Review! Gifted, Bullied, Resilient: A Brief Guide for Smart Families by Pamela Price

The first thing to say is that I did receive a copy of this book for review purposes. However, given that the author is on my auto-buy list (which means I'd have been buying it as soon as I heard of its release), and the subject matter, it was going to end up in my hands sooner rather than later anyway.

Now. Given Skeeve's, my, and Mad Natter's struggles with bullying, this was a huge book for me. I've been anxiously awaiting its release for at least the last six to eight months, and that's all I can reasonably remember - it might have been a lot longer. The digital copy arrived in my
inbox this afternoon, and I promptly dropped everything, picked up paper and a pen, and immersed myself in the book.  Mad Natter was out playing with the neighborhood kids, I had some time...  I'm sad that I finished reading before I started dinner, and only partly because dinner's about half an hour late. Mostly because I want more.

It's Parenting The Gifted Week!

Congratulations, all you wonderful folks raising gifted children, this is Your Week!  Jen, from Laughing at Chaos, is looking for suggestions on what kinds of things parents need - swing by and let her know what would make your life easier.  As for me, I have my own take on these things. What would make life easier? Recognition of the gifted poor.

I'm not allowed to watch TV anymore...

So, I learned something about myself while we were visiting Hammie and Buppa for the 4th of July. I, apparently, am no longer allowed to watch network television. Of all the things! Here at our Mooselandia home, we only have Netflix and YouTube for television viewing - and, of course, DVDs/Blu-Rays - so I've long since fallen out of touch on what is present in standard media anymore.

Inside Out!

So, I'm late to jump on the Inside Out train. However, Mad Natter and I went to see the movie with Hammie this week, and it honestly deserves a post of its own.  You see, it's a Pixar film, which means it's going to be amazing, that's just because it's Pixar. But, it was more than that.  Even though the Vat O' Fruit Punch Mad Natter got before the movie meant we had to leave to pee three times between the middle and the end, the film was still so astounding as to absolutely merit talking about it. And honestly, the number one reason is because of Mad Natter's first comment after it was over: "You know, Mama, I think I have all those characters from the movie inside ME!"  SOLD.

A Review of Khan Academy: Math

Alright. As we all know, I've been off my game recently. As a result, many things slid, and the homeschool year ended abruptly on my surgery date. I'd spent a good amount of time looking for something for Mad Natter to do to keep his math from atrophying over the summer, and it seemed like The Time to start it up, especially since I had a recommendation from our next door neighbor as well.

Intersections

The recent kerfuffle about bullying gifted children in the mainstream media has a lot of people talking. And some of what they're saying is reasonable and level-headed - things like

@TODAYshow highly gifted and profoundly gifted are not jokes they are actual psychological terms for people in the top 2% of IQ #Gifted

— Becky Lichucki (@rlichucki) May 24, 2015

and

There's no way to defend mocking #gifted kids. Mocking Parents of Gifted Kids Isn’t Funny http://t.co/qJv9hn2iHO @TODAYshow @SWilderTaylor

— Celi Trépanier (@CeliCeliC) May 24, 2015

When Mainstream Media is the Bully

Apparently, Al Roker, Natalie Morales, and Stefanie Wilder-Taylor think it's great fun to laugh at gifted children. Yeah, same old trope, all children are gifted, blah. But then, Ms Wilder-Taylor quotes out the oft-accepted 2%-5% of the population is gifted stat, followed by the mockery that parents then have to one-up each other claiming their child is "highly" gifted. Wow. Because "highly gifted" is completely different from "left handed." My question, though, is this: Would they all be so quick to point and laugh at the other side of the curve?

Unit Studies are Born!

Ever since Mad Natter was a bitty infant, we've been driving long-haul multiple times per year. Eight hours each way kind of long haul, from when he'd sleep through the entire drive, right on until he got his MobiGo, then Innotab, now his 2DS. This is the first time we've come out of a trip with plans for unit studies.

Box Day!!

This post contains affiliate links to materials discussed. Purchases via these links help support our family at no additional cost to you. Thank you for choosing to support my little blog. Read my full disclosure statement here. 

Oh, how I love box day! We put our orders in when the tax return comes, but because we're in Mooselandia, shipping is a... well, a moose. So, we ship everything to Hammie and Buppa's house, and then go visit for long enough to cover the cost in our customs declarations. So box day is a Big Thing, where not only do we get to visit our family, but we get curricula as well!  And so, here is where I fill you in (because everyone loves a good box day!) on what we got!

Virtual Field Trip: Museum of Science and Industry Chicago

Mad Natter and I recently spent about a week and a half visiting with Hammie and Buppa in their suburban Chicago home, and while we were there, we had a lot of great opportunities.  From visiting with some of his cousins to spending days playing baseball with his Buppa in the yard, we had a lot of fun. We found a lot of fun things to do that were good field trips, too, and so I want to take you with us!

Mother vs Mother

Being online, and connecting with other parents - either of gifted children, or who homeschool, or sometimes both - means I get a decent amount of contact with other mothers. Sometimes fathers, yes, but mostly mothers. Generally, talking about this garners only one response: "ugh, the Mommy Wars..." I have to wonder why that is.

The Benefits of Our Less-Stressed Household

On March 13, the weekly #gtchat on Twitter was about homework.  If you haven't checked out #gtchat yet, please, please do! It's held every Friday night, 7E/6C/5M/4P, and it's a wonderful conversation. Anyway. I somehow managed to come out of a conversation about eliminating homework... with homework. I'm not sure if that takes talent or idiocy, and for the sake of my sanity, I'm choosing not to explore that any further than I have.  All it took was one tweet.

Review! "The Family Library" series by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley

This post contains affiliate links to materials discussed. Purchases via these links help support our family at no additional cost to you. Thank you for choosing to support my little blog. Read my full disclosure statement here. 

Having Mad Natter in the house is often an exercise in mitigating what he's emotionally able to handle versus what he's intellectually ready for. Nowhere has this been more evident than in his determination to understand every single thing about how the human body works - including all its parts (both variants!), and the reproductive process. This is all well and good, and I encourage a whole lot of curiosity, but there's only so much I'm willing and/or able to tell my then-four-year-old about human reproduction. As a result, I turned to the children's book section of Amazon, did some flipping through of books, and went on to find what would work for us. It turns out, that starts with It's Not the Stork!: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends (The Family Library).

Finding our Joy

A quick bit of history for those not in the know: Mad Natter started preschool at 3. It was about three weeks in (at two days per week) that we started hearing rumblings about perhaps ADHD. Skeeve and I knew there was something amiss, but we didn't know precisely what. All we knew was that our child, from the age of 2.5, no longer seemed to meet a certain subset of developmental milestones - anything doing with delayed gratification, impulse control of any kind. Once he got into preschool, and things needed to be done on a schedule that wasn't 100% his own making, we learned that he had a distinct inability to follow directions on top of the impulse control.

Gifted in "Reel" Life!

When I was small, before I knew - and long before I understood - words like "undiagnosed" and "gifted" and how they applied to me, I loved to read.  I still do.  Back then, I was reading Encyclopedia Brown, The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, A Wrinkle in Time, and my favorite, so much so that I'm suddenly astounded I neither own, nor have read these books in ages, was a series called "The Great Brain." The first book of the series being published in 1967, there are the usual issues with stereotyping, but when you're looking back at something you loved, you don't really realize how awful it was - kind of like the Hunt For Tiger Lily scene from Peter Pan.