Been Gone For Nearly A Month.....

Wow, didn't realize how quickly that flew! In the last month, I've rearranged our room, painted the bathroom, painted most of the living room, cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more. It's been super busy around here. We also got some new furniture and appliances with our tax refund. That took most of our refund, but we really needed them. And scratch-and-dent is cheaper than you'd think! We now have an oven that actually preheats! And a fridge whose shelves aren't falling out every time we open the door. Amazing how little things like that really make a difference.

As far as schooling goes, we've backed down a little on the pressure that Gabe was feeling. He has voluntarily started to do lessons with me out of the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book. Easy? Yes for a regular child, but not so much for mine. It's not pretty, but he's trying. He already knows the letters, but not so much the sounds that they make. So this book teaches him the sounds and helps him to learn how to sound out words. Since the 5th, he has been working on the beginning lessons, and he can now recognize am, mat and sat. But we've also noticed that he's now reading more sight words without our prompting (mostly on games!). Words like "infection" and "slayer" and other game-theme related words.
He's also consistently falling asleep but 10 (most nights, we have had a few bumps), and is drawing more pictures. He wants to draw nearly every day now, faces, people, things. Always with pencil, always what he wants to draw, always when he wants to draw.
Caleb and I are working on his reading, as he can do it, but lacks confidence. We skimmed through the same book I'm doing with Gabe, and I just had him do the words. He knows the sounds the letters make, and knows how to sound them out. It only took him maybe 20 minutes to go through all the words in 23 lessons. And he had them all right. Granted most of them are simple easy words. But it's gotten him to realize that it doesn't matter how big the word is as long as you sound them out.
James and Caitlin are reading well, and we've been trying to really make sure that they are engaged in what they are reading. She's been reading the Junie B. Jones books, and is enjoying them immensely. He's reading Artemis Fowl, and has already listened to all the books on CD, and checked out a lot of them from the library before I bought him the first set that he wanted.
Our main focus the past few weeks has been their reading, because I feel that with reading, anything else is possible and will fall into place.

Aside from the early spring cleaning we've been doing, that's pretty much it. Hopefully I can remember to keep posting and not let there be that much of a break!