loose teeth and inlaws

So my consistency quotient is not very high right now... not much to say about that except I guess I've just been treading water the last couple of weeks, trying to stay caught up. Michael and I are busy finishing up his kindergarten year of school--he tested out of one math book and we are finishing his 13th list of spelling words (total of 260) for the year. According to whoever made up the scale, this actually leaves him at a mid to late second grade competency level in spelling. I do have to say that he and I have both really enjoyed this spelling program (phonogram based if you do not remember). It just makes sense to both of us. I've seen a big increase in his comfort level with reading, as well, which is exciting! He is excited since we set a goal of being done with school for the year by his birthday, which is next Tuesday.

My brother David, his wife Rabia, and their son Isaac came down for a much anticipated visit last week! We had not seen each other since last April, which was just too long. Isaac is a cute little monkey of a boy who (to me, anyway) looks just like David as a little boy, just in a different shade. David was blond in his earliest years. We spent some time shopping; the guys took the kids to the beach (while Rabia graciously spent the morning with me at a MOPS event); and enjoying a relatively quiet Mother's Day at home. It was a fun visit, but I had forgotten that toddlers struggle with traveling, losing their familiar surroundings, and especially being without their regular schedule. I am sure Isaac had some catch up sleep to work on as my kids are pretty early risers, but overall he did really well. Did I mention that he is a really cute little boy??

A friend commented that there are no pictures of me on the blog. This is true, but the main reason is that there are not really any pictures of me in our library. I am generally on the other end of the camera. I think if you go back to the August entries, there are pictures of me in the vacation posts.

One funny thing from David and Rabia's visit: I bought a new wireless router because my old one was behaving very strangely. It took David (who is a computer geek by profession) and me (who computer geek by hobby) at least two hours of frustration and headscratching to get the thing up and running to our satisfaction. This is sad, especially since the manufacturer provided two different "easy to use" programs to basically do the setup work for us! Our issues all boiled down to a small, but critical issue: the router's default IP address happened to be the same as our modem's. The first program couldn't resolve the conflict and the second did, but changed the router IP without informing us of the fact. Everything works now, though, and so far the new router seems to be an improvement over the old one.

I have to come back and add to the post since I realized that the loose teeth never made it past the title (didn't catch that, did you?). Michael, who was just a fat little baby yesterday, has two loose teeth. Suddenly he is a lean, strong, unbelievably active (almost) six year old boy who is growing adult teeth! Two of his six year molars (which are permanent teeth) have come in already without me even knowing it. It doesn't make me feel old, but it's hard to believe that he is that old!