Creative Titles Require Brain Power I Don't Have

So, the car isn't going to be expensive; it's just a bracket that holds the alternator -- what the heck is it with me an alternators, though? -- and a fan belt was rubbing up against it, thus causing the horrible noise.

The problem is -- Dan had to order it from Nissan...so I'm stuck driving my mom's non-air-conditioned van until Thursday or Friday.  Bleh.

At least my mom can hitch a ride with my grandpa to work, so I don't have to worry about the traffic light being out again.

It was Boy J's turn to test the rules today.  Now that all four fourth graders have done so, hopefully our lives can settle down a bit.

However -- being able to wail, at full volume, "I want my mom!" for an hour and a half is just unnatural.  What's worse is that I've been told he once did so for over 2 hours.

Also, we sort of solved the Boy A hitting someone like clockwork every day after recess; turns out he did that in M's class too because he didn't like going from something fun (recess) to something not fun (work).  So, we have classic escape behavior.  As a temporary solution, he now has a special seat to sit at for five minutes after recess; meanwhile, I will have to come up with a replacement behavior -- maybe a request to run an errand, or something like that -- to prevent it from happening.

(Incidentally, the scary deep teacher voice doesn't work so well if your voice cracks on the "more" in "No more hitting."  Oh well.)

It's nice to know why, though...I have to say.

In other news, the Raid appears to have done its job...haven't seen a single ant since I got home (we're prone to them here, but they're usually in the bathroom or the family room).  I crashed again when I got home -- I wanted to just take a power nap but that wasn't just in the cards.  Probably not sleeping because I felt phantom ants all night was the culprit for that as much as our drama today was.

Finally, we did our first activity with our shiny grade-level textbooks for social studies today.  It was a scavenger hunt (I stole the idea shamelessly from our science teacher) where they had to look for certain pictures in the books.  The kids liked it, and it was nice to do something functional (e.g. find pictures, write/copy/ID numbers, write/copy/type words, follow directions, etc.) with actual grade level curriculum.