I can hardly believe the little boy is getting so big...

E and I had a coffee date in the park (it's decaf)

If we had gone back home when we thought we would, I had already decided to start teaching G to read once the girls were back in school since it's just me and him all day. I figured I would take my time and split lessons up and spend about a year just going at his pace through the book. And quitting if it got to be too much for him. (Also, in case you're wondering, I do recommend this book because it is VERY EFFECTIVE but I also hate it because after about Lesson 40 the lessons become excruciatingly long and you want to pull all your hair out and punch the wall.) But then we didn't go back and I had to manage the girls' home school and then I got pregnant and was barely functioning for like a month there. Also we didn't have the book. But anyway, I found the book at the library once it reopened for curbside pickup and I was feeling better so I figured maybe we could give it a shot.

His new haircut makes him look like two years older

Well, let's just say that I'm the personality type where I'm always pushing my kids to do more than they can handle. It has pros and cons, okay, and I'm not always proud of it. So the girls both started this book at the age of 2. Now, neither of them finished it at the age of 2. But that's when they started. And you know, in a lot of ways that's about the age we treat G as. (We're not just being weird, it's what the experts say you should do.) So I expected that he would go through the book in about the same way that the girls did. And Lesson 1 was pretty consistent with my expectations. But Lesson 2! He just remembered everything! And he even was catching on to the patterns of connecting the slowly sounded out words with real words (he could connect "mmmmeeeee" with "me.") This guy has only HEARD English for a year and only spoken it for about three months. I was shocked. Today we just did Lesson 8 and he's still surprising me. The only way to explain this is that he was ready. Which was not the case with the girls (ahem). I just can't believe it. This little boy is a genius.

He's been working on holding a pencil lately too. I'm kicking myself for not bringing his fancy triangular pencils though. One of the many things I would've packed if I had known.

We'll see how things develop, especially as he starts to get tired of the hard work it takes to learn to read and to get through this book. But for now, I'm just so proud of him. And boy is he proud of himself. On a side note, it does make it easier to do the book since he sits on the potty so much. We just do the lesson while he's sitting on the potty and he doesn't have the struggle with sitting still that he would otherwise. So anyway, we'll see how things go, but for now we're all very impressed!