General update

We're now 2 chapters deep into the last Percy Jackson book. Would have been 3, but Sayer fell asleep last night while I was still reading. Couldn't have anything to do with it being way late, or with having gone on an 'adventure' to go get a (giant!) scoop of ice cream from an ice cream shop last night ... :)

We've picked up several of the requested Minnie and Moo books from the library. Sayer read one of them in the car before we even got home. We also picked up lots of books to read with our history lessons. Today will be a big day for finishing books about the Phoenicians so we can move on to the Greeks, and then the Romans.

Sayer finished the Kumon math book about money. It was soooo much easier for her now than it was back in March. Learning and growing every day, that girl. :)

Friday we got out our new liquid watercolors and some diffuser paper and made splatter paintings. Sayer calls them floating pepperonis because the drops hit the water and spread out into circles that bump into other circles and mix colors and seem to float on the page. Silly child.

Duncans lessons lately include polite interactions when angry or frustrated. He's struggling. We're doing a lot of cuddling. I'm hoping that the day when logic and reason and understanding that event A brings outcome B isn't tooooo far away. But in the meantime, I'm trying to show him that even when he's upset with me (or I'm upset with him), that we still love each other. Lots of cuddling.

When we're not angry or working to distract or otherwise get over being upset, Duncan is thriving. Great progress in swimming, lots of fun and progress in gymnastics. His number recognition might be a step ahead of his letter recognition. Yesterday Mark asked him about what number we'd call if we had an emergency and needed help. Eventually they got to 9-1-1, and I mentioned that it's only good to know if he could recognize the numbers to dial them on the phone. So Mark quizzed him. He had trouble with the 6, but otherwise knew them all (though I think it's 'cheating' to ask him to identify them in order - he knows the sequence, so he can guess what comes next even if he doesn't really recognize it). We'll keep working on it.

Not only does he know the numbers in sequence and perhaps recognize them, he was doing some basic subtraction problems in his head yesterday. He was telling us that if he had four of something (can't remember what we were talking about), and he gave one away, he'd only have three. He continued giving one away until he got to zero, doing all the math correctly. Again, he did it in sequence, so it's easy to guess the correct answer, but it was unprompted, so I like it :) He also did addition a couple days ago, telling us that 4 + 4 is 8. It was a totally random statement. I've been asking him lots of math questions lately to take advantage of his seeming interest :)

There you have it ...