loose tooth!

When she went to the dentist a while back the hygienist reported that Casper has a couple of baby teeth that were likely to go soon. And indeed, her bottom two front teeth are loose - the right one very wiggly indeed.

We're all rather silly-excited about this. Although Casper told me yesterday that she knows the truth about the Tooth Fairy. (What truth she knows, she didn't say).

I have a Sacajawea dollar stashed in my sock drawer for the enventuality.

Dillo insists he has loose teeth too, of course. He has to do EVERYTHING Casper does right now.

Hooray, Judith Warner says something useful!

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/families-to-care-about/

investigating gifted

I've just emailed the gifted teacher at Casper's school to ask for a meeting. We'd like to know more about the tests used, what Casper's scores were, and if her youth (birthday 8/28, K cutoff 9/1, so she is probably the youngest K in the school) is taken into account, as well as more about the gifted program in general. mr. flea is the one pushing on this; I think he feels that his parents didn't push him academically and never expected greatness from him. He was a perennial B+ student and always just missed the cutoff for things like gifted or honors programs, and his parents never made a noise about things. He wants to be better advocate for our kids. I am a little ambivalent but I figure learning more can't hurt, right?

The gifted teacher has a web site with photos of her classes (K isn't up yet, but I learned they have 45-minute pull-outs every day; 90 minutes 1 day a week). The 1st graders are 8 kids: 6 girls and 2 boys, all but 1 white (and the nonwhite child has parents who drive a Mercedes; I know almost all of these kids and their parents). There are 4 first grade classes of ca. 20 kids at the school; first grade is the pioneer year of the upper-middle class families choosing the school. The higher grades at the school as a whole are much smaller (1-2 classes per grade, many nowhere near 20 kids per) and mostly nonwhite. The gifted second graders are 4 kids: 3 boys and 1 girl, all but 1 white (I know only one of the kids). There are no pictures of 3rd grade kids, and the 4th-5th grade is only 2 kids (1 boy, 1 girl, both nonwhite). So, it does look like there is a fair amount of socioeconomic-which-in-this-town-almost-always-includes-racial stratification going on wrt passing the gifted test. As I sort of expected.