Sozlet stories

Aw, this all sounds so familiar. Duckie is all about the hard math problems. I finally went and bought him one of those math activity books from walmart and he is constantly wanting to do the worksheets.

And the school-friends-sudden emotional meltdown thing is so familiar. For both of them. There are some times when duckie will come home and we'll start talking about his day and he'll seem fine but then all of a sudden, in tears, say something like "Billy kept getting me out in four square and he's not nice and that made me really mad. I just wanted to punch him." Billy being an older boy in aftercare, maybe 5th grade. Or he might cry because he didn't get to play with one of his friends. The social stuff is just so hard to navigate. I was never good at it so I doubt my own advice. I want him to be happy by himself (which he often is) and not need any particular friend but at the same time have lots of little friends. He is well-liked too and I get nothing but compliments on him from other parents and teachers. He seems to have lots of little playmates whenever I see him. But it only takes one little thing for him to get really upset.

Then there is the ducklet. (I know, I should probably start my own thread.) She is getting in trouble for kissing boys at pre-k. Her main problem is that we have moved her from school to school too many times and each time she has to start from scratch making friends. She doesn't have any good friends that we could invite for a playdate or anything. She is also well-liked and always seems to have playmates at school and on playgrounds or at soccer. But when I started talking to her about how we don't just kiss anybody, and that kissing boys won't make them your friends (not to mention that it encourages them to chase her and grab her butt -- don't ask) she started melting and telling me how she doesn't have any friends. Ugh. I can't give her friends and I'm so terrible at social things that I can't even suggest ways that she could get friends herself. So I tell her just to play with everybody and give it time -- that she hasn't been there long enough yet and she will get settled in, etc... Ugh. I so suck at this.

This reminds me: I think I have a "hard physics question" she might enjoy. A Caltech alumnus tells me Richard Feynman liked to give it to prospective doctoral students. (I don't know if that's true; but even if it isn't, it should be.) Anyway, the problem tests for talent, not book knowledge, so the Sozlet may well ace it.

You have two rooms. "Room 1", has three light switches in it, "Room 2" three light bulbs. Each switch in Room 1 switches exactly one light bulb in Room 2 on and off. Your task is to figure out which lightbulb connects to which switch. Two handicaps: 1) You can stay in each room as long as you like, but only once: When you leave a room, you can never go back inside. 2) You can't see any light from Room 2 in Room 1, nor can you see the switches of Room 1 in Room 2.

Sooo, which bulb belongs to which switch, and how do you figure it out? Happy problem-solving!

I like that one. Do you have any others?

Guess what happened last night? :-? (Barf-o-rama take 3,972.)

Anyway, I think it may be that she was feeling off and more prone to emotion but that the stuff she talked about was real enough.

FreeDuck, I know exactly what you mean about navigating these social minefields. She's quite good at handling this stuff herself, usually, in the sense of going to the playground or pool or whatever. I turn her loose amongst kids, she ends up playing happily, I don't do nuffink. And in terms of good friends last year, while the kids approached her more than she approached them, the parents also approached me more than vice versa. I'm not very good at that either. When I was a kid, I pretty much never had playdates at my house, or scheduled playdates for that matter. I'd come home, and go outside, and there would be kids outside, and we'd play, and then it would be time for dinner. Simple.

That's how I still think it should be at some level of my brain, even though it's not really possible around here. So I have this kind of gut-level resistance to playdates which isn't useful. I gotta be proactive and start scheduling them. (The ones she's had so far have been when the other mom took the initiative -- I reciprocate just fine, but I gotta start it too.)

The kissy ducklet stuff is funny, that does sound a lot like sozlet especially when she (sozlet) was her (ducklet's) age.

I'll give it a whirl, Thomas!

Wow, your mother's intuition is on the money. It's funny, I know I'm coming down with something for the same reasons -- I take things too personally, just feeling off.

Agreed about the playdate thing. We are actively trying to move to a neighborhood with more (any) kids. Once we do that I'm going to try to arrange my work schedule to be home in the afternoons. Then they can just go outside and play.

Hope the sozlet is feeling well enough for some hard math problems. :wink:

For some reason, an insight just struck me while remembering the entry about Sozlet reading: It may be only a year or so until she can log on to A2K for herself and give her side of the "Sozlet stories". She sure has come a long way since you talked about weaning her a short time ago -- feels like a few days maybe. Her upcoming thread, "Sozobe stories", should be very interesting indeed. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Oh god!!!

This site doesn't allow members under 13, I think. Yeah. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Oh by the way I tried asking her the lightbulb/ switch thing, didn't get any answer in particular. First I just read what you wrote -- she said "EH??". Then I tried to explain it a bit more thoroughly, including drawing a diagram. She did one minorly interesting thing by connecting each bulb and switch as if they were back-to-back on a wall, but didn't really come up with an answer. (It has to do with heat, right? I think I vaguely remember seeing that question before.)

That's right. You turn switch 1 and switch 2 on and wait 15 minutes. Then you flip switch 2 "off" and go to the other room. Bulb 1 is the one that's on, bulb 2 the one that's off and warm, bulb 3 the one that's off and cold. Okay, so Sozlet, at five, isn't yet ready for post-graduate work in physics. I'm sure she can deal with that. She still impresses me.

No "Sozobe stories" for another eight years, eh? Looks like you got lucky for now.

Ah, that's what I had, but a little different. I said flip switch 1 on and wait x number of minutes. Then flip 2 on and walk next door. Switch 1 is on and hot, switch 2 is on but not as hot, switch 3 is off.

I gave it to ducklet and got the same "eh"? So I just for fun I gave him a modified problem with just two bulbs and two switches. He got that one but I notice it took him a while to really understand what I was saying.

sage advice :
- wisdom number 1 : kid always outsmarts parent ,
- wisdom number 2 - see 1 above .

(i sure enjoyed posting this :wink: ).
hbg

I hear you. Wouldn't you hate it if your kid posted on A2K?

Soz and Duck, it's interesting to hear the reaction of your children to the light bulb problem. Maybe the abstract thinking represented in floor plans, drawings of electrical wiring etc takes more training than we grown-ups realize.

As a person who has presented many plans to clients, I'll cheerfully say that some fraction of the adult population is completely thrown by plan view drawings... while others 'get' them immediately.

Just sent this to a family member who'd gotten some pics of sozlet in her Halloween costume and wanted an update; "What's it like to be her mom?" Seemed to belong here (excerpt).

We went to the local science museum recently and there was a guy warming up to do this spiel -- he had a big metal tank and some stuff that was sending out a mist. He asked the gathered kids, "what are some things that are cold?" One kid said "snow?" another said, "ice?" Sozlet said "liquid nitrogen?" The guy shot me this priceless look. :-) (E.G. does demonstrations with it for his classes so she knows all about it.)* She loves clothes and fashion, as you could probably tell from the costume. I can't just buy her clothes any more, she has very specific taste, likes and dislikes. She's super duper social, a [E.G.'s last name, the person I wrote to is on that side of the family] all the way. (I mean I'm social and everything but she's constantly just walking up to strangers -- kids or adults -- and charming 'em.) In other words, it's fun being her mom. Also challenging of course. She gets bored easily, always wants something to be happening. As I write this something went whizzing by in my peripheral vision -- eh? Turned to check on her and she had her eyes closed and was tossing these bits of plastic high in the air. Asked her what she was doing, and she said "something..." in this "no time to talk, just let me finish" kind of way. Still don't know what she's up to, hope nothing breaks. Just looked again, she bounced these little plastic things off her desk. "WHAT are you doing?" "Skipping rocks!" Oy. Put a stop to that, then she danced for a while and is now on my lap, reading along and getting in my WAY (that took a good five minutes to write). I'd promised her we'd go outside and rake leaves and jump in them so I better wrap up and do that. [sozlet's insisting that I add:] And sozlet's hanging a little bit upside-down on the chair. Yay! And now she wants to write the following: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy and z now I know my abcs nxt tim wont you sing with me

*That reminds me that I don't think I ever wrote about when she helped him do a demonstration for his class. It's a huge class, a couple hundred people I think, big ol' auditorium. He was doing a few different demos. We set it up ahead of time, she and I slipped in the back at the appointed time as he was wrapping up the lecture-lecture and starting the demo part. He did some stuff with liquid nitrogen (oy, always makes me nervous, especially since he's not the most coordinated guy around -- he has in fact spilled some on himself before) and then brought out a bed of nails and asked for a couple of strong guys to volunteer to help him get up and down. Then he asked for one more volunteer -- this was our signal, sozlet raised her hand and he said "the young lady in the back" without betraying any particular knowledge of her. She traipsed down the long set of stairs, with everyone craning their head around and a chorus of "awwww"s following her. She was perfectly sanguine, got to the bottom, followed directions, and stood on his chest once he was on the bed of nails. She faced the wrong direction -- she was supposed to do a little triumphant wave at the end, circus-act style, but was facing the back wall -- but it was still really cute, and she loved it.

And now I REALLY gotta get to those leaves...

I'm beginning to suspect that soz really likes her kid.

Don't worry about it. I used to work with liquid Nitrogen, and did pour it over my hand all the time. It doesn't do anything because it boils so fast there's always a thin layer of gaseous Nitrogen between the cold stuff and your hand. This layer is a good insulator, so you don't feel anything. Just don't pour it over your marriage ring. (Good heat conductor, connects directly with the liquid Nitrogen, and contracts on cooling.) My diploma thesis advisor discovered this exception to when he demonstrated the general harmlessness to me three days after getting married. But with this exception, liquid Nitrogen is nothing to worry about.


Nah, she's just playing.

I worked with it too... at least in the sense of freezing speciimens, if not as a subject of physics. Coooool.

Hi did have ill effects from spilling some on himself, sort of frostbite. Wasn't too bad, faded, looked like a mild burn while it lasted. I think it was a situation where he actually dipped his hand INTO it for a minute, so it couldn't all evaporate immediately. (A spot not covered by a glove.) Can't remember, but it was enough to make me nervous. (And this isn't counting the explosions...)

Gus, yeah, I think I'll keep her.

As a bit of ballast, though, from about when I posted she was driving me nutty. The whole leaf thing was fun but she insisted that she didn't want to jump in the leaves until I'd raked 'em all into one big pile, which took a while, and she was moping around until I was done (note, I kept encouraging her to go crazy with the considerable piles already established but no she wanted ONE big one), and then she jumped in the big pile, fine, that was cool, then there was this story she wanted me to act out where I was a guy who was collecting leaves and then a hand came out of the pile and it was a zombie! And that was kind of a fun-sounding idea, OK fine, buried her in the leaves, hand appeared, "aaaahhhh!", then the hand's staying there, she's not coming out, now what, then extremely mad zombie pops out and yells at me for not doing something I was apparently supposed to do, hey take it down a notch, OK, now what do you want to do? Then more discussion, I repeat everything back to her to make sure it's what she has in mind, it is, we start over again, I do it to the letter, but then she gets all mad again anyway. I say look, I'd love to play with you in the leaves but you're going to have to improve your attitude, she pouts, etc.

Many variations of that. Argh.

I think we have a budding movie director...John Carpenter better watch out!

I'd vote for an early bedtime--she may be sickening for something.

Is she more of a perfectionist when she's fighting off germs?

She is, but she's been more like that in general lately, even when she's healthy. It could be perpetual germ-fighting, or it could be a developmental thing -- this is very much in keeping with the all the stuff I read about six-year-olds when two of her friends started going ballistic. It's a sort of advance adolescence -- a lot of push/ pull, independence/ dependence. More impulsive, more reckless, but also big developmental gains (her reading and writing is improving by leaps and bounds, not to mention the hard math questions -- the other day she figured out 20 X 25). Overall it's within reasonable bounds -- not nearly the harpy-level stuff her friends were doing -- but it's still a bit wearying.

We got together with Dolly the other day, I took them on an outing and then they played at Dolly's house for a while when I dropped her off. Dolly is the first "girl gone wild." Sozlet asked for something that was not OK, (forget what), I told her so, she protested, I remained steadfast, she said "FINE" with not a little pique and they went upstairs. When they were gone Dolly's mom turned to me and said "That looked familiar..." It's new for sozlet, she hadn't seen it before with her but it's what her own daughter (Dolly) has been doing for something like 8 months now...