The Weekend of Nothing & Kids

Loida Casares Ruiz

Wife, Mother, Writer, Advertising Manager

Loida Casares Ruiz grew up in Northeast Houston. She graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Minor in English. She received a Master of Arts in Communication in 2001. She works in advertising by day and is a mother, wife, and writer by night. She has al...

Loida Casares Ruiz

Monday, September, 8, 2008

This was the weekend of nothing. It felt so good! We didn’t do a thing. We stayed in all day Saturday and ordered Chinese for dinner. I have been so exhausted with so much going on this past summer that I needed a weekend to just chill out. We did that.

The only thing we did was prepare for our meeting (religious) and go to our meeting today. Oh yeah! And we went to lunch with some friends who came to visit our meeting. We went to one of my favorites! Kim Son, Vietnamese!

Other than that not much. The kids and I went to Target today and bought groceries. I don’t usually buy groceries at Target but the kids needed socks for school. Target is one of those stores, like Walmart, where you can buy groceries and clothes. And all kinds of stuff too! This is not an ad for Target, but I must confess I love the place.

Tomorrow is the beginning of another week. I have to visit my son’s school in the morning as part of this intervention to see if we can get him to listen to his teacher and to get engaged in school. This is one of the things we were asked to do at our parent-teacher conference on Friday. We’ll see how it works. I’m going to go in for a couple of hours a day a few times and Rey is going to pop in during his lunch hour to check on him and to watch from the window. Maybe if he sees that we are involved and that we know what’s going on he’ll be more inclined to listen to the teacher and to participate. As it is, he’s not too happy with school and he’s letting them know. My husband and I are wondering if maybe he wasn’t ready for school. Our daughter didn’t go until Kindergarten, but then again our daughter is a completely different personality type.

This is just part of the many challenges of parenthood. I never would have imagined that my son’s dislike for school would be this great. This is the same little boy who climbs up into my lap at the computer yesterday and wants me to show him on the computer who is the woman who took the picture of the typewriter that’s hanging by my desk. I start by reminding him of the portrait of Frida Kahlo that hangs in my bedroom. I tell him about her husband, who painted the portrait, and I show him photographs of them on Wikipedia. Then I explain to him that the photographer was their friend, Tina Modotti. This interests him. Later he puts his broken popsicle sticks, that he made in class and that have a magnet on one side, under the magnet of Frida Kahlo on our refrigerator and tells me that this is Frida Kahlo’s body. Note: I didn’t tell him that the woman on the magnets is also Frida Kahlo when I was teaching him this lesson. This is not a little boy who is un-teachable.

So we will see how these visits at his school help him.