So cute!! (and I really want one of those!)

Grateful Mom,

Isn't it funny that we are the only group of parents that actually find failure to be a good thing? But congrats to your son none the less, I'm betting next year he'll slow down....

AUSTIN!!! I somehow missed seeing this earlier (haven't been around that much lately). Congratulations to you, your wife, and Mr W!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope you're having a lovely time with your new baby! Is it a boy or a girl? Such joyous times--I so miss having a little tiny guy to hold (though the big guys are pretty great, too)!

The hubby told the boy to tell me, "bye mom. Me and dad are going to look at the pretty girls". The boy told me they were going to look at the happy girls. The hubby tried to correct the boy, but he said, "Well I want to look at the happy girls.".

Dd4 has been improving in reading and especially in spelling out words based on how they sound. Today we were playing a game where I was asking her to write out simple " -at" words, so of course dh has to come in and ask her to spell "splat", which I thought was a bit unfair, but she totally nailed it! Not huge, but kinda hard!
What I am most pleased to see however is her fondness for a good eraser -- it has cut down considerably on her throwing the whole notebook and pencil across the room when she notices that she got a letter shape slightly wrong!
Also, I think the eagerness to discover more words has her less stressy about the 'perfection'. (I hope!)

Chris1234,

We used magnetic letters to play spelling games because it helped take the fine motor component (which was and is a problem for my son)out of the equation. All he had to remember then was how to spell the word. He was younger than your DD, but we played one game where we took turns making words for each other to spell out and to read phonetically. He would delight in giving me loooong chains of consonants to "sound out" just to hear me sputter and contort my face. It was a great way to build word family/pattern recognition, though, because it was very obvious if I was only changing the initial letters, or the final letters, or the central vowels. She might like something like that in addition to the writing games. Sounds like she is really moving ahead in lots of ways, including the all-important decreasing perfectionism!

Thanks, Aculady, that is a great idea, I had sets of these for ds but they've sort of floated away, so I should get another magnetic set, or a foam one for the bath....

Have to add another brag on ds10; we took a bit of a break on the algebra, but today he was back at it and simplifying his first polynomial expressions.

Its a girl. She is way more active than Mr W was at the same age. Especially from 1130 pm to 230 AM. ugh

Ugh is the word...hope you'll be sleeping better soon!

Congrats Austin!! (hope you're not up right now