It's been a crazy busy week since my last entry. I won't bore you with all the details, but some of the highlights are worth mentioning. Last week Thursday was my conference with Einstein's Preschool teacher. He received an excellent review. He's mastered all the skills that are required of a Preschooler. His strengths are "puzzles, building structures, art, writing." He's still working on interacting with others. Although he's just a little bit on the shy side, to say the very least, he's taken quite a few steps out of his shell since starting school. There's no question that he's academically ready to start Kindergarten next year, but I think he'll definitely benefit from an extra year of interaction in Preschool before throwing him to the wolves. Besides, when the boys are in high school the extra year between graduations would be a nice break.
Monday was our conference with Picasso's Kindergarten teacher. Like his brother, he received an excellent review. According to Mrs. "M", his reading skills and ability to apply them exceeds most Kindergartners. While we were there in the class he read a few pages of a new book and did very well (yes, I'm bragging). He's also doing excellent in math. Mrs. "M" gave him 4s (Exceeds Standard) in all areas. What can I say, our boys are intelligent. Okay, enough of that.
Picasso made a sad, gruesome discovery in our yard on Saturday morning. He was tossing the football and it landed by a litter of newborn wild rabbits that weren't moving. There were five of them scattered in a two foot radius. I had never seen newborn bunnies before, so it took me a little while to figure it out. The long hind legs and ears told it all. It seems as though they ventured away from their nest, which was just a couple feet away from where we found them and nothing more than a clump of grass by the tree, and froze in the unusually cold weather we had been having. I wish there was something we could have done to save them. But, such is life.
Later that night I went with my sister and mom to the "Annual Food & Wine Festival" here in town. Included with the admission price was your choice of a wine or beer glass. Guess which one we took. There were a lot of wineries there, and even more attendees. It was wall to wall people, but we had a good time. The cost of the samples ranged from $1 to $6. The one wine that stood out to me the most was the "Coffee Port." It tasted sort of like a coffee liqueur. It was different, but I don't think I would drink it again. By the end of the night I probably had the equivalent of 3 glasses of wine. We didn't have to take advantage of the free cab rides home.
Sunday night was the Awana's Grand Prix Night. The older kids raced their custom pine cars, while the younger ones raced their Matchbox cars. Picasso raced the one that I had grabbed while we were at Grandma and Grandpa's house earlier in the day. I guess I have an eye for winning Matchbox cars because this car came in first place for all 3 heats it raced in. Picasso received a 2nd place trophy out of 12 cars. Needless to say, he was pretty proud of that. It's trophy number one of his new collection.
I was impressed with the high tech equipment used to measure the speed of the pine cars. Everything was electronic and computerized. The computer converted the real time speed of the car to the speed of a real race car. Some cars had speed in excess of 180 mph. They even had sound effects to add to the atmosphere. I was able to get some ideas stored in the back of my brain for when Picasso is old enough to race a pine car in a couple of years.
Then last night we went to Picasso's school to learn how to play chess. I always avoided the game like the plague because there was too much thinking involved, but I thought it would be something Picasso would be interested in. I was expecting a big crowd of kids there, but Picasso was only one of about 5 kids. Mr. "J" did an excellent job explaining the basics of the game. If I could understand, then anyone could understand. We learned about the pieces: how they move and how many points they're worth. We also learned how to set the board up. Some tips I remembered were: "White on the right," to remind you how to properly place the board, and "The Queens' dress matches their shoes," to remind you that the queen should always start off on the color square that matches her color. With the basics out of the way, the kids played a couple games of "Pawns & Kings" to practice learning the moves of those pieces. Then they added the Rooks in the mix. There was definitely information overload, but Picasso seemed to enjoy the challenge. Now we have to get a chess set so that we can practice.
And that has been my past week in a nutshell.
My friend and hair stylist, Karen and me.
