I'll Be Like that Baby Hawk

Catching up some loose ends that I haven't reported on yet...

Two weeks ago we decided to pull Evie out of school.  This school year has been incredibly disappointing and we've had a few meetings and too many things have gone wrong, but the last straw was a fight that happened on Thursday, April 4th.  I was going about my work day and noticed I had a message from Evie's school email address.  It said, "I'm scared, there was a fight and I'm scared, please come get me."  Now, I understand that in public school sometimes there are scuffles in the hallway and it gets blown out of proportion so I wrote her back and told her if she was upset, she should ask to talk to the guidance counselor.  She wrote me again and said, "I saw the whole fight and I don't feel safe here."  A little while later she called me from school and so I figured this was important enough to go get her.

I found out that she had been alone in the science classroom, which she does sometimes when she doesn't want to go to the cafeteria, when the class was returning from lunch and the first two kids to walk in got into a fight in which one of them stabbed the other in the chest with a pencil three times.  And as bad as that is, she was also asked to come to the counseling office during science class and write her statement about what happened - but the school DIDN'T CALL US.  Didn't communicate at all that this had happened, that Evie had been a witness, that she had missed instruction in order to write about what she saw - none of it.

So, she is now being homeschooled by Seth.  And it's going very well.  Seth called the private school Evie will be attending next year and told them we had withdrawn her from her current school and asked what we would need to provide to them to prove she passed 6th grade.  THEY offered their counseling services to Evie if she needed them after having witnessed the fight - she doesn't even go to that school yet and they're offering more support than the public school.  Anyway, they recommended that she begin one-step equations if she hadn't already since that's what the 6th grade girls are doing there, and that they had no concerns about our ability to educate her at home for the rest of the year.  So, Seth and Evie spend 4 hours in the morning getting math, English, science, and social studies lessons in, and she seems happier than she's been in a long time.

Another item of report is that she got great news at her scoliosis follow up.  Six months ago, she had an 11 degree curve.  Now she has a 2 degree curve!  She had been so nervous before the appointment, asking if we thought all the back bending stuff she's been doing would make it worse.  Turns out that, if anything, it made it better.

This past Sunday, as Evie and I were driving to church, we saw a hawk flying after what seemed to be a smaller bird that it was going to prey on.  But as we watched, we realized it was actually a mother hawk with her baby, and it seems that we witnessed the moment that they parted company forever - the mother had been following the baby, seeming to ensure that the baby was on track, and then they just separated and few off into different directions.  Evie turned to me and said, "I can't believe that!  Do you know, the chances of seeing something like that are like,... one in a billion!"  She was so excited.  And then about 2 minutes later, she said, "You know, Mama... Some day, I'll be like that baby hawk and go my own way, but I promise I'll always come back and visit you."

The old soul.