I have complained since we started violin about how UNpunctual Liam’s teacher is. I mean REALLY unpunctual…it’s like she has no sense of time. If your lesson is supposed to start at 1:30, you will be lucky to start by 2:15-that’s on a good day. And she never apologizes or even acknowledges that she is late…EVER!!! That’s not including travel time there and back. So basically, about a quarter of your day gets sucked up by violin lessons. That has been okay and I have managed to tolerate it for the past two+ years because she is so good with Liam. And remember, only Liam plays right now. Colm is going to start soon…can you imagine how much time is going to be wasted just WAITING for our lessons to start???? So, tomorrow I am going to go observe another teacher. I interviewed her over the phone and she sounds good. I couldn’t come up with a polite way to ask her if she is punctual though. I guess we’ll see if she in on schedule when I go to observe the lesson tomorrow. Another reason why we are thinking about switching is because of kindergarten. Liam won’t even get out of kinder until 3:45. Group lessons begin (or atleast they are supposed to begin) at 3:30ish. By the time I wait in the carpool line and drive all the way to his lesson, they will have missed half, if not all of the group lesson. Not to mention that I am going to be in a mad rush to get them from point A to point B every Monday…I don’t want that. Another bonus is she costs about half us much. Money talks, folks.
The GPS I have in my car has traffic alert so it will tell you when you are about to hit a traffic jam so you can presumably find a different route. So, I am stuck in traffic today on the freeway and my GPS says, “There’s traffic ahead”. Hmmm….really…thanks for telling me. I think the trouble is that it won’t tell you there is traffic on the freeway until you are on the freeway and when the traffic jam starts before you even get down the exit ramp, you are kind of stuck.
It is so exciting to drive by and see how much progress they make each day. It is amazing what a difference just a day can make.
Colm LOVES Kindermusik. We only have two more sessions and then it is over for the spring. I am so glad that I enrolled him in it. He is such a good listener and wants to do everything just the way Miss Lin does it. He loves it when she reads stories to them, and when it is lullaby time and she turns out the lights and also when they get to hold hands and dance around in a circle…but I think his favorite part is when they get to hide their scarves and then find them…he thinks it is absolutely hilarious.
I have been reading this book FOREVER! I had to turn it back into the library and then put it back on hold and wait for it again. Luckily, it is a book of short stories (memoirs), so it wasn’t a tragedy when I had to turn it in…you can just pick up where you left off. I made it to the last two stories, however, and decided that I could not invest any more time in this book. Some of the stories are very interesting. They are all about children whose parents were missionairies, dignitaries and the like. Children who did not have a home country and often lived in five different countries, speaking as many different languages and trying to absorb and assimiliate into that many cultures before their tenth birthday. Children who were sent to boarding schools or American schools in the country they were currently residing in. Many of the stories are very interesting, but towards the end I had had enough. Time to move on to another book. I need some fiction.
Liam specifically asked for me to put this picture on the blog. What is he doing? He is using some cardboard from some packaging to scratch the cat. The cat loved it. There were several other pieces of cardboard that he used that afternoon to make into various spaceships from Star Wars. 
One more down, three more to go! I finished another class last night! I am going to take one class this summer and one in the fall. After that I will have one more class to take and I am not sure when I will take that one. We’ll see. I have until 2010 to finish this degree up and then may classes start to expire. What does that mean? It means that I have to start taking them over again and I definitely don’t want to do that!
I almost cried this morning when Colm woke up and I saw that his right eye was swollen and I knew we would have to go to the pediatrician’s….again. You see, we have been there about six or seven times this month. Let’s see…let me count…we went there once as a follow up to Liam’s trip to urgent care, then we went back about a week later to have his breathing tested. Then Colm got pink eye and then Colm had his three-year checkup and then Liam was having asthma trouble on Friday. Then there was our trip there today. There is a new receptionist there and she knows me now. That’s not a good sign. We have also been to the pediatric surgeon’s this month as a follow up to Colm’s surgery last month. Most importantly, however, Colm will be fine. (If you look at his birthday picks you can see how there is a red rash sort of thing around his eye up onto his forehead.) The dr thinks he got a bug bite which might require us to go back to the dr if it gets any more swollen. I am seeing if they have some sort of frequent flyer program.