Conferences :(

I may or may not post more about our little trip later but right now it's definitely back to real life. Last night we sat outside freezing for two hours to watch Riley play his last football game of the season. At the same time, Brittney and her cheer team were competing in Yankton. One of her bases dropped her so she didn't have a very good night. For those of you who are non-cheer, that basically means that Brittney was way up in the air with four people holding her leg and someone didn't do it quite right so Brit fell. Thankfully, she doesn't seem to have seriously injured anything.
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School conferences are next week. When Brittney was in grade school, I used to love going to school conferences. As much as we try to tell ourselves that it doesn't matter what other people think, it's still an ego boost when people tell you good things about your child. "She gets along with the other kids. She is so smart. She works hard. She's always willing to help. etc, etc. ". You get the idea.

Along come three traumatized boys, a little baby and Taylor thrown in the mix. I now have a lot more conferences to attend and instead of the positive feedback we were getting before, the conferences now sound more like this:  "He needs to pay more attention in class. He distracts others. He can't keep his hands to himself. He takes things that don't belong to him. He's definitely not working up to his potential. He lies to me. He doesn't follow directions. He's not turning his work in on time." etc, etc. To anticipate getting hit with conference after conference is a bit daunting.

Knowing all that, it took me a while to figure out why I was so frustrated when I found out that our little preschooler, Sophia, wasn't having a conference. I should have been excited to have one less thing on our busy schedule but it really bothered me. Her school has decided to do their own version of a "conference". Instead of meeting with our child's teacher at a specific time, we are supposed to schedule a time to go into the class with three to four other families. Our child then takes us around their classroom and shows us what they can do. While I think that's a great idea for an open house or family night, that's not a conference to me. A conference is a discussion between the parents and the teachers about what's positive and what needs to be improved. It's a communication tool that you don't usually get during the chaos of drop off and pick up because there are so many people and so much going on during those times.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what really bothered me was that I was looking forward to this conference as the one and only really positive conference experience this fall.

Sophia isn't perfect, but she is very typical of a child her age. When she was screened as an infant, she was developmentally behind in pretty much everything and qualified for almost everything. When they re-tested her at age three, she was in the 90-100% for everything.  I feel like we've been able to take the time with her that we didn't have with some of the others. Plus, we were able to start earlier, since she was placed with us at 7 months. I was anticipating ONE mostly positive conference experience. But since that's not going to happen, life must go on.........

So next Monday morning I'll be taking Zeke to his orthopedic team in Sioux Falls for an evaluation. Then Monday afternoon we'll have piano lessons and in the evening we'll have Riley's conference, Taylor's conference and then Zeke's conference. I'll have a breather until Tuesday evening when we have Anthony's conference. Thursday it'll be time for me to get all six kids to the dentist in Sioux Falls. Anyone want to come with? Just me and six crazy kids ;)
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