It's official.  Anna is reading!  Now that she knows her five short vowel sounds well, and about 11 consonants....she has begun reading short words.  I was getting a little frustrated at how slow the curriculum was going for her, it's been soo easy and she's always begging to do more.  SO, I went ahead and let her do a couple lessons a day to get a few more sounds under our belt.  Since Abeka doesn't have her in readers til well into next month....I pulled out some old, BOB books that someone gave to me.  These are about 30 small readers that slowly increase in difficulty and have funny, black line drawing characters.  I grabbed the first two and scanned them to see if she knew all the sounds.  Sure enough, we sat down and she read them both fairly easily.  It was the 'cat has a hat.  Sam sat on the mat' type of stuff.  But hey, there were characters and pictures!!  To say she was thrilled would be an understatement!  She read them again and again, sang them, read them to her sister, carried them around with her all day...in the end she memorized them!    Her first 'real' books.  How fun.

The boys finally finished their Grade 1 arithmetic books and we start today in Grade 2.  I'm relieved to finally be about where we should be.  The whole first quarter is mostly review, so we will be skimming through pretty fast just touching on some things for reminders.  The end result is that we should be where we are supposed to be by Christmas.  They were introduced to Roman Numerals and Multiplication at the end of their books.  Exciting! 

We have a huge week or so ahead of us.  We're gearing up for a family trip to St. Louis on Saturday.  Matt will be singing at a church on Sunday evening, then staying to do a concert at a family fall festival on Wednesday night.  On Monday and Tuesday, we are going to do some sightseeing...including the St. Louis zoo.  We are all excited about that.  They have a big insectarium, which is perfect as we are studying insects in science!  David is excited b/c they have some kind of see-through slide that goes THROUGH the otter pool.  We've been doing our online research as you can see.   

The rest of the week is terribly busy with Bible study, AWANA, a baby shower and board retreat on Saturday.  (we leave after the program on Sat night)  We'll be back next Thursday night then.  Not looking forward to that drive home all in one day.  Yuck. 

On Tuesday night, we may try to make it to the high school football game.  Our guys are 8-1 going into a big, playoff game for the first time in our small town's history.  I imagine everyone in town will be there.  We have several guys from our church who start, including one staff kid.  It would be fun to see it.  Speaking of football, my husband informed me last week that we are going to have a special treat for our anniversary this year! (Dec 16)  He managed to get ahold of some Packer tickets, and we will be going on Dec 9!!  HOW fun will that be?  I'm thrilled that I get to go to my first NFL game, and that I get to see Brett Favre play before he retires....if he can just stay healthy til then. 

I'm reading a really great book.  In fact, I've been reading alot of interesting food/diet stuff lately.  Have to write an entry on it sometime soon.

Well, this will probably be the last entry until after our trip.  Hope everyone has a great week.