Try Try Again

This morning school was delayed for 2 hours due to snow covered roads... which also means snow covered driveways.

Yes, I had yet another opportunity to clear the driveway today. No shovel for me. I busted out the snow blower AGAIN. This time, it only died twice, and it only took me about fifteen or twenty minutes to get the driveway and sidewalks cleared. I even did the walkway up to the front porch. After I parked the snow blower back in the garage, I stood at the top of the driveway for a moment to admire my work. I felt so triumphant!

It didn't snow at all for the rest of the day. However, when I went out around lunch time, the roads were still pretty junky, especially in the neighborhoods and side roads. They were still pretty slushy and snow-covered when I left home to go pick the kids up from school.

When I got home from picking the kids up from school, I could not believe my eyes! Aaaarg! Apparently the snow plow had been by the house while I was away, and the bottom five feet of my driveway was covered in a good six inches of snow. So much so that I had to take a much more calculated angle to even pull in without getting stuck. *sigh* So much for triumph.

I was not in the mood to wield the snow blower for five feet of driveway. So I found a shovel... the dumbest shovel ever. The only thing it had going for it was that it was, in fact, a snow shovel rather than, say, a garden shovel. But it has a collapsible handle (dumb shovel feature), and a blade that is all of 18 inches wide. Even though I locked the handle in place, I found the length of the shovel seemed to vary with each scoop. So I would shovel a bit, and the handle would shrink or twist or collapse altogether. Nice. Again I found myself wondering if I was in the middle of being live entertainment for the neighbors. Seriously, if they would only just sit near their front windows while I'm out there, they could have a great laugh! I'm thinking I could have a DIY reality show career in my near future.

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As the theme of this post is try again, I thought I would share a cool little story while I'm thinking of it.

Tonight Sebastian told me he didn't understand his math very well. He sat down to do his homework, worked on it for a while, then packed it back in his book bag. I assumed he was finished.

At 7:30 he came up to me and said he didn't know what to do. As it was almost bedtime, there wasn't much time to be making big plans really. I just happened to ask him if he wanted to go over his math to make sure he understood it. So he got it out of his book bag, and I saw that it was only about 1/2 done. He didn't know how to do parts of it, so he just didn't.

They are learning division of large numbers - long division type stuff. The method they are learning right now is called partial quotients. He had no idea what that meant. So we went over it together. At first I could tell he totally didn't get what I was saying, nor did he really seem to be in the mood to be doing division problems. But we stuck with it, tried different approaches, did a few examples, and then worked through his first homework problem. Once he got the hang of it, he did the rest of his homework in a flash. When he got done he quickly flipped the page over and said, "Aaaaw! I wanted there to be more on the back."

He WANTED to do more problems. He went from avoiding them because he didn't understand to wanting to do more of them because he was having so much fun working through them. True story. I thought it was pretty cool. I like that he started out thinking "I'm not good at math, it's hard" and ended up being able to say, "I understand, I can do this, and I enjoy it." Who knows. That little shift in attitude could be the difference between a school career of struggling with math or a school career of excelling at it. For tonight, at least he finished his homework. =)

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