Just For You, SGM...

These past three weeks have been horrendous for Matt's office. Between the weather and the Christmas Exodus that soldiers are treated to, work has been at a standstill (according to Matt). The kids and I have loved having Matt home so much, but I think his SGM would rather work a bit more. They're prepping to deploy and, if he's anything like Matt, the SGM is anxious to get the ball rolling. :)

Anyway, I'm directing this post to Matt's SGM because he, according to Matt, paid me a compliment that I just cannot ignore. Apparently Matt's SGM expressed his appreciation of my writing skills. I was very encouraged by the compliment and am thrilled to be able to give Matt's boss a detailed account of Matt's where abouts at any given time (SGM found a post stating that Matt went to work at 7:00am, which is normally utterly rediculous since their report time is 8:30. This made SGM question what I was reporting, but, after looking up the date, he found it to be accurate due to it being a deployment training day). lol...

As for the rest of our happenings:
Matt rented a storage unit nearby and we've (okay, so I meant to say that he's) started working on getting our things moved into it. Matt took down our indoor Christmas decorations and has already stored them. Then we (and yes, I actually helped) went through several boxes from the garage. We ended up giving 7 medium-large boxes to Goodwill. They were stuffed full of toys, crafts, clothes and miscellaneous items that we no longer wanted or needed. The idea is to downsize our rather large holdings in order to make future moves more efficient. Besides, there are not going to be too many places that will have a nice sized garage to allow us the space to store all of our junk in our future locations (especially if I get my way and we end up in Hawaii [or even Korea, which is another location I'd really like to live at some point]).

Little Mr. M suprised me this morning. He was playing his Nintendo DS; Brainage, which I bought for myself. I've learned it's quite a unique, fun and interesting way to help M (and C as soon as I teach her) keep up with his addition and subtraction as well as some of his reading. It's been a wonderful introduction to multiplication, too. This morning he ended up reading a portion that I thought he was totally incapable of deciphering by sounding out the words. This is a HUGE accomplishment for M because he has never quite understood how the "sound it out" process worked. He is able to say the sound of each individual letter but isn't able to sound things out fluidly to make the word more coherent. Well... He did just that this morning when he sounded out "blue", "black", "red" and "yellow". I'm so proud of him!

C is still doing marvelously. Her kindergarten teacher mailed a packet home to enable us to work with her on her "DIBELS" test (this is a test that checks how well the kids are learning their phonics). Sadly, it was a wasted envelope, paper, time and effort since she is unable/unqualified to take the DIBELS test. Due to being profoundly deaf she must learn to read via sight words and memorization, which she accomplishes with great skill. I can tell you that she is excessively excited about returning to school. She asks every day when she can get on the bus and go, and I just had to show her on the calendar exactly which day she would be returning. Hhhhmmmmm... Is it me she's tired of or the boredom of being home with Mom all the time?!? LOL!

M, on the other hand, is rather enjoying his newfound freedom. 3 weeks off of school will make anyone feel like they are on summer vacation, even with the snow piled in the backyard (although that's finally nearly gone). I know that's how I feel... And I, too, am ready for them to head back to the drudge of being educated! ;)

Well, things are progressing fast, now... Christmas is over, the decorations are down and we're packing to move. Valentine's day is just around the corner followed shortly by St. Patrick's day. So, it's not long now before we begin the new chapter of our lives.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year!!!