Schoolish Time Today

In the spirit of letting go of some of the things I have saved FOREVER I let my girl have, what I would consider, a special treat today. She was doing some school time, and having a blast. She picked out one of her workbooks to do some practice writing letters. I usually take the individual pages and put them in a sheet protector, or even just lay the sheet protector over the top, and then have her use a dry erase marker to do the workbooks. That way I can wipe it off and she can do them again and again, especially since we are still in the beginner stage of writing. Today, she picked one of her workbooks where each page has you practice writing a different letter. She sometimes loses interest in letter writing and would rather just color, which is just fine, but I thought to make it a special activity, we would do like real school and use a REAL PENCIL to practice writing. My girl does not usually use pencils. She LOVES to color with a regular pencil, but the resulting picture with lead that wipes off....not my favorite, so usually it is just boring crayons or colored pencils. Today, I went into my secret pencil stash. I found pencils in my drawer that I have been saving for many, many years. I have been saving some of them from when I was in elementary school. I have panda pencils, a gymnast pencil, a hershey kiss pencil, a pencil from my elementary school, and pencils with my name on them. I even have a Care Bears pencil that is the original ones. For today's special grown up school time, I let my girl pick a special pencil, and I sharpened it and let her use it. She chose the purple one with the knock knock joke on it. She thought it was the coolest thing and did 5 pages of letters with her new pencil. I told her it was just like the grown up kids do when they get to start real school, and she was very excited to be so grown up. Then she had us play Dinosaur Train matching, where she shared the Buddy figure with me, and then grabbed her favorite items: laces and strings. She has some shoe laces, and some strings for doing lacing cards, and she uses them for all kinds of things. They make great gloves, or scarves, or food for her animals, or wipes for dusting, or anything else you could possibly imagine. This morning she invented a new game and taught me how to play it. All you need is a couple laces or strings. The object of the game is to toss the lace or string in the air. I tried to ball mine up and catch it on the way down. Apparently that wasn't the object of the game. Instead you are supposed to leave the string long, toss it in the air, and watch it fall to the ground before repeating the actions. It sure was a lot of fun.....And then she decided if I held one end of the little string, and she held the other, that the two of us could jump rope. I tried to explain why that would be so challenging, and she agreed that she needed to get her big jump rope for that. She held one end, while I held the other, and we tried to jump together. Unfortunately, she is still confused about the sequence of events that lead to successful jump rope. She tried to jump while swinging the rope backwards over her head, and I was trying to swing it under our feet......So I tried to explain how to jump rope, and my girl, holding on to both ends, tried it out in slow motion. She did it! It was slow, and it was only a few times, but she did it!....and then went right back to string tossing. Way fun! What a great girl and some fun school time!!!!!

In other news, Logan has been studying math and is set to take the placement test to see about getting into some college classes. He is such a smart cookie! And can remember numbers and problems really well, while I have to write down everything in order for it to make sense to me. It has been really neat to see him studying and working hard to figure out this stuff, even though it has been years since either of us took any kind of math class. He has also been working hard at his job, where they have sold a couple more houses and have a remodel job as well. We were hoping to take a break all together as a family, but he's going to get the chance to get lots of work done and some great studying as well....while my girl and I go for an adventure down south. We are hoping to visit Logan's family in Oregon, my family in California, and maybe, possibly, even drive over to Utah for a day or two. I would really like to take my girl to the dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving point, but I'm a bit concerned about the drive....But we are planning on a trip up to Portland to go to the Children's Museum and/or the zoo. We're looking forward to seeing everyone and having lots of adventures.....The only drawbacks are that we leave in a couple weeks, and I'm finding there are LOTS of things I want to do before we go, and that we don't get to take Logan with us. But it should be a huge adventure. When we were walking around the airport last week, my girl was commenting on how she really wanted to go visit her grandparents and to fly on an airplane. I am looking forward to sharing those adventures with her which I know she will really enjoy....and to getting back here to hang out with Logan too! So fun times for all, and preparing for adventures ahead!!!