Blast from the Past

Now and then we have a fabulous unearthing here. It doesn't happen often, because frequent howlings from the local harridan (that would be me) routinely fall on deaf ears, so nobody cleans anything out except me, and Lord I am tired.

But Kid #1 actually cleaned up his room before his grandparents came to visit. And I mean CLEANED as he's never cleaned before. Victory! I went upstairs and found that he'd moved all of the furniture out of the room and put it in the hall. That's how clean. The process was scary, since I've never seen anything like it except when I do it myself.

After some hours (yes! I did say "hours"!), he came downstairs to show me a piece of paper. It was a wonderful sharing. I gave him a big hug, and it was mutual. The paper had come from an early elementary school journal. I believe it might have been something the administrators had him write one of the times he got angry and in trouble, and was required to reflect on and record his thoughts.

We tried to figure out how old he was when he wrote it. I worked it back to second grade. To my regret, I must report that his handwriting has not changed a whit since then. Fortunately, since then, we've also unearthed some large processing problems (not learning disabilities--just problems processing, organizing, and getting things on paper without a computer).

It says [preserving his original spelling]:

1. Success is a do it yourself project. Attitude is a little thing that makes a big diference.
2. "If called by a panther don't anther"
3. I've larnd perents do care about it.
4. I've learnd when I don't dance alot I get mad esely.
5. Violence dosn't help your feling.
6. & to say excuseme.
7. I saw a poleciman today how had to kill a man with his gun because he stabed his wife 30 times and killd her then tride to kill the polecman and his 4 kids.
8. today I find out what part in the play I have, I want to be pelvis elvis. he sings shake rattel them bones. I also had fun in math we did muliplication in the trillions it was cool. I hope I got a good grade in spelling, too. We did letters about blank [the rest is illegible, and it's been so long that even he can't decipher it.]
9. My Mom found a 5 store house with galotn spa [becomes illegible and unintelligible; he says he was just writing because he was told to write and he had to make it appear as though he were writing].

#9 is very weird to me--eerie, in fact--because when a layoff forced us to move from our tiny beloved town (the town where we were living when he wrote this piece), we did indeed find a 5 story house with a spa. (I'm still sorry. I never wanted to leave our wonderful house in tiny town.) The main point is, we didn't have to look for a different house until 2002. That's just weird. How did he know three years ahead of time? Given the date of his writing, we had only moved to [previous town] one month before. At that time were just beginning to enjoy what we considered our "new" house (our previous house), and he already had a prophecy about the next one. The one where we live now. Which is a split level with 5 levels because it is strange and built down a hill. Weird.

And he still has dance by passion, but he switched from modern to ballet and has two different classes a week. With dance, piano, and lots of singing, he is a happy camper now. He's had a pretty good run of years. I hope he'll keep out of the principal's office and never have to write such a thing again. Especially since he got into an arts academy for the rest of high school.