Status Updates

Cool thing I forgot to mention- Pip started college this week!!  Yes, she can go for free.=)  She's taking 13 credits. She has one class on campus two days a week, and the other classes are online.  She's doing a two year library science program to start with. She may do more later.  She's mainly doing almost all online classes because when she signed up, Jenny's car wasn't up to the drive, and this is winter semester so the roads should be icy and dangerous.  However, Granny Tea gave the girls her old minivan, and the roads are dry and the weather a warm fifty degrees.

I posted about our 21 year old having her first day of formal education in a traditional class room today to our FB page.  The comments are cracking me up.

Striderling had a bug this weekend and was very pitiful.  As sad as this was, it was also a little eery and I even thought exciting.  This is the first time he's been really sick since his new diagnosis (in fact, this may be the sickest he's ever been with a bug rather than syndrome related stuff, and I note this is since switching from breastmilk to formula).  Nevertheless, formerly, every sniffle turned us zero at the bone as we watched him anxiously, twitching at every sniffle, wondering if the next step would be ER.  Now we are just sad the little guy doesn't feel well.

Striderling's baby sister lost very little weight after birth, and now weighs in at 7 1/2 pounds.

The Dread Pirate Grasshopper's vocabulary and sentence structure are growing enomrously.  He has an active imagination, that one. He slays deer with his plastic sword and feeds his mother bits of deer off the tip of the same sword, and then he has imaginary conversations with invisible deer who seem not to mind that he kills and eats their kith and kin.

Both boys are learning a few sings. Striderling knows three signs- all learned this last month, more, please, and water.  He also knows I sign to him more than the rest of the fam and when he sees me he starts 'babbling' in sign, which is ADORABLE.

Jenny got to do some detail painting on an airplane today, which tickled her much.  She and the Progeny are planning a train trip to Colorado in a couple of months.  The youngest two are looking for ways to earn money for their train tickets so they don't have to borrow much from their older siblings. Unfortunately, there's no snow and the grass is not growing, so the boy is missing his most lucrative opportunities to touch up Granny Tea for a tenner or two or three.

My youngest two are still in year 8 at Ambleside Online. The Boy is reading A History of the English Speaking People - Volume II the New World. I let the FYG use Dicken's A Child's History of England instead of Churchill because she just found Churchill too difficult.  She did better with his first book because we had an audio version of the first book in his set History of the English Speaking People, but we don't have the audio version of the next three.  The Boy loves Churchill, much as he loved Island Story when he was five.  Do you all realize he was reading Our Island Story in school when we started this blog? Sniff.

The FYG also is learning ASL using Dr. Vicar's lessons.  She likes it, and takes to sign language much more quickly than her brother, which is good for them both, I think.  I've taken to giving her 'spelling tests' by fingerspelling, and we are both trying to use sign whenever we know the sign for what we are saying.

The Cherub has taken to waking up at 4 a.m or so, shuffling quietly through our room and heading to the kitchen to get into food she cannot have.  We are going to have to figure something out- an alarm system? A child proof doorknob on her side of the door?

Trouble is, I have trouble opening those!