Yay for your ds, GeoMamma! It is so fun to watch them start to read. It really opens up the world to kids.

2 emails from Adults at DS14's new school with compliments:
1) 'engaged' 'polite and intelligent'
2) 'learning well' 'thoughful'

and an excited phone call that 'There is SO MUCH work' but with a tone of pride.

Yippee!
Grinity

Week 1 of High School is over! DD14 has showed major improvements in areas of organization as she has already had many assignments and has started them before they were due. She has also had to learn to keep track of time and to make sacrifices as she now has to wake up the earliest she ever has, at 6:00, in order to make it to marching band in time. The strange thing? She mentioned that she feels really happy and doesn't know why. I've been telling her for years that getting organized is a mood improver, and she never believed me....
Also, I kind of have to brag about her challenging courseload, 3 Honors, 2 AP, Band, and Speech. 2 of the 3 Honors classes will be very easy (for her at least), but rumor has it that Honors Biology is the hardest course available at the school and that majority of kids drop down to regulars around the end of the first semester. Science is her strength, so it shouldn't be *that* hard, especially if her organization skills continue throughout the year. AP Geography will be hard, as it's an AP course, but I think she will manage just fine, as she told me that the syllabus looked like stuff she mostly already knew, and the textbook was interesting despite being, well... a college textbook. The other AP will be probably the hardest of her courses, as it is a part english, part humanities, part world history type course. She's starting band with 3 years less experience than the rest of the students on her instrument (she switched from Orch to Band at the end of 8th grade), and said that she is already about as good as some of the people in her class. (granted that she is in the lowest of the 5 bands, but still, I think that is an accomplishment) Marching is early in the morning, plus games and other things after school certain days. And Speech, well, public speaking isn't her thing... So she has a difficult course load. Yes, she may struggle keeping up with the work at points, yes she still might not be as good as the other band students by the end of the year, but... wow! I get the feeling this is going to be a *good* year. (not to mention that she is combining with 2 other schools that are about all the children of engineers and such, and there are a large number of highly gifted+ kids for her to hang out with.

This was the first week of Pre-K for DD when I picked her up her teacher said she had papers in her backpack and maybe DD would read them to me in the car on the way home; they were school rules, newsletter and menu for the month. I guess she realized DD could read since she read about 50 pages of her chapter book during rest time today. Today was the first day DD took her own book to school.

this isn't really a brag per se, but is the sort of "cute" thing that goes on at my house with my two and four year old DDs that I don't typically share: my four year old DD wanted to find the letter Y magnet so that she could pretend it was an antibody since they have a Y-like shape. Oh yeah, she had fun pretending our dryer ball with spikes was a virus too. Then I found she had my cognitive neuroscience book from college days on the coffee table and was looking at it for fun...

Oh my gosh, a girl after my own heart! I love immunology!!

My little guy will be two this week. He likes to spell his name on the fridge with magnets. Yesterday my dad came over to visit. He came in the house and said, "Where's Sean?" and little guy ran to the fridge and pointed to his name as proud as could be. He can't talk yet, but at least he can spell!

This is just like our house, too - what fun!

We are homeschooling this year dd7 & dd5, dd7 let my dh know all he had to do was give her the teacher guide and she'd figure out what she needed to know.

Not really a brag about ability, but happiness at sticktoitiveness. DS put together the first sample robot from Lego Mindstorms, Shooterbot, all by himself, though it took him a while. He seems to be picking up the visual programming environment quickly, too, though he has only recently learned a little about programming prior, and in a Java environment at that.

A quote from last night: "If you see someone throw a villain into a dumpster, that doesn't mean he's a hero. He might be a supervillain."