Kindergarten's going great!

Amy and Mrs. Mitkowski at
meet the teacher day

Amy is doing so well in kindergarten, just like we thought she would. She is excited about everything they're learning, and is enjoying the structure and organization of the classroom. We are so incredibly fortunate to have gotten Mrs. Mitkowski and Mrs. Cote as her teachers – Mrs. Mitkowski really seems to see what Amy needs, and takes the time to do things that will help her. Amy has quickly learned to use lower case letters and is really reading, though I think she still doesn't feel 100% comfortable and confident with her abilities – she doesn't feel ready to sit and read on her own, though I think she's pretty well capable of it. Amy wanted to learn to write her name in cursive, so Tod showed her how and she's been busy perfecting her signature.

Amy learned to tie her shoes last month....just before she broke her wrist. She got that cast off yesterday, thankfully, so now we can get back to wearing tie shoes and reinforce her abilities. And that cast – it didn't slow her down one tiny bit. She's a bit too much of a pro at it...here's hoping for no more broken bones!

Today was our first parent-teacher conference with Mrs. Mitkowski. She reviewed how Amy did on the PALS (Phonological Literacy Awareness Screening) testing. The expected benchmark for kids as they start kindergarten is a score of 27 (I think that's right – somewhere in the 20s) and then they'd like kids to be up to a score of 81 by the end of the school year. Amy started the year with a score of 85. Wow.

Mrs. Mitkowski also said "You know Mrs. Cote and I try not to have favorites, but Amy just captured our hearts from the very first day." Wow, is that nice!

So far, so good!

You've got to be kidding!

Well, she's gone and done it again. On Thursday, October 7, Amy fell off a bike at her after-school program. I got there to pick her up about two minutes after she fell. I had a feeling, based on the way she was crying, that she truly was injured. I took her home and we tried to figure out how bad it was. She said her wrist really hurt, but said the pain was a 5 on the 1-10 pain scale, with 10 being how much it hurt when she broke her humerus. She could move her arm and bend her wrist forward but refused to bend her wrist back. About a half-hour of indecision later, I figured I should just take her to the urgent care and get it x-rayed.

Off we went, back to the same urgent care that missed her broken arm earlier this year. This time we got a doctor whose specialty was sports medicine, so I felt more hopeful that they'd get it right. Sure enough, she had a buckle fracture of the distal radius (the bone that connects to your thumb). Evidently kids' bones are soft and sometimes they can buckle, much like a soda can when it's crushed. She fell on her wrist just the wrong way. They bandaged her up and we went on our way. She got a super cool blue cast the next morning – two and a half weeks of that and she'll be good as new.

Same arm (right) as before....three months to the day. How crazy is that! We're thinking we might need to wrap her in bubble wrap every time we leave the house from now on.