Compartmentalizing

Today's post: compartmentalizing

Not my strong suit, and my guess is it's a gender thing. Most of the men in my life are quite good at compartmentalizing. Me? Not so much. I dwell. I worry. Hell, sometimes I make things up to worry about. I try to stop myself from doing that, but old habits die hard sometimes.

So, I must deal with the preschool problem, compartmentalize it, and deal with some other things I've got going on now. I took Zachary to preschool on Wednesday, he started crying the second we got into the room. I stayed with him the entire time, I didn't even try to leave the room. By the end of the day he was beginning to participate. Today my mother in law took him, I had to teach my belly dance classes. The same thing happened with her, but the teachers said that today was his best day. I was losing my warm fuzzy feelings about the place, but Joanne (my mother in law) thought the place was okay. Her opinion is an informed one, she's worked her way through the county school system here from P.E. teacher to Assistant Superintendent of Schools. Now she's retired and works as a consultant designing curricula for schools all over the country. So if she says it's okay, it should be okay. However, she has recommended some testing for Zachary through the school system. I'm not sure exactly what we're testing for, but it's clear that Zachary is a bit behind his peers socially. It might be cause for concern, it might not. Of course I'm worried about it.

This morning we had his vision/hearing screen done. It's a prerequisite for the further testing. The vision screen at first had all these symbols for him, but I told the tester that letters would be better. She looked at me skeptically, then put the letters in. Zachary passed with flying colors, and she was quite impressed with his letter recognition skills. He knows his letters. He knows most of his letter sounds. Last night he was counting in his dog book in French. He got to 'quatre' and said "ka-ka ka-trah, quatre begins with a K." Yes, dear. Sort of. However, he doesn't converse like some of the other kids in his class. It's difficult to articulate what the problem is, perhaps it's just shyness. I hope and pray it's nothing more, and compartmentalizing it for now.

One other pressing concern for me has been my troupe's web site. I've been designing it myself. All those who know how utterly unsavvy I am with technical stuff should get a good laugh out of that. I've been working on it for almost a month. It's been SO hard. I'm using a template from Microsoft Publisher, but still it's hard for me. There's a big push to get it up and running because we have a big hafla, or belly dance performance, we're hosting in October. I've booked Tamra-henna, a real live Bellydance Superstar, to teach a workshop and perform at the hafla. I'm on the hook financially, and those superstars (managed by Miles Copeland) are NOT cheap. They tour internationally and throughout the U.S. If you ever get a chance to see them, go, it's an amazing show even if you're not into belly dance. But I digress, my website is being published as we speak. Go visit at http://www.gypsyparvana.com At the moment it's only partially up, it's still missing some of the pics and the last page, the links. This is rather like childbirth, watching your first site go up. At least this one won't have to go to preschool.

At some point I'm hoping to go to sleep tonight, it's 10:45 and I've still got lots of work to do.

Saturday I leave for Costa Rica, for a weeklong intensive with Rachel Brice, belly dance teacher extraordinaire. I did this last year and it was incredible. I hate to go with all this turmoil with Zachary and preschool, but I've had this trip planned for 6 months. Ryan seems to think between him, his mother, and my mother (who's coming tomorrow to help with Z while I'm gone), they can handle the preschool thing. Cool. Maybe he'll be able to sit still and listen and converse when I return. Then I can compartmentalize that for good.