My Long Lost Son

A few people have asked about my two children. Hmmm---think I've blogged the youngest two a little too often the past two weeks. Andrew is still here and he's fine. We just had a glut of Nathan material with birthday parties, star of the week, cub of the week, etc., etc., etc. Plus the baby just gets more pictures taken of her since she's with me all day long. We like to make sure her every move is documented.

Part of my problem is Andrew is getting to that age where he doesn't really want his every move captured on film. I have a hard time getting candids of him and he doesn't often volunteer to pose for photos. Here's a candid of him trying to hide in the booth at Nathan's Birthday Dinner. He's telling us to 'peace out'.

I thought I'd update everyone on Andrew. He's loving school, but would prefer school to be one large computer videogame (preferably that looks and acts like Disney's Toontown online). He is holding an almost straight A average and this year he is really being challenged by his teacher, his gifted teacher and his work. Since we're off to middle school next year, I think it's good that he actually has homework most days. (He really never had homework before--he'd get it done in class.)

He will be participating in the "Read to Succeed" competition in early April. There is a team of four students and they have a list of 19 books to read. They work as a team to 'buzz' in first with the answer to content questions. It's a competition open to 4-6th grade students only, so he's reading harder books to participate. The goal is for each child to read 10 of the books with each book being read by two teammates. This way, every book has two kids with content knowledge. He's been working since fall and is on book #8. I'm thrilled that he has had the opportunity to read a lot of great literature since most of these are award winning books. He's been forced to read authors and genres of literature that he would have never picked out on his own. The best part--he likes some of them. He's struggled through a couple books he didn't like, but I insisted he finish. I distinctly remember being forced to read "The Scarlet Letter" in high school. To this day, I find it to be one of the dumbest books ever written that we pass off as classical literature. (If interested, ask me sometime what I really think!)



All in all, Andrew is here, he's having a great time and this week he has more activities coming that will be photographed and blogged.