Almost 10 - wanting to be 20!

Baby A - what am I going to do with him? He is bored all the time at school - at least this is what he has been telling me for the past 2 weeks. I'm thinking this is fall out from him not getting accepted into the gifted & talented program - when we thought he might get in - we had built it up saying how much fun it would be to be in a class filled with kids just like him - now he is thinking that he is too much ahead of his regular class mates to be able to have any fun. I'm thinking that this will all pass - and he'll learn to get over it and get on with life. So in the mean time I listen (patiently) to his stories of woe - about how easy everything is - how the stories they are reading in school are only 5 pages long. He can't believe they can even come up with enough questions for the tests if the story is only 5 pages long! He also spends time complaining about how he wishes everyone else knew their math facts that it takes entirely too long for everyone to get done with their math - and he just has to sit around and wait all day long......

Then today - for the first time I get graded papers home - he hadn't even bothered to look at the grades - otherwise I'm sure he'd have never brought them home to me. He got 50% on 2 of them and a 58% on a third one! E-gads! One of them was the test on the 5 page story he had been complaining about because it had been too easy - and another one was just a math sheet with 18 problems - all of the problems being adding 4 two digit numbers together - needing to carry in order to complete them. So I remained really calm, and had him sit down & re-do the math sheet after he was done with his reading. He immediately told me there wasn't any need - that the teacher wasn't going to give him any more credit for it - I quickly informed him that we were going to do it to let the teacher know that he was the kind of student that re-did papers that he only got 50% correct on, and to let the teacher know that his mother was not the kind of mother that let 50% grades just slide by. So I had him copy the 9 incorrect problems down & re-do them on a separate sheet of paper. He got 5 of the 9 incorrect AGAIN! I'm having a harder time keeping my cool - but we needed to move on - I had to get dinner ready before shipping them off to Cub Scouts.

Of course the next issue is the fact that he can't find his uniform. I send him back to his room - telling him to look harder - his room isn't that big and it has to be there some where. He still can't find it. I look for it - it was turned inside out and lying on his floor beneath all of his shirts that are properly hung up. I hear his father tell him every week - to put it on the hanger nicely so it will look decent for next week. Once again I'm calm. I just tossed it at him and went downstairs to finish the dinner. Asking him to hang up all the other shirts that I had found lying in the bottom of his closet.

Now - my issue is this - this is the same child that SWEARS that he is mature enough to play in the Major's - meaning he wants to play in the 11 & 12 year old catagory for next year's baseball season. Not only is he really small for his own age - which he won't even turn 10 until December - he is apparently not overly mature for his age.

In the mean time - I am trying REALLY hard to remain calm, and kill him with kindness - with Ben that almost always works better than hollering at him. I'm about to burst a blood vessel - but I've decided that I can do this - he is worth it.

Tomorrow I will talk to his teacher. I know that today she sent him out in the hall for quite a while - apparently she was talking about plant reproduction & he got the giggles thinking that the plants were having sex. So I have to tread lightly - I don't want her thinking that I'm upset about that - she probably did the exact right thing there - get him out of there before he got the entire class in an uproar.

I guess no one ever promised me that this parenting thing would be easy.