Wow, it's been a while since I've been here, between work, the holidays (belated happy Holidays everybody), birthdays, potty-training, seeing family and wishing for snow things have been a little busy.

Our youngest is already potty-training herslef.  She freely makes the announcement and has been successful most of the time.  She has been so good already that we only use a diaper at night when we know tha there's a poop in there somewhere and it's about time for it to come'on out!  Otherwise, she hasn't wet the bed yet.

I can't help to wonder if all of our work with her older brother isn't a factor in it. Kids tend to pick up a lot more of what is going on then you'd ever think.  I think this may be getting combined with our growing emphasis in her occupying herself while we spend more time with her older siblings.  "Ms Jealousy" is slowly learning to deal with it and I hope she figures it out soon before I go DEAF! (she has an ear-splitting scream).

The older kids have been using our home computer more (I'll post more on this later, but it's an Educationally-oriented Linux operating system that includes a number of educational games for kids, is free, does not require powerful hardware (works perfectly fine on my P3 500MHz 7-year old Sony desktop) and was even sent to me for free, called Edubuntu).

Thomas has taken to the computer rather quickly and is amazing me with how far he is getting in the games, but I am going to have to watch him.  My wife walked in one time as he was sitting at the computer and instead of him typing in his username (his first name), he had "daddy"?!   My 4 year old is trying to hack into MY ACCOUNT!?!  Yeah, he's going to be a challenge.

Our oldest is definatly blazing the trails for us.  We are realizing that 1rst grade is where these social circles, clic's and talking about each other is starting up.  It is also our wake-up call regarding bullying.  Luckily it is so far very mild and most likely isn't bullying so much as misunderstanding but still it got our mind thinking about it and learning what to do about it.  The eye-opener was when she began getting things wrong on her tests and foolish things that we know she knows the answer to.

Luckily we found out it is somebody at her table she's having trouble with, talked to the teacher and got their seats re-arranged (so they are at the same table but not next to each other). Scores have returned to normal but there is much more to do to try and empower her.

So things are still moving along and we are still playing "catch-up" but I wouldn't change it for the world.  Hope things are going well in your corner of the world!!

~d