"And the gift goes on..."

Summer is snuggled up on the couch with Trixie learning about dinosaurs. She has been enjoying her Christmas presents. I think her favorite thing, besides the puppy, is her Leapster 2. She played it for hours the first day and almost ran the batteries down. We are definitely going to have to look into an adapter or rechargeable batteries if it continues to be a hit. I hope it will because the games she has are educational. She also got a Tag reading system which she likes. I'm glad I got one of the sets of 6 books that focuses on short vowel sounds. It will be easier for her to actually learn to read than with the Disney books which have a lot more words. She got a bit frustrated with the Tinkerbell book when she tried to get the pen to read each word. If you were lucky enough to have missed out on the commercials for it this holiday season, I'll explain how it works. There is a pen which reads each word as you move it over the words. It sounds them out phonetically and is actually a pretty cool invention. Anyways, she ended up pushing a button that had the narrator read the whole page rather than her doing it herself word by word. This mutes the point in my opinion, but she was still able to play a game on each page after hearing the story read to her. I hope she will learn to read before she goes to Kindergarten, and I think this may help her get there. I'll have to do my part in helping her too.

We really need to get into some sort of schedule with her workbooks. We've definitely been slacking this month. Of course, there are lessons to be learned in every day life, not just workbooks. But, writing and following directions is an especially important thing for her to learn right now before she goes to school next fall. She is starting swimming lessons in January. I really hope she gets on board with these and will learn to swim before we go to Florida in May. She's still going to be going to gymnastics and music too. We stay busy, busy around here. But, we only live once. So, we might as well try to do all we can to live it to the fullest!