Happy March

I'm being a blog slacker again! My life isn't exactly boring, I've been plenty busy, but nothing worth writing about. Duncan is doing really well with housebreaking and learned a new trick- bow. I've been clicker training him and happened to capture "bow" in the morning because he stretches over and over. It's really cute. Now I just need to figure out how to train "down" because he doesn't lie down unless he's sleeping. I plan on signing him up for beginning obedience this Thursday, so that should help. He's getting a little better about jumping on people and is mouthing (biting lightly) a lot less. He's young and crazy.

I'm very excited about my road trip (gasp!) this week but am overwhelmed at how much I need to do. All of my summer clothes are in a Rubbermaid box on the top shelf of my closet. I need to find clothes and wash them and clean out my car and pack and shop for a few things. I used pretty much every minute of my weekend- I didn't slack- but still have so much to do before I leave on Friday!

I got Kaylin signed up for a ceramics class that starts at the end of the month. She opted to try ceramics over drawing. I'm sure she'll love it because they get to do all kinds of work with clay, including using those (I don't know what I'm talking about) pottery wheels. I've always wanted to try that myself, but never enough to take a class. Kaylin loves painting pre-made ceramics, so I'm sure this class will be a blast. She considered taking drawing as well, but that would be 4 hours of every Saturday for 8 weeks. Kind of a lot...

Logan's reading is improving significantly. He's been up to 2nd grade level for a while and keeps getting better. His spelling improvement has me shocked! In first grade he only sounded out the first letter of the word and then had no clue how to spell the rest. He might spell "dog" d-a-k. He didn't think about it and didn't care. It was literally painful to spend so much time on spelling because he had to memorize each word. Second grade started out this way, but he slowly started sounding words out. He still had to memorize, but it wasn't quite as bad because at least the memorization made sense to him. Last week I got wrapped up in my own work and forgot about spelling until the drive to school Friday morning. I called out his list of words and he spelled ALL of them perfectly on the FIRST try! All 20! I about keeled over from shock! He's even passed a few pre-tests where they don't see the words first. This week he didn't pass the pre-test because he didn't know there were two ways to spell weak. He learned and remembered. Phew! I'm hopeful that his reading will continue to improve without intervention or tutoring and once he gets it down he'll be able to breeze through the rest of grade school. I really do believe his reading problems all stemmed from complete lack of interest.

Well, I should spend the next hour before I have to get ready for work doing something useful. I wonder if I'll wake Gene if I get my summer clothes down from my closet? Guess I'll find out :)