Pencils. With Erasers.

I think I need a T-shirt that says "I survived parent-teacher conferences."

'Parkle Girl's conference this morning was wonderful. No surprises there. She had the same teacher in the afternoons last year, and Mr. Personality had this teacher when he was in the pre-school. She undestands my kids.

Then, this afternoon, I spent TWO AND A HALF HOURS seeing 8 teachers. The boys actually have 10 teachers between them, but I talked to one teacher when I was at school on Monday, and I skipped another teacher because, well, there was nothing to be gained by seeing that teacher.

The most interesting thing I learned is that none of Mr. Personality's teachers knew how old he is (which is younger than all of his classmates). Sometimes that difference makes itself felt in his emotional maturity (or lack thereof, at such moments), and it's helpful for the teachers to be aware of it. Or so they told me. One of his teachers is concerned about how hard he is on himself -- he is a total perfectionist, which is something we knew about him and something his teacher worked on last year. All I can say is, "Good luck." In this personality trait, Mr. Personality is very much like my father, who is still very much a perfectionist. And everyone here at the SuperM household is awfully hard on themselves, so I don't see much hope of that changing either.

The big complaint? He doesn't bring enough pencils, the kind with points and erasers, to the class he has right after lunch. Also, he's very wiggly in that class, which seems a strange time to be antsy to me.

I was very nervous about Universe Man's conferences. Until the beginning of this school year, he hadn't had a single test in his entire school career that wasn't one of the end of the year standardized ones. He went to a school with no grades. At all. If he didn't finish his homework, he finished it at school, or fixed his mistakes. That's all different now. Just getting through the school day has required a level of organization that we thought might actually be beyond him.

Turns out it's only sort of beyond him. His locker is apparently a complete disaster. (I will be stopping in to organize his locker for him once a week until further notice. I can't wait.) He is chronically late to class. Nearly every class. The teachers feel this and the locker issue are related. And he often lacks.....wait for it....a pencil. Evidently this is a family trait.

In spite of all that, every single one of his teachers told me that academically he is doing fantastically. Even though he's missed a few assignments entirely (that whole lack of organization thing), his grades are excellent. They're all pleased with him and his work and his transition to a more typical school environment.

Now we just have to work on organization and the social things that come hard to him. Which may very well consume nearly all of our attention while he's blithely going about his school life.

The take-home message LSH got? Universe Man's language arts teacher is really excited about the way he writes. The teacher wondered if Universe Man might be the next S.E. Hinton. That's what LSH took out of the conferences.

Of course, he didn't have to stand around waiting in lines for two and a half hours.