Report Card time again

And we were unsurprised by another good one. There's still room for improvement, but all her teachers were very excited about her work and her behavior. Her gym teacher thanked me as soon as we walked in the door for raising a polite kid. I am grateful that these lessons have soaked in, even if they aren't always obvious from her home behavior.

Our little Gaz is quite the athlete! She's jumping higher and farther than anyone else in her class, and Mr. S. says that she's got the natural ability to do well in sports, which is something that Pehpaw Charley has been saying for years. Ah, validation! :)

While chatting with her teacher, Gaz sat down with a dry erase board and wrote out some adorably misspelled sentences. But this is the goal: not spelling but just getting comfortable using words (that at least make sense to Gaz) to express thoughts and feelings and actions. And boy did she. I should have copied down everything she wrote, but I was also trying to carrying on a sensible conversation. Gee, and I wonder why teacher conference day always wears me out.

We're doing well right now. We've had some dramatic ups and downs this school year and some spectacularly bad days, but things are more or less leveled out. Even still, Gaz constantly complains that school is boring. She likes it, but it's really not challenging her. Many days she's got her homework half done before I get back to the table with my cup of tea. She does a good job of guessing at spelling, and she writes the best S's in the world. Mrs. K. said she plans to really advocate for Agatha to get into the gifted class (they did finally test the kids, but the results aren't in yet; Gaz said it was hard), so we'll see. Maybe soon we'll be hearing "Mom, it's too hard!"

And it's book fair time, too, so we've now moved into the world of Goosebumps and the Poison Apple series. So far she's not spooked by them, but it's hard to tell with her. She gave me one of those looks when I told her that my favorite silly song when I was a kid was "Go Get The Axe."

In not-Gaz-related, but still schoolish news, I've accepted admittance to a very fine (but not too fine) law school, and will be matriculating in August. I will try really hard to keep this occasionally updated, but after mid-August it might be more Mark than anything here.

One of Gaz's Favorite Books

Voyage of the Basset

No brain for a review right now, but it's good. Gaz even dressed up as Cassandra for her school Halloween party. We're finishing up another reading of it now, and it's still good.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Serpentine

We've recently gone through a couple of months of having to watch Barbie in A Mermaid Tale repeatedly, so when she said she was ready to trade that in for something with dinosaurs, the grown-ups were quite relieved. Barbie was better than some things she's watched (this subject will get its own post one day), but dinosaurs are something we can all enjoy equally. Thanks to Netflix, we got rid of Barbie and ended up with Prehistoric Planet. It's fun little show, and I never get tired of hearing Gaz go on about the old ornithocheirus. She's really into pterosaurs when she's not obsessed (as most kids are, I guess) with T-Rex. Though for the latter, we can probably blame Sue, or rather, our fondness for the Field Museum.

The reptillian fun hasn't just stopped with the constant viewings of dino-drama, though. I picked up a Step Into Reading book on snakes, since we had just been talking about the old family pet (a sweet little corn snake named Biscuit). While I was at it, I picked up a more herpetologically involved book for myself because, amongst other things, I've always been mystified by snakey taxonomy and was hoping to figure it out for once.

What I didn't figure on is how much Gaz would flip for the many color photos in my book, or what her tolerance for mommy stumbling over long Greek and Latin words that don't mean anything to her (and sometimes me) would be. She is in love with the eyelash pit viper and was quite disappointed when I told her they're venomous. But two nights in a row now, she's fallen asleep to me reading random snippets of squamate biology, ecology, locomotion, and evolution. But I am only allowed to read the pages that have photos. Is any of this actually getting through to her, or is she just dozing off to the sound of my voice? I don't know. But I do like that I am able to share something cool about the world with her, and I think snakes are pretty darn cool.

I don't know exactly where this attraction comes from (though the grass snake featured in the kid's book looks like the Utahraptor from Prehistoric Planet, we agreed), but I am so pleased that she is interested in learning about the weird looking creatures and isn't afraid of them. Of course, we've only seen one very tiny garter snake out in the wild, so she might change her tune when she sees her first enormous black rat snake. (Okay, maybe that's just me.)

Still, this all has me thinking about the logistics of getting another corn snake. I'm not sure our landlords would go for it, but when we're ready, I've got a game plan in my head. It would be nice to have a reptile around again.