Whew! The end of the quarter has arrived, and now that I'm finished with finals I can post a few updates.
First of all, Dylan was one of a small handful of kids to represent his school at the district-wide Math Olympiad Competition. Every year the top math students from each grade (grades 4-8) form groups and meet once a week to work math problems, and it all leads up to the big competition day in March. They meet with all the other Math Olympians from other schools in the district and spend a day doing lots and lots of math problems in their groups and individually. This was Dylan's first year actually competing, and he did a really great job, placing 9th among all the other 4th graders in the district (there were probably 60 or so 4th graders total). I'm so glad he's excited about math, and actually enjoys doing it. He was also honored with a "Butch Award" at school yesterday (Butch is the school mascot, and Butch awards are handed out to students in recognition of various good deeds and accomplishments) for his work in mat
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And now for the latest in Zoya's world...she is growing so much, and is so FUNNY! She has a nasal fixation thing going on that I think might be hereditary (I was quite fond of putting things up my nose as a child - for me it was the silky lining of my blanket. Oh, and packing peanuts - that was fun!).
For whatever reason she seems to get comfort from sucking on her pacifier while simultaneously shoving the ribbon from around Rosie's (her teddy bear) neck up her nose. On occasion she'll totally freak out because she has boogies on Rosie's "zipper" (her word for "ribbon") - go figure! So a couple of weeks ago at precisely 5:05pm (because she just COULDN'T do it before the Dr.'s office closed) she started screaming bloody murder, scratching at her nose, crying that "it hurts, it hurts!" It scared me to death because she was so panicked. I tried to calm her down and asked her if she put anything up her nose. She insisted that she hadn't, so I tried looking up there using a flashlight, but couldn't see anything. In the mean time, her right nostril was turning red and looking slightly enlarged, and her right eye was BRIGHT red and gushing tears like the Bitterroot River with spring run-off (that was for you Stevensville MT natives). She was still screaming inconsolably and I was getting a little panicked myself, so I asked her again if she put anything up there. She finally 'fessed up and said she put "the fire" up her nose. After another 10 minutes of trying to figure out what THAT was, I determined that she had put a wood pellet from the pellet stove up there. For those of you who don't know what those are, here's a picture: perfect size for a 3 year-old's nose holes!
Wood pellets are simply compressed sawdust, that, when wet (whether with water or mucus secretions), EXPAND. ALOT. And even better, they are filled with teeny tiny sharp little splinters that, I'm sure, feel GREAT on the sensitive lining of a nostril.
Unfortunately, Movakel was up at Steven's Pass snowboarding with the SCC snowboarding club, and Dylan couldn't seem to hold the flashlight still while I tried to operate with tweezers, so I had to call my friend Mary over to help with the operation. We tried tweezers and saline flushes, and NOTHING was getting that thing out - she really must have used some force when she stuffed it up! After a couple of hours of very traumatic attempts at dislodging the pellet, it finally occurred to us that she was old enough to BLOW her nose. So for the next FOUR DAYS, Zoya was blowing big chunks of mushy sawdust before we finally got her all cleaned out. It was a very difficult and painful lesson to learn, and now she will spontaneously launch into a lecture to anyone who will listen about how we don't put ANYTHING, especially pellets up our noses, detailing the gruesome consequences of such actions.
Needless to say, it was an experience we will not soon forget.
