4 posts tagged “grandparents”
The In-Laws just landed and will be with us for 7 days.
Must remember to breathe...
It's good for the kids...
Breathe...
Inhale... hold it, hold it... cough, cough, cough, slowly exhale.
Just after Christmas, when the visiting in-law grandparents were safely stuffed back on an airplane, my 3 3/4 year old decided she wanted to learn to read.
It has been an explosion of knowledge.
I am not keeping track of a word list that she can recognize or spell yet, as I'm not sure day to day how much of it is sticking in long-term memory, but it would be impressive.
Our favored method is to use an email client to compose a message (in super huge font)
one word on one line at a time.
This past week, she expressed an interest (i.e. "NO, I want to do it!") in typing the words herself.
So, she's also learning the letter location of the QWERTY system as well.
She's been copying some of her favorite sections of Doctor Seuss books in this fashion.
Now she's hitting up educational game websites to master their spelling games.
She long ago became bored with the content on noggin.com and nickjr.com having explored every link on their sites.
She is more competent with the use of the mouse and navigating via browser bookmarks than my parents are.
Her latest expansion is math fractions games.
She was on a spelling game when I left the room to go make us nachos.
I came back and bam, she's doing math.
My wife's response, "Are you going to save anything at all for her teachers when she starts school?"
I'd write a child development book on how it all happened, but dude, I don't think it's me.
We haven't pushed either of our kids, but simply provided resources for them when they expressed an interest themselves in exploring a given topic.
Now the 21 month old, I'll just be glad when she's finished potty-training (about 90% there now.)
She's also learning her alphabet, animals and sounds they make with a ringed flipcard set.
She started potty training (felt like early) because she wanted to keep up with big sister.
Now she looks like she wants to do the same thing with playing on the PC and reading her own book words.
It's daunting, this whole parenting young kids thing, but I think I might not have screwed up too bad.
I think they'll both be ready for school on time, likely way ahead of peer grade-level.
I am anticipating feeling incredibly relieved at that hand-off of learning to the teacher and at the same time weirded out, considering that at this pace they should surpass my own knowledge of most topics somewhere around middle-school age.
Survived another Grandparental visit.
All the contraband can now be unpacked from the garage.
Silver lining is that Grandparents make great babysitters.
As a result the wife and I had time to deal with officialdom.
We now have new state drivers licenses in hand (or back pocket as it were.)
They were hard won prizes.
Three different licensing stations we visited had lines out the door and no available parking...
The lines were just to get tickets... to then wait to be graced with an audience with an official at the counter.
Consulted map and drove 45 minutes North to a rural licensing station in another county.
Here we found where all the fat, jolly, hick sort of DMV officials I had always hoped to have process me resided.
It's been my previous experience when dealing with officialdom to get the emaciated, cranky, geriatric that's a stickler for the rules.
But not this time. No line. No need for all those fangled state-required documents that just get in the way.
You look like a nice feller. Pay your fee and sit over there for your photo. Have a nice day now ya'hear!
And it was just that easy.
The In-Laws arrived last Thursday.
They left this morning.
I have my house back.
Within the house, I have my office back.
*Enormous Exhale*
Ahhhh.
That's better.
The kids enjoyed their visit... The wife worked half-days.
and I managed not to murder any of them.
Good times.
