I wonder if everyone's life looks like mine. I kind of hope not, because then I have cause for optimism about our own future being different.

We're in Transition Week. One of a couple. The time when summer pushes back on the spring stuff that isn't finished and then you toss in a couple of high-intensity special capstone events for good measure. Add in a little Clendenon craziness, and you get the picture.

Here's today, and yes, it's still a schoolday on top of all this, not that anything got done:

Orientation and first training session at Learning RX
Drop off leftover conference books at St. Joseph's Villa
Practice play lines with friend
Dive practice
Swim practice
Tennis practice
Dance recital rehearsal

What we skipped: baseball game; picking up flowers for Frances's hair for recital

Tomorrow is another Learning RX session (way across town), play practice, band practice, flute lesson, Cub Scouts, dive practice, swim practice. I'm exhausted just writing it.

Though we have a lot going on, probably the biggest time consumer that is both exciting and stressful is the cognitive training that Walter is doing. This program, PACE, requires 3 hours a week in the center for 12 weeks working one on one with his trainer, Andrea, and then we need to do at least three more hours at home with him on the off days. Tonight's first assignment is to have Walter watch the Karate Kid, which we're doing right now (yes, that's right, it's after 10 p.m. and the kids are still up) to learn the lessons of wax-on/wax-off and sand the floor and kicking like a bird. Walter's assignment is to try to figure out what Daniel learns from all his exercises, what the wax on, wax off has to do with karate, how practice and concentration in one thing that seems unrelated can carry over into other areas of your life. We also did some training, even though he wasn't necessarily supposed to tonight. The first thing they learn is the names of all the presidents forward and backward in order, and they are timed on this and must meet certain benchmarks. Walter has it down, but he doesn't have the time thing covered. He's getting stressed, but he's working on it. He managed to get a "gold" in the 10 and 20 categories, but not on all 44, which is where he started crying with the stopwatch going. He also worked on attention arrows, which is a variation on the old say the name of the color when the word name of another color is on the paper. Again, he is timed on how fast he can say the names of rows of colored arrows or say which direction they point and has to say the color of each arrow on the beat of a metronome at various speeds. It is cool to see the gradual improvements. For each task, he gets points, so he has incentive to work harder. My motivation is high now, and I hope it will stay that way for the next 12 weeks. It's intensive, but finite, and hopefully this will improve his auditory and visual processing and his processing speeds, which should carry over into his reading, listening, attention and other skills.

At the conference, I also picked up a new wordbuilding/vocabulary program that I'm dying to start. I'm second-guessing myself for having gotten a level that may be higher than what we should have started with, but I am hoping that this will help break down vocabulary to help with both spelling and understanding longer words. What I'm seeing is a shift as we had into summer. We'll finish up Saxon math one of these days soon--about 12 more days left or something, but then we'll focus on this brainskills stuff, doing more of the Critical Thinking Company books that I've collected over the years, playing games, doing this vocabulary stuff, and helping Frances learn to read. I'm pretty impressed with her progress over the last month. She has been working through Headsprout Reading, which is an online program (yes, I'm spending more money on "education" than I thought possible now) that has her completing one 10-15 minute episode a day and claims to get her reading at the level of an average 8 year old by the end. We'll see if it's true. I still haven't seen the real "click" that tends to happen with reading. She's still laboring through the short words like she always has, but there's bit by bit change, and her fluency is going up. I'll try to remember to say how it's going in a few weeks. She's near the end of the first 40 episodes right now, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to pay for the next 40 right away. Rutledge is doing it, too, but he's moving slowly. Amazingly, though he is delayed in many areas, he is starting to read some short words and knows quite a few sounds. He's not exactly breezing through or understanding everything, but slow and steady wins the race, right?

And Spongebob School, as we call it, is nearly over. He has been doing speech therapy for almost 3 months, but unfortunately, there have only been about 5 sessions so far because of holidays and then us being gone last week. Now he only has one more before the schoolyear ends. It's a little frustrating, since a delay in such a short life is significant and 3 months is a long time to wait to get on the issue again, and so far he hasn't gotten to material that is challenging or works on his problem areas (specifically, one of his age-inappropriate areas is that he can't say "k" and g" sounds at the beginnings of words). But he has had a lot of fun, he has learned all of his sounds taught so far, and he performs them like a little trained monkey. I'm wondering if there's something I can do to further the process over the summer. I hate the feeling that I need to become an expert in someone else's professional area, but I guess that's what parenting is, when it all comes down. We are the experts. We are at ground level and know what our kids need, and then we endeavour to find out how to meet those needs, no matter how far flung from what we thought we were experts in they might be.

Oh my goodness. I can't believe my kids are still up. Especially with a physical day like they've had (dive, swim, tennis). We're all working on getting up earlier, particularly now that I have this running ambition and program I'm trying to follow. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow will be rainy, which will eliminate some of the things from our list of to-dos, but I'm excited about the changes toward a more outdoor lifestyle that the impending summer brings, I'm excited about wrapping up some of our regular year stuff, and I'm ready for a bit of change.

Nancy