Hear That Music?

The other night, Mandy was trying to get the counter and island area cleared off. Somehow everything and its brother manages to get thrown on either of those places and before you know it, the place looks even more than usual like it's gonna get up and walk away. (And a person then really does want it to do just that too.)

Anyway -while she was sorting through old mail and papers and such, Maya put in a cd on the "boom box" there -one that Mandy says was found in my jeep and that had apparently been left behind, overlooked or some such, by the previous owners. It's a mix of songs that had been hits of the 70s and it seems that both Maya and Kurtis really like the music -cause Maya keeps playing it over and over, every chance she gets.

I have the video Mandy had done uploaded to my facebook but can't figure out how to transfer it here to my blog. I tried to upload the video to this post -using Blogger's good old video upload setup -but after almost four hours of waiting and waiting and waiting for the darned thing to upload, I gave up on it. I used to have instructions from Dr. Sardonicus on how to embed a video from YouTube but be darned if I can get to that e-mail to open it and get those instructions. So any of you reading this who knows how to either put the video in her via my Facebook or to upload it from YouTube, please let me know via e-mail. Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated and your reward -well, getting to see the video, of course.

The way these two kids are bouncing around on the stools, then Kurtis chasing around a good bit, it kind of makes a person wonder if they have found some diet pills with ephedra or some kind of good "speed" type stuff.

Or, considering the way that Sammy, the mutt and Fluff-Nuts, the Tom-kitten race and chase each other around -zooming into the living room, virtually flying across the room to the sofa, up on the back of the sofa and down to the floor and smashing at full speed into the recliner -heaven forbid if there would be someone sitting in the recliner when they do their merry chase cause I think it might knock that person out cold -that I wonder if there's something in their specific dog/cat food too that gives them all this whiz-bang energy and if maybe the kids have been dipping into that too!

Yesterday, when I had Maya accompany me on my walk with Sammy, I tried to engage her in conversation, asking her about her day at school. Now getting her to answer any questions is sometimes like pulling teeth cause odds are her standard answer to anything an adult might consider important to know, her answer is generally going to be the same thing. "I don't know."
So one has to try to find ways to ask a question that will inspire her to tell about her day, the kids in her class, her teacher, what they are studying, etc.

So I was trying to prod her to talk to me about her classes yesterday and getting no where fast. At one point, I asked her if she'd been good and got the standard answer so I inquired as to whether or not her teacher had said anything to her and she said "NO." Not much as answers go, but it was a different answer from her norm so I tried to pursue it a little. "What do you mean she didn't talk to you today? She didn't say ANYTHING to you? Nothing at all?" And again, Maya repeated her earlier answer of "No." So I gave up on that topic then and let her ramble and giggle as Sammy as he meandered along the road.

Later, after we got home though and I was going through her backpack, looking for papers that indicated homework, other things along those lines, I saw a paper Maya had completed but had no checkmark, stars or stickers on it -all indicators of a paper she'd turned in and it had been approved by her teacher. So I questioned Maya about that paper and if she had forgotten to turn it in or something. She told me no, that a substitute had done it. What was that again, Maya and she said again that a substitute had done it. So I asked then if they'd had a substitute teacher yesterday and she said yes. And then I said, "So Mrs. K. wasn't there then, huh?" And when she told me No to that question then her consistent answers that Mrs. K hadn't said anything to her all day yesterday made sense!

Pretty hard to talk to your student isn't it, when you aren't there, I guess!

For us, about the only time this place is relatively calm, a bit quiet is between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., Monday thru Friday and usually, if we are lucky, after 9 or 9:30ish at night -provided of course there are no meltdowns on the way to bed and that Kurtis sleeps through the night then until -hopefully -7:30 a.m. when it's time for Maya to get up and ready for school. Any child awake though between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. is definitely not a good sign, nor a good start for the day.

Never a dull moment otherwise, that much is for sure!