Grandkids and schooling

Today I received in the mail a irreplaceable gift. A picture book of my Costa Rica grandkids. Even though I see them often I highly value hard copy, old fashioned pictures. My daughter did it online and we received it today in the mail. It is soooo cool! My favorite gift yet for sure.

Another gift I received today was that my 6 year old finally got it! I mean it finally clicked and she started putting the sounds together to read words, yahoooo! I am really excited and maybe tomorrow she will forget, but just for today I will enjoy the feeling of success that at least thinking she got it is giving me!

I have taught all six of my other children to read and would never let anyone else enjoy the great sense of joy that we both discover together when we accomplish this goal. There are days, like the past post that I really believe it is never going to click. And then one day they just get this little sparkle in their eye and wallah, they get it. That was our reading day today and I am so excited to get moving with her now. I have a feeling she is really going to take off now that she is reading. Harvard or Yale here we come!!!!

Schoolin'

We started school yesterday. You know the first day is always the best, and then it quickly declines from there. Yesterday both girls were excited to dive in and learn to read and finish up some books. But alas today the reality of how much work it was going to take sunk in and my girlies wilted. I mean like melt down. Baby has a photographic memory which is great unless you are trying to teach her to read phonetically. So she will look at a word and spend about 15 minutes trying to see if she has had it before, guessing and finally she will sound it out. At that point she is done with that word and I have to get some new ones.

The part that really drives me to distraction is the guessing part. For example the word "live". We discuss the l sound and the short i and the v. Now we try to put them all together. We get like, love, and every other l word in the school room. Then she finally really looks at the word and tries to sound it out. Of course it does not help to have your teenage sister glaring at you across the room, just because you are getting on her nerves!

So now I am wondering how in the heck did I teach 6 other kids to read? I do have to admit some were easier than others, but we did it and I'm sure we can do it one more time. She does have a deadline to learn to read in English before school starts in Feb. I told her if she does not know how to read she can't go to school until she learns how. Don't know if I will last that long.

Then of course is the teenager wanting to just leave and go for a run, eat lunch, anything but stay there and get that darn math book done! O.k. mom just breath and know that they are not going anywhere and there is no hurry for them to learn these thing.

On a fun note I did my first swim today and got in a good 800 before I felt like my arms were going to fall off. It felt great and I think sure enough the time was about the same as when I quit swimming eight years ago, how sad ha?

Books! Books! Books!

Saturday was the used book sale by the womens club in Belen. It was awesome and we had a blast. The bad part was there was only two children's books and we bought both of them. The above picture was our bus ride home, reading of course. We ended up buying 25 books and I have already finished off about five of them.

We have a huge surplus of books and I am thinking about having a book swap here at my house. We could just have everyone bring books they want to get rid of and everyone go around the room swapping. I think it would be great fun, and it would help us even the score with all the thousands of books we have here.

When you go to someone's house do you check out the books? I do. I have to say I judge people by what books they have in their home, if they even have books and how many. That sounds really weird, but it is true. I can't even imagine life without books.

All our children have been readers. Not having a t.v. in the home certainly helped cultivate good reading habits also. In fact the younger kids did not read as much as the older ones. Until Micah went to jail he had never read a whole book. Now he just finished Crime and Punishment and is reading Pride and Predjudice. He is always reading something and due to lack of something better to do enjoying it.

The only problem for me with reading is my poor old eyes. I have reading glasses but never take the time to dig them out. Hence red and tired eyes. I guess I am just waiting until the big five oh catches up with me and then I will get them out for good. Until then better go and work on the thousands of books that need reading.

READING PLEASURE

This is how I caught Dad putting baby to sleep! The plan is he is supposed to read her a story and put her to sleep. The plan according to her? She lets him read until he falls asleep and then she sneaks off to watch tunes!

It is bad when the kids get smarter than us. This at five, fifteen is going to be a real picnic especially at the rate the hearing, site and memory are going.

Yesterday she brought home from school a paper for us to fill out about her health. They had questions like, "did you have good prenatal care, when did she lift her head, when did she first respond to people" you know the usual questions.

In a way I hate it when we get those. It always proves to remind me that I don't know anything about her family or her health history. I really don't know if her biological mom was healthy, starved, or what her health was. Judging by her health now though I would say that her Mom was very healthy and took good care of herself.

She has never been sick or even had problems with her teeth, other than her brother knocking one out on the trampoline. Over all perfect health in other words.

Finally after looking over all the questions I just wrote that she was adopted from China at 13 months and we had no health history on her. I told them she is just perfect and gets along well with everyone and has no health problems.

That was really pushing my Spanish vocabulary. My older daughter suggested I write up a whole story based on the info we got on her referral, so I think I will put that together. I think it is important for her to have some sort of story about her first year of life on earth.

We do know where she was born, where she spent her first year, not specifics of course, but the rough outline and we can go from there. After all we all need a story right?