Achievement Tests - Day #2

I have resisted all temptations to peek into the girls' test booklets, comparing the questions they've been asked with the bubbles they marked on their answer sheets. I wasn't specifically asked not to do this, but it seems a little skeevy, doesn't it?

Test 3 Language Mechanics was first out of the bullpen today and proposed to measure how well they use capital letters and punctuation marks. Meelyn will probably knock this one out of the park (she reads a lot), but I fear for Aisling. She's at this stage where she strews commas wildly throughout whatever she's writing, often throwing in a few semi-colons to keep them company. It gives her writing a breathless quality, making me, feel that I, have to gasp, for, air after each little, snippet...fuuuuuuuaaahhhhhhhhh.... *pant* It may be a strike out, but I'm tentatively hoping for at least a first base hit.

(Where did this baseball metaphor come from? I hate baseball. My husband, a Cincinnati Reds fan, is obviously a terrible influence on me. I wouldn't put it past him to be whispering, "Baseball...you love baseball...it is not the most boring sport in the world...it is beautiful...it is played on a great big diamond, and how could you not like that?" in my ear as I sleep.Yet another reason to Just Stay Up.)

The next exam was Test 4 Language Expression, in which they were to demonstrate their knowledge that "theirselves" is a word that will make your mother jab her fingers in her ears and scream if you say it.

Meelyn and Aisling both finished in good time, checked back over their work,and we were done.

The rest of the school day was spent in feverish math extra-credit work (so, so incredibly necessary), English (picking nouns out of sentences and deciding if they were expressed in the nominative, possessive or objective case; then deciding if each noun in the objective case was a direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition or an appositive, finished off by our new project, which is memorizing a list of fifty prepositions...phew). We also watched the final hour of a TiVo'ed program from the History Channel titled "The Dark Ages," fast-forwarding through all descriptions of gruesome tortures.

After that, we went to the library and brought home another ton of books and then drove to the church so that Aisling could practice for a little while and so that we could go to confession.

I went, but Father ran out of time in the confessional (I am very sinful) and Aisling couldn't go. Meelyn went with her dad a couple of weeks ago. But Aisling sat at the keyboard and softly played hymns, which I hope was very nice for all the people who were there to pray. I thought it sounded lovely and Father was very pleased to have her there.