Amy's Blog~

I put some Hanukkah stickers on my window, assembled my paper dreidel decorations, and cleaned my hanukkiah!

For the second year in a row I bought candles with bases that are sliiiightly too wide for my menorah so I have to melt the bottoms to make them fit.

But now I'm all ready! Have to buy potatoes tomorrow though so I can make latkes! 😍 (And sour cream, which is the one true latke topping)

kids in high school: holy shit free college?!

biden: oh no two years of pre-school and then two years of college*

However.

There is decades worth of evidence that pre-K education is one of the strongest ways of giving kids enduring advantages in K-12 education. A lot of the data comes specifically out of Oklahoma, which does have voluntary universal pre-K (which makes it an excellent case study) and the research shows gains across all racial and socio-economic boundaries. That paper is from 2005. Researchers revisited the kids later to see how persistent these gains were, or if they were drowned out by all the other stuff.

Turns out, the kids who were in pre-K continued to have academic success through middle school (they hadn’t tracked through high school). And just for fun, they also did some projected adult earnings for kids who went through pre-K, as fun benefit-cost analysis of the whole thing. And it looks like the benefits skew disproportionately in favor of the more disadvantaged students.

My name is Brandon Boulware and, Chairman, I’ll go as quickly as I can.  I’m a lifelong Missourian, I’m a busy lawyer, I’m a Christian, I’m the son of a Methodist minister, I’m a husband, and I’m the father of four kids—two boys, two girls—including a wonderful and beautiful transgender daughter.  Today happens to be her birthday.  And I chose to be here.  She doesn’t know that.  She thinks I’m at work.  

One thing I often hear when transgender issues are discussed is, “I don’t get it.  I don’t understand.”  And I would expect some of you to have said that and to feel the same way.  I didn’t get it either.  For years, I didn’t get it.  For years, I would not let my daughter wear girl clothes.  I did not let her play with girl toys.  I forced my daughter to wear boy clothes, and get short haircuts, and play on boy’s sports teams.  Why did I do this?  To protect my child.  I did not want my daughter or her siblings to get teased.  And truth be told, I did it to protect myself as well.  I wanted to avoid those inevitable questions as to why my child did not look and act like a boy.  

My child was miserable.  I cannot overstate that.  She was absolutely miserable.  Especially at school.  No confidence, no friends, no laughter.  I can honestly say this—I had a child who did not smile.  We did that for years.  We did that against the advice of teachers, therapists, and other experts.  

I remember the day everything changed for me.  I got home from work, and my daughter and her brother were in the front lawn.  And she had sneaked on one of her older sister’s play dresses.  And they wanted to go across the street and play with the neighbors’ kids.  It was time for dinner, I said, “Come in.”  She asked, can she go across the street.  I said no.  She asked me if she went inside and put on boy clothes, could she then go across the street and play.  And it was then that it hit me.  My daughter was equating being good with being someone else.  I was teaching her to deny who she is.  As a parent, the one thing we cannot do, the one thing, is silence our child’s spirit.  

And so on that day, my wife and I stopped silencing out child’s spirit.  The moment we allowed my daughter to be who she is, to grow her hair, to wear the clothes she wanted to wear, she was a different child.  And I mean it was immediate.  It was a total transformation.  I now have a confident, a smiling, a happy daughter.  She plays on girls’ volleyball teams.  She has friendships.  She’s a kid.  

8 page short kids book class project on important/current/difficult topics! Covered the topics of change, sibling relationships and the subject of having a transgender family member (in this case an older brother!)