Time flies!

Yeah, so I have decided to start blogging again with some sort of regularity.

My baby girl has turned five and I'm wondering where time went. She is SUCH a big girl now...she talks like a miniature adult and asks all sorts of questions that I never thought a five year old would ask. She no longer wants to fall asleep listening to the acoustical nursery music we used for years. Now its James Taylor's Greatest Hits. She's interested in science and biology and space and weather. She's really into how weather works and likes to watch the local weather radar, reading the weather report to me. She wants to be a scientist when she grows up.

 We've been homeschooling her for a year and a half using the Funnix beginning reading program, then the follow-up to that at the second grade level and now a reading mastery third grade text, and now C is working with her on math. She reads and comprehends VERY well. Sometimes it still takes me by surprise, but I am getting used to it. She is small for her age, so it is a little funny when we are out and about and she starts reading signs aloud and commenting on them and folks are giving her sideways looks, wondering how old this kid is, LOL! She reads at about a third grade level. And now she is doing a lot of counting (by fives, tens, twos, fours, etc....forward and backward to and past 100) and learning addition, subtraction, money and time. She just soaks all this stuff up!

She is currently obsessed with dragons, ninjas, and superheroes.

She is still doing gymnastics and tae kwon do. She starts full-day kindergarten in two weeks. She will be attending a Spanish/English dual language immersion program offered by our school district. So she will alternate half days in the English classroom and the Spanish classroom. They do everything in English in the English classroom and everything in Spanish in the Spanish classroom and just teach like normal. The goal is for them to be fluent in both. About half the kids will be native Spanish speakers and about half are native English speakers. She knows some Spanish because she attended a Spanish immersion pre-school where they spoke in Spanish all the time. Did I mention she soaks this stuff up?

She's an amazing little person and it makes me sad that her birth parents will never know what an amazing little human they created. She is kind, funny, happy, smart, physically active and hard-working. She loves to give affection, shows genuine concern for her fellow human beings, and walks through life with one question after another on the tip of her tongue. She is thoughtful and introspective and creative.

I have had knee surgery to repair my torn ACL. It took about three weeks for me to go to the doctor after my sprain, at which point he told me my ACL was about 80% torn. So I had it replaced and my recovery was a lot easier than I anticipated. I did it arthroscopically, so there was minimal cutting. Surgery was May 24th. I was off crutches about ten days later and wore the dratted knee brace 24/7 for six weeks (except showers and rehab, of course). I religiously did my physical therapy rehab all summer. I'm all good now except that I'm still working on muscle strength and stretching out the scar tissue in my knee cap...I can't comfortably squat down low and sometimes my knee stiffens up pretty quickly if I sit certain ways, but the Dr. says that will all get better with time and exercise. I can't do anything for quite some time that requires twisting my knee or sudden changes of direction.

I'm still knitting and crocheting away. Working on a pullover for C, some nesting Russian dolls (matryoshkas), and am about to cast on for a lacy scarf. I also need to whip out another dragon for N. I made one for her last month and she's been asking for more...