Today's Note from Parker

Posted on the refrigerator:

SRWE (sorry) MOM AND DAD I WENT HOM(E) ON BLUE [FN1] SO GAWOWND [FN2] (ground) ME.

Footnotes:

FN1: Daily conduct grades in Parker's class are awarded on the common "traffic signal" basis (except that his teacher refers to green as grass, and the other colors are labeled weeds, so the inquiry every afternoon is, "How green is your yard?"). Green equals excellent, yellow (caution) equals satisfactory, red equals unsatisfactory - oh, and blue equals needs improvement. So, in other words, blue comes between yellow and red. Want to explain that to me? Want to explain it to a five year-old who knows that the color between yellow and red on the ROYGBIV scale is orange? Yeah, I got nothin'.

FN2: Like a lot of kids his age, Parker tends to replace his R's with W's (hence, the other day he wrote our dog Ruby's name, "WOOBY"), and I find it quite amusing that, when he spells a word phonetically, HE SPELLS IT LIKE HE SAYS IT - complete with little kid "lithp."

In an attempt to regain "gawownd" after coming home on blue ("bwue"?), he drew me a picture . . . of a character from "Total Drama World Tour," the age-inappropriate show that he watches with his brother when we're not looking, being the same show that taught him the phrase, "Fo shizzle." Ooh, sorry PJ - bit of a miscalculation there. But points for the intense colors, and for depicting Bejeweled-style jewels falling from the sky (because that happened in one of the episodes? because you know that your mother likes playing Bejeweled? because you know that your mother likes ACTUAL jewels?).

For those scoring at home, we are churning out, roughly, four art projects and three "notes to Mom and Dad" per night. On Monday, I guess he decided that he didn't have enough homework (as in, he didn't have any), so he assigned himself the project of writing an illustrating a book. The first draft of the book was great, from Mom and Dad's perspective . . . except Parker misspelled a word, and Dad (poor, naive Dad) pointed out the misspelling in the spirit of constructive criticism. Cue the waterworks, and first draft of Mr. Parker's Opus was torn into shreds. Really? Over self-assigned homework? I've long maintained the theory that the kid was a closet perfectionist - even more of a perfectionist than his brother - and that the "easy, breezy" persona was just a mask. While I do so enjoy being right, I don't enjoy the tantrums that much. And I continue to blame "lack of nap" as the primary catalyst. But he went to bed early, woke up chipper (well, relatively speaking - PJ has never been much of a morning person, whereas Connor springs out of bed at o' dark thirty and is immediately amps on eleven), and immediately began working on his second draft. Which he took to school and presented to his teacher, but apparently self-imposed make-up work doesn't save you from a "bwue" in Kindergarten World.