Storm and I volunteered for a fundraiser for her choir to raise the money necessary for another choir trip. This one is much better and far more interesting than the one to Disneyland. This year, we're going to Idaho.

Whee.

It still takes money to rent the bus and the hotel rooms. Fortunately, the local sports stadium has such a deal for non- ( Read more... )

I continue to be sick. This is highly annoying. At first I had what the local doctors are calling "The hundred-day cough," because it resembles pertussis, but lots of people who have been recently vaccinated, like me, seem to be catching this variant of whatever it is. I'm about thirty days into that, and now I have a really nasty headcold, the ( Read more... )

Since school is almost here, Omaha and I took Kouryou-chan to Wild Waves for one last summer experience last week ( Read more... )

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This has been the busiest week yet here at the Villa Sternberg. We started, Monday, with dress rehearsals for Storm at the local Performing Arts Center. She was in two pieces for her hip-hop class, one where she was dressed as a monkey for a choreographed piece called "Worlds Collide" (the other half of the class wore blue jumpsuits and blond ( Read more... )

Today was the last day of school for Kouryou-chan. This is true in more ways than one: she's been at this school, in the Montessori program, for seven years, and has never known anything else as a matter of schooling. She's had three of the most amazing teachers she could ever encounter, has had a life full of adventure and learning and fun, and ( Read more... )

Omaha and I last night went to Storm's high school choral presentation. We've had a lot of problems with the choir teacher-- she plans things at the last moment, never sends out messages to the parents about goings on in her choral program, and surprises everyone at the last minute with notices about trips and performances ( Read more... )

Today's expedition to Storm's high school for the parent/teacher conference was a complete waste of time. It was fifteen minutes long. The first ten minutes were a scripted set of bulletpoints that the school distributed to each student. The first instruction read, "The parent should remain silent and withhold all questions until the end of the ( Read more... )

Dr. Science over at Obsidian Wings has an article about Being That Dad, the one who brings up uncomfortable subjects and confronts the status quo at his child's schools and social events. The subject he brings up is rape culture: the expectation that "boys will be boys" and "teenage boys joke about rape as a way of figuring out sexuality," and how ( Read more... )

The other night Omaha and I did the very 19th century thing of attending a good, old-fashioned lecture by Steve Hughes, Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. The crux of his talk, entitled "School 2.0," was how, when he became a parent, long after he'd gotten his degree, he did a survey of all the ( Read more... )