Ahh...Winter at Last

It's just a perfect Sunday afternoon in October. Daylight savings time, so it's nice and dark at 5:30 pm. Chilly, grey, and rainy outside. Inside, we've got a great fire going, and I'm curled up by it in the big reading chair. Everyone is supposed to be writing letters to Grandma right now.
I've discovered by watching my slightly older friends that kids who don't know how to write letters when they leave home do not discover this skill in the MTC. They have no phone, you get no information--just one side of 5 x 8 sheet torn off a mini legal pad and covered with cliches. A kid who has avoided writing his whole life is not going to start writing just because the little white book says he should. Unfortunately, the joy of writing letters is communication. Nobody writes letters anymore, so the kids don't get the whole feeling. But I'm banking on the Grandmas eventually responding. Letter quality is low right now, but I'm trying to get production going before I address quality.
Alex wrote the letter right after lunch. He's going to be a great missionary letter writer. He's now curled up in the other chair reading the New Era. Nigel dictates, so he's also done. Zach is trying to procrastinate by sitting at the piano picking out "Captain Vegetable." Tim is half way done but has been distracted by the nerf six shooter and is standing in the kitchen firing off rounds of suction cup darts at the white board. With every hit, he sucks air in between his teeth, shakes his head in amazement, and says "Whooooah!" It's all very peaceful. I love it.
It occurred to me this week that Tim has a date with the WASL at the end of next year. They're not going to like each other. He brought home a math paper this week that emphasized the problem of evaluating Tim using a standardized test. The assignment was about tally marks. The upper half of the page was a data set shown in tally marks. Then there were five or six questions about the data. Every question was marked wrong. None of the questions required difficult reasoning--all subtraction and addition. I sat down with Tim to try to figure out what went wrong.
"Well, Mom," he said earnestly, "I have curly hair and so I wish that more kids were like me. I don't like all the kids to have straight." I looked back at the data set, and sure enough, the two categories were "Straight" and "Curly." And now I also saw that a number of tally marks had been added in pencil to the "curly" column. I soon discovered that Tim had rectified the anti-curly bias by evening up the numbers. Then he went on and did the problems based on the corrected data. The final question asked the student to consider whether the interviewer would get the same data if he came back and recounted in a month.
Tim's answer? "No. Egzapl. I hv crlee hr normule but I cut it swt [short]."
Sigh. I talked to his teacher about the worksheet and she smiled. "Yes, I know that's what he did, but I'm trying to help him realize that sometimes he just has to work according to the rules."
Other Timmy moments: he was a dementor for the church trunk or treat. He had a hooded cape, which I told him he couldn't pull over his face.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because. No masks at church."
"But this isn't a mask," he pointed out.
"Yeah. But still," I told him.
He thought for a minute, then said, "I'll wear a nametag. Will that help?"
Another night we were bashing through yet another wrong math paper, this one a story problem. It was a clock problem with hours being added to hours as a whole day was described. He just kept getting confused, and finally I had him circle the important parts of the problem. He kept circling unimportant details, and I said about 15 times, "NO, Tim. What kind of ice cream they got is NOT important!" and he would answer, "Well, it's important to me!" Finally he caved in, circled the number details, and easily solved the problem. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, "It wasn't my mistake of misunderstanding the clock. It was just my mistake of getting too interested in the story."
Final random Timmy moment. As I was cooking dinner, he came up and asked me (out of the blue) "How do dinosaurs fit into God's plan?