Homework, Except Different

I've noticed a few good changes lately; I think Princess is stepping out of her "thing." Maybe it was the shirt. The change was definately after the shirt. I can see that as a possibility; I imagine it's hard to yell insults at someone if you look at them and they are actually wearing everything you were going to say. I may need more shirts.

One day she seemed to notice, almost out of nowhere (well, not exactly nowhere), that the other children hug and snuggle and, well, talk to me. And, really, treat me much nicer in general that she does. There was a point where I actually saw her turn her head and NOTICE. So almost every day since, she's asked once or twice a day if she can hug me. Sure, it's a lot like hugging a pillow. Yes, it's not exactly what you'd call spontaneous, but it's a HUG. A hug! She's obviously trying to make me feel good around her, and I'll take it!

She is also making a h-uge effort to not turn her homework into WWIII. Usually she has a set time of the 45 minutes before dinner to complete what is for most first-graders ten minutes of work. Usually she doesn't finish because she heads off into InsulttheMommyLand, but this week, she really has been working hard. Last night four math problems took her one hour of really, REALLY hard work and compliance with my help. It gave me the chance to notice some things.

For one problem, she was to draw 67 cents in coins. She used only dimes and pennies, and she did not draw them in any organized way. For comparison (because I was curious), I asked Buddy to do the same problem, and he did it the way I would expect: QQDNPP. The next problem was a line of coins in no particular order, and she was to figure out what amount of money they equaled. She could not seem to see which coins she had already used, so I walked her through organizing them and labeling their value on the back of the paper. Then I had her add them one by one, and write the values one at a time next to the coin so she would not get confused. Her adding was correct. She gave me the correct verbal answer. But I was cooking dinner and was not LOOKING at her paper. I came over to check it, and couldn't even understand at first what she had done. Then I realized: she TOLD me 85, 95, 105- the right answers. But she had WRITTEN 80, 90, 100. And she had written them next to the coin underneath the ones they belonged to.

I don't even really know what to make of it. We happened to have a vision therapy appointment today, so I told Dr. F, but she wasn't so sure it had to do with her visual processing. One of the things that frustrates me the most with this whole "child-rearing" thing is that I can never seem to figure out what is causing anything. So how the heck am I supposed to fix it? Huh?