So Natha's now a full-time kindergartener...

...which makes me even more a trophy wife. I dutifully cut 12 bananas in half and placed them in two big ziploc bags for Natha's class snack today - I even threw in two boxes of Vanilla wafers to make it ultra-snack-ish.

So now I've got today and next week until I start school myself (and start teaching again) - there's an 'organizational' meeting next wednesday. I need to file my course of study and apply for unconditional admission now that I have enough hours to...

I made it! I stayed home *2 months* with Natha to get him ready for school - behavior-wise and knowledge-wise he wasn't on par with other to-be-kindergarteners until the end of july and we don't think he would be now if I hadn't stayed home with him. I think that the behavior problems were getting in the way of him learning, namely the excess of sugar making it hard for him to control himself. I was one to have too much energy in middle school and high school - and if I couldn't let it out by playing some sport, I'd jump up and down in place to get it out of me. When I had an avulsion fracture on my left ankle I couldn't do much of anything, so I jumped up and down on my right foot as much as I could - otherwise I couldn't sleep at night. No wonder I got a stress fracture in my right foot 5 months later.

The other thing about Natha to remember is that he *just* turned 5 - there are lots of kids who went to pre-k or otherwise missed the deadline for turning 5 in time for school last year - I was one of those kids. Ed, however, was one of the younger ones in his class - even though we are 4 months apart, he graduated high school a year before I did. Natha just had to mature naturally - which he has. We went to Logan's last night and dinner took 2 hours - and there was no screaming, running around, or other things that most kids his age do. Sure, he did things to get attention, but he rarely got out of his seat and ate quite a bit of food.

I don't think Ed (or even me, honestly) completely understand how atypical Natha and his habits are - he eats way more and much weirder stuff than most adults do, we can go and have a 2 hour dinner without disasterous results, and he has the fine and gross motor skills of an average 6 or 7 year old. I haven't seen all of the kids in his class line up, but he's probably among the tallest if not the tallest (big surprise there, I know)...

Natha's grandpa is coming down to Tennessee to fish at some lake and is going to pick Natha up after school to take him with him - Natha should like that, since he a)loves his grandpa and b)loves to fish. He'll stay overnight and come back tomorrow afternoon...

I'm supposed to mow the lawn today - it just depends on how hot it is after I get back from my yoga class - I haven't been since last saturday which is good in one way and bad in another - it's good because it gives my hamstrings a chance to heal more, and it's bad because I haven't been practicing asanas in that long - and I'm going to a weekend yoga retreat in florida in 2 weeks... where most people have been practicing for *way* longer than I have...

I've adapted a completely different strategy for Pikmin now - I went back yesterday and started over my game (kept the further advanced game I had been playing just in case) to start accumulating ship parts at a rate of about 2 per day to get all the easy ones in while storing up as many pikmin as I could - in my more advanced game, I ran into a problem where I don't have enough pikmin or skill to kill the monsters I need to, and all of the parts that are left are really hard to get. Before I was subscribing to the one-part-in-one-day-is-ok theory, but now I realize that you have to get the easy parts 2 in a day to allow you time to spend a day to set up getting a part guarded by more monsters. I've also had to consult the internets to find out how to kill some of these nasty litle buggers. And yes, I know that Ed is the only one who would understand this paragraph - and he probably doesn't really care. He's secretly jealous that I'm at home playing a video game and he's working all the time, I know how this works. At least this is keeping me from getting in a funk since I'm not very busy at the moment - I'm about to start using my planner to plan out the day's activities for pikmin to get as much done as possible. Yes, I know I'm weird.

About time for yoga... see yous guys later. Dude.