbing onto the table and flinging all crayons and worksheets to the floor (which happens often). If anyone has any ideas of robot or superhero related activities or teaching methods, please let me know! For now, we will do our part to protect the universe with the "power of reading."

Weekend Chores

Saturday mornings are usually spent undoing the damage done during the week. In other words, we clean the house. In order to divide the weekend tasks fairly, we write them down on bits of paper and take turns pulling them out of a box. Today, Rich initiated the ritual by jotting down each job and preparing them for picking. Rich is notorious for making every event, including housework, fun and interesting, so I expected a few surprises. Sure enough, the first tasks plucked from the box included "lick the bird feeder" and "feed the giraffe," which I did using a bucket of corn flakes from the pantry.

Why was there a bucket of corn flakes in the pantry? Only Jack can answer that question, since he's the one we found sitting next to it this morning, along with an empty cereal box and a large pile of flakes on the floor that had apparently missed their mark in the bucket dumping.  Then, distracted by the camera, I wasn't aware of the fistful of flakes Jack shoved into my mouth until it was too late. Maybe the bucket of corn flakes was intended for mom-feeding all along. After all, Jack HAS witnessed the amount of food I can consume at a time.



I thought these tasks were the extend of the silliness and that the real house cleaning could begin, until I pulled out "punch self in the face," followed by at least 5 minutes of contemplation over whether I would in fact prefer to punch myself in the face or clean the kitchen, which was the task Rich offered to trade me for it. In the end, I made the trade because although punching myself seemed preferable at the time, it was also less productive. By midday, the house was cleaned, the fake animals fed and the family thoroughly entertained. Well done us.

Constant Battles

No, I'm not talking about the kids. I'm referring to the battles we consumers are forced to fight daily due to growing incompetence and negligence of the very people who specialize in customer service. It seems you not only have to PAY for services and products but you have to fight tooth and nail to receive what you actually paid for. You all know what I'm talking about. We have to hound our physicians for test results, demand pre-paid warranties to be accepted, altercate with insurance companies to pay their pre-determined share of the bills and compromise with our car mechanics and utility companies notorious for overcharging. We expect to get ripped off and grow weary of spending half the day "on hold" in attempts to resolve the injustices. After all, time is money, and we spend far more than the original service or faulty product was worth. Today, I am on the front lines with two foes: the e-bay vendor who never shipped the item I ordered and has now sold out of it (of course, it had to be the transformer toy David painstakingly earned through completing his home preschool lessons and has pleaded with the mailman to deliver every time he arrives at our front door mailbox... it's been three weeks now...) and the online school that enrolled me in the wrong class and is now resisting relinquishing the refund for it. We expect far more courtesy from our children, forcing them to hand over the toy they've agreed to trade. Yet, we're not surprised when the adult/customer service rep wants to keep both toys to himself. Are there any salespeople out there who still care about making the customer happy, or at the very least, care to GIVE them what they paid for? I know my husband tries, but in all fairness to salespeople, there are a lot of greedy consumers too. Perhaps the callousness shown by our service providers is due to the influx of dishonest consumers. We need to take responsibility for this too. Their skepticism may de drawn from numerous examples of incorrect claims and scams. I challenge you all to a moment of reflection and resolution, regardless of which side of the battlefield you are coming from: seller or consumer, to fulfill our commitments to each other and maybe our kids will learn from our example, growing up to service a smoother society.