Day: May 18, 2005

I have what is commonly refered to as Poker Straight hair.  My sister Megan has what is commonly referred to as Poker Straight hair.  My sister Bean, however, always had dark, wavy hair.  As she got older, and as her tumor got worse, the hair went from a nice, soft, wavy type of hair to a dry feeling, kinky type of hair.

I bring this up because I think of Bean a lot.  And last night, as I was combing the baby’s hair after her bath, I noticed she has this soft, wavy dark hair.  Since my other two girls have inherited the gene for Poker Straight hair, I am envisioning Granuaile with long, flowing, curly hair that is the envy of every straight haired girl in her path.  And as soon as I pictured my beautiful little curly haired daughter, the image was replace by Bean’s head of Brillo pad, uncontrollable, not so enviable curly hair. 

Keep your fingers crossed for those flowing beautiful curls…

Brighid got a letter in the mail a few weeks ago from the prep school she will be attending in September.  They invited her to take a test to see if she qualified to enter their Honors program in English and History.  She is totally psyched about the test, since English is her very best subject, and she is convinced before she gets to the testing center that she will pass the test and get into the Honors program.

She takes the test, just three days after I get home from the hospital after having Grace.  In spite of the turmoil at home with the new baby and everybody home together for the first time in nearly a month, she says that she aces the test.  It was incredibly easy, she had no problem with any part of it, and she is just waiting for her letter of invitation into the Honors program.

Yesterday, we get a letter saying that you have to score 10 in order to get into the program, and Brighid got an 11.  But, after they print the scores, there is a paragraph that says she has not been accepted, although she has the potential to get in next year.  The letter encourages her to study hard and keep her grades up as a freshman, and she may get in as a sophomore.

Brighid gets home, PMSing to add a touch more interest to the story, and she reads the letter saying she isn’t in the program.  She is devastated, crying, upset, convinced she is a complete moron that will never be able to compete with the kids going to this school next year.  She is regretting her decision to go to this school, she is convinced she is destined to deliver pizza as a profession, and she sees no point in continuing life outside this house or out of pajamas.

Jim makes a call to the head of the English department to see if he can find out why she didn’t get in if the qualifying score was 10 and Brighid got an 11.  Maybe they have limited the number of kids accepted and 11 is not good enough to get in, but it was good enough to “qualify” to get in.  We just don’t know.  We wait for a call back from this English department guy, and he phones today while Brighid is in NYC on her class trip.  There seems to be a mistake.  The rejection letters were printed out with the “sorry, try harder” paragraph before the “you are brilliant and accepted” letters.  When they got around to printing the “you are brilliant” letters, they forget to change the form letter, so all the kids that were accepted got rejection letters.  Brighid was one of those kids.  Not only that, Brighid scored the second highest of any kid who took the test.

I cried.  I felt so awful for her because of how hard she took the rejection – for no reason.  It was a huge blow to her ego, and even though we have good news to share tonight when she gets home, it was a shitty thing to have to go through. 

I baked a cake.  I bought her chocolate strawberries.  I bought her a black and white graduation teddy bear (her new school colors are black and white).  I bought her a card to let her know how proud we are of her.  I hope it washes away some of the bad taste left in her mouth.

…and the next thing we know, there are three Spanish speaking homosexuals gracing our TV set.  There are dangers to teaching children new things, and as parents of a 13 year old, you would think we would have learned this long before we started teaching things to our 4 year old.

We were sitting around the other night, and there was nothing suitable on TV for Eilis to watch.  She had a bit of a cold, and wanted to just chill out on the sofa and watch a show, so I turned to the On Demand channel to see if there were some PBS type of cartoons available that she hadn’t seen yet.  There were, and she spent the evening watching Thomas the Tank Engine and Barney. 

The next evening, Eilis is crying over not finding something on TV and no one will put a movie on for her, and she starts yelling something that sounds to everyone like “I Want to Own the Man Show!!”   Having no knowledge that the child had any inkling that the show existed, and a little ticked off at her father, the only one who might have introduced her to the depravity that was this Comedy Central show, I sent the kid downstairs to find something on TV that she could watch.

Next thing we know, she has tuned in to the On Demand channel and has apparently ordered a pay per view movie spoken in Spanish, about homosexuals.  She didn’t want to own the man show – which might have been safer.  She wanted an On Demand show.  Now we owe $4 to Comcast for 20 seconds of a movie no one could understand or enjoy (at least not with a 4 year old in the room).

Proof positive that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.