Good things

In an effort to lift the glum mood around here (I AM REALLY GRUMPY), I am not going to blog about the bad things. I'm going to focus on positive things!

1. Our neighbors.
We have one set of neighbors that are just great. They live right next door to us and have two kids very close in age to our 3 little girls. We just played outside for a little while. Good clean fun (errrrr... as clean as it could be since they were digging in the dirt) on a summer night. It's so nice to have friends who live close so you can spontaneously meet for a play date!

I still haven't met very many of our other neighbors, but I've met a couple more. I met one neighbor when we thought N's kitty got lost outside. The neighbor was very concerned about our cat and she walked around with me looking for N's cat for a while. The next day, she came over and checked to see what happened with our kitty. ( I was delighted that we had our kitty and she got to meet him.) She was very nice, but she doesn't have kids and I think she might have been a bit overwhelmed by our 3 little girls!

I just met another neighbor and he seems nice--he's an older gentleman and he and his wife have just re-landscaped their yard. It looks beautiful. I've seen his wife but not spoken to her. If I see her outside when I'm driving by, I'll stop and introduce myself to her. He was nice enough, but I doubt we'll hang.

2. N's tutor.
We opted to have a fairly low-key this summer and not send N (6.45) off to full-day camp for weeks. Most of my friends are doing that with their almost first-graders.

I have no idea how much full-day camp costs where I live, but I'm guessing I'm spending less on N's summer activities than what I would if I sent her to full-day camp. We have a nanny because K and T aren't old enough for such activities. It seems silly to send N away all day while N3nny is around with the other girls. N3nny is great and I love the girls having a chance to play with each other for extended periods of time.

[Sidenote: This might be our last summer with a nanny.... (OH MY my heart went into PALPITATIONS just typing that....we'll see.) ]

Anyway, N is doing a three 1/2 day camps for one week each (Art camp, acting camp and gymnastics camp) and we're having a tutor (a good friend of mine who teaches) come spend an hour a week with her. I figured it would be worth it to do so. Today was our first session and I am SO excited! My friend did an amazing job with N and N loved it! Yippee! My friend spotted a difficulty N has and will work with her on it.

N is reading at almost a second grade level, and my friend instantly realized how good N is at sight-reading (memorized words) but how poor N is at sounding words out. N's always had difficulty doing sounding out words. She has really good phonological awareness (knows rhymes and all the sounds the letters make) and she knows basic phonics (what sound each individual letter makes) but she has a really hard time putting the sounds each letter makes together when she is sounding out words.

My friend, N's tutor, is going to work on improving N's ability to sound out words by using nonsense words. While N reads well, and has an amazing memory (and has memorized LOTS of BIG words), the ability to sound out novel words is a very important component of early reading. Improving this skill will be very useful for N.

My friend will also be working on math skills with N too. I really want N (and all the girls) to always be at the head of the class in school. I don't think there is any harm in letting them overlearn material. N likes to teach others and my hope is that she'll be able to help in "Big Buddies*" or peer-tutoring at her school as she gets older.

*I'll explain later.