GEAP Test, Check

So, I thought I'd be all bad-ass urban mama and take The Girl on the L to her GEAP test yesterday. And then I realized:

- the test is at 3:30 in the afternoon, which is not the best time for a 4-year-old to be at her best

- it was a school holiday, so Natty didn't need the car to pick up The Boy

- and it's 30-degrees outside

So we drove to IIT instead. Earlier in the day, Natty had taken The Boy, The Girl, and The Tot to the Shedd Aquarium before picking me up at my office (I took a half-day's vacation), so The Girl was pretty wiped out. I left at 2 o'clock, leaving myself a ton of time to get there and hoping The Girl would fall asleep in the car on the way down, but she wrote her first and last name on a piece of paper and counted to forty instead.

We got there way early, at which point I realized I needed cash to pay for parking, so we drove back up to the Jewel-Osco at Roosevelt Road for cash and snacks: Veggie Booty, grapes, and a snack-sized package of bite-sized brownies. Back down to IIT to park, scurry across State Street in the bitingly cold wind, and upstairs to the psychology department in the Life Sciences Building. The Girl was in and out in about 1/2 an hour. She, like The Boy two years ago, couldn't or didn't want to tell me anything about what she'd done during the test. And that's fine. Until recently, it hadn't even occurred to me that someone would prep their kid for the test.

The head of the department was there to answer questions about the process. He couldn't reveal anything about the test CPS uses, or how it's scored. But he did say that the norms they use to determine the standard are actually taken from test data from four or five years ago, which I found pretty interesting. He also said that they score everyone taking into account their actual age, within the month. So The Girl will be scored against all the other 4-year-and-7-month-olds. We'll find out in March how she did.