More than one friend has emailed me because of my sudden stop in posting here. One of them told me that the complete stop after a fairly steady pace of posts had him concerned; he said he was worried that I’d been ‘hit by a bus.’ Well, no – not literally anyhow – but close enough. I’ve been on a project for work for almost a month now that has consumed every waking moment (and then some) so I’ve been unable to even think about the blog, much less spend time writing posts. I am now at the end of that project (hopefully) and have a work sales conference starting tonight and lasting through Friday then I should be done for a while, so life should be returning to (ab)normal over the next few days. I don’t know that I will maintain anything like the frequency of posts I did in Dec but I will try not to go weeks between posts either.

I have several posts in progress that I will hopefully find time to complete after I take a couple of days to recover. In the mean time I have a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post – all to do with Courtney, oddly enough – but haven’t found the time to. So, in no particular order, here they are:

Every year the school Courtney goes to has a big deal around hitting the 100th day of school. I don’t know if that is common or not – it wasn’t when I was a kid – but it is the norm here, at least. As part of that whole event the kids were given assignments related to the number 100. One of those was to take 100 of anything and make something interesting/creative with them. Courtney decided that she was going to get 100 paperclips and link them together into a chain. Since that would be terribly boring and would require nearly zero effort I told her we should find something else to do. We ultimately ended up sticking with paperclips, but decided we would make a mobile. I thought it would be fun to do, more interesting than a chain and would have educational potential as well. This picture is what we ended up with. I obviously handled bending out the paperclips to act as decorations at the bottom of each chain but we worked together on the rest. We met the requirement of using 100 paperclips but, more importantly, we had a blast doing it. Before I get any criticism on my involvement, making this a parent/child project was encouraged.

And, speaking of Courtney’s school, we finally got to go in and meet her teacher for the gifted program. The program is amazing, and the teacher is awesome. She seemed to be one of those rare teachers who takes an intense interest in her kids. Well, to be fair, Courtney’s school has an abnormally high number of those – her school cluster is why we live where we do. The classroom was engaging and the curriculum… wow! I can see why they are so stringent on the entry requirements for the program. We discussed lots but I can summarize fairly neatly: We will need to come back in a couple of months to see the PowerPoint presentations each kid will have produced presenting the results of their research into some subject. As soon as they are done with that they will start algebra. This is first grade.

If I can take a moment to brag on her school a little more (as if the above isn’t enough), I discovered that her school grouping is one of the very few in the state who was given the ability to set curriculum independent of the state guidelines. They earned the right because of the consistently high test scores they had. The state superintendent of schools came to spend a couple of days there talking to teachers to try and figure out how they are doing it. And last night I learned that, starting next year, the highschool will have a program in place to have students participate in joint enrollment at Georgia Tech!! While that won’t matter to Courtney for another 8 to 10 years, it is still amazing. For those not familiar with GaTech, they are consistently ranked in the top 5 engineering schools nationally along with little schools like, oh, I dunno, MIT. The beat out other, better known schools like Carnegie-Mellon by a significant margin. It is truly one of those “pick your job” schools. In case you can’t tell, daddy is very pleased with the meeting, teacher and school.

And last, but certainly not least, Courtney celebrated her seventh birthday a few weeks ago. We had eight six and seven year old girls spend the night. It was…interesting. If you are ever in a similar situation, let me share this one bit of advice: You don’t want to be too close to the girls when a Hannah Montana song comes on on Disney radio. Trust me. I’ll just be glad when I get my hearing back. Anyhow, here are a few pictures of the ‘big event.’

Until next time; peace.
/g

While waiting on the rest of the girls to arrive they sat in a circle on the floor and gossiped. How early it starts!

Them congregating on the stairs (I didn’t put them there or pose them) for some reason. I just realized looking at these that I never got all of the girls in a single shot. It was truly like herding cats.

A “Fur Real” turned out to be her favorite present.

Her opening presents with Emma’s help

…and opening…

…and opening.

ohmgosh!

She dug her new PJs.

The beginning of a teddybear relay. They had to run to the next room, put one article of clothing on the bear and bring the bear back to the next on their team. First team to get the bear fully outfitted, wins. This was one of the several activities to make them think they were having fun while, in fact, wearing them out. -muh-ha-ha-ha-