Thankful

Last week (there's no school this week, which...??), I received a letter from Ella thanking me for "making [my] sister born." Isn't that the cutest? I think she might actually be the first person to thank me for making Sadie. Which is sort of hard to believe, but I'm guessing other people are thankful it happened but just didn't feel the need to write me a letter about it. Note that Ella does not thank Dean. This is probably because she has a very limited (very. limited.) understanding of his role in the matter. To date, she knows that you need a mommy and a daddy to make a baby. Any time we stray past these facts, I change the subject to Suite Life on Deck. Then  Sadie takes over. Which makes me very thankful that I made Sadie born too.

Meanwhile, Sadie is thankful for me, Ella, and the pool. Sorry, Dean! Some day when these girls have a bunch of friends with nonexistent, nonpresent, nonparticipatory fathers, they will begin to appreciate what they've got.

In other news, we had Ella's parent/teacher conferences on Monday. I'm sure it will shock you to learn that the child of an editor (you'll note Ella's stellar grammar in the quote above) and a librarian is an exceptional reader. Just how exceptional, you ask? Mrs. S told us they expect kids to be able to read @60 words a minute by the *end* of first grade. Ella can read 144 (or was it 120?) *now*. She has mastered all the reading skills required of her in first grade. They tested her on all the sight words (not just the ones they've studied so far), and she's got them all down. So, said Mrs. S, "We don't expect to see any improvement on this at the next grading period." (This is because they test with the same set of words, and Ella is already 40/40.) Fortunately, this qualifies Ella for "special services," (or did they call it "interventions"?), which means that she is pulled out of class twice a week to have advanced reading with a group of other first graders who are also excelling at reading. She has also been placed in the advanced reading group for her class, though the stuff she is bringing home for reading is pretty simple for her at this point (all the homework comes from the Reading Street program, and it has three levels). Of course, I'm thrilled to have a kid who likes to read as much as Dean and I do and get a huge kick out of seeing Ella steal away with a book. She has also recently mastered (finally) the art of reading to herself rather than aloud (it never dawned on me that this would be tricky for a kid), and she looks so grown up laying on the couch with her Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. She is devouring this series and has read parts of three or four of them in the past week (!). The one difficulty I am having though is that since she is clearly not reading at a first grade level, I can't use that as a guideline when selecting books for her. It's sort of a crap shoot at this point. I just try to gauge based on how many words per page, how big the font is, etc. Apparently Dean was reading the Narnia series in first grade, and I flipped through one of those the other day and do think Ella could handle it, so we'll see. I'd like to strike a happy medium between choosing cool and challenging books for her and frustrating the heck out of her with books that are for fourth graders.

Ella is just average at math--another big shock. I personally think it's not a matter of her not "getting" it but more a matter of her not applying herself.  They did ask one question on all this testing about how many wheels six tricycles would have. Ella got the right answer (which impressed me) and figured it out by drawing it out. I thought this was pretty clever for six.

Speaking of clever, Sadie pointed out the other day that there are two kinds of ketchup: "the kind you dip in and catching up to people."

What can I say? I made two smart kids "born." Feel free to thank me.