It's so hard to believe, but Reed turned six this past Tuesday. Where does the time go???He continues to be so interested in learning new things and figuring out all types of puzzles. Reed is particularly good with logic puzzles...and many times can figure them out more quickly than me.
The current huge obsession is Mario Kart on the Wii. Reed has studied the instruction manual and can tell you which things are stronger than the others, how you combat this and that, and on and on. Clearly his Mom doesn't get quite as excited about the game, but it is fun to see. He enjoys making different Wii characters (Mii's, I guess they're called) and continues to get frustrated with Amy when she inevitably loses interest in the race at about the thirty-five second mark.
Reed is doing well with Kindergarten and his teacher Mrs. Lewis works hard to keep him engaged. He has a fifth grade "buddy" named Holden who visits with him most days; they read together and do other book-related activities. The classroom has a discipline system where the goal is to keep your clip on the purple octopus, not moving to green, yellow, and certainly not red. Reed has struggled some with this, often times having his clip moved because he's called out while the teacher was talking or something like that. I think he just gets excited and finds it hard to contain himself. But things are going more smoothly now. Reed's handwriting has improved by leaps and bounds since he started K - it's really great. Week by week, his spelling is improving and I expect it won't be too long before he's got it down.
Most nights, Reed is SO exhausted from the long day, which is quite a change from when he was in preschool and wanted to stay up half the night. At CASA, the after-school program, they run and play games and generally wear him out. Sometimes I think they do their best to make up games that require the kids to run from one end of the gym to the other, over and over. Which is great! Works for everybody.
Reed still likes to read books at night, though lately he prefers to do workbook pages (he's adding 3-digit numbers now, and doing his best to figure out multiplication) and read on this own rather than have us read to him. Which is bittersweet....it's wonderful to see the independence, but we'll certainly be sad when he doesn't want us to read to him any longer.
We celebrated Reed's big day this past Sunday at Chuck E. Cheese. He didn't want to invite tons of kids, and we ended up with a total of seven kids there - Reed, Amy, Aly, Alicia Arnold, Joey Donovan, Harrison Lindsey, and Patrick Hayden. It ended up being a perfect number of kids, and I think they all had a great time.
When I think back to the day Reed was born, it feels so long ago that we were given this precious gift. We are so grateful to have him (and his baby sister, of course) and every day is a joy to be with him. We love you, Reed!
