Back to School

Well the kids went back to school about 3 weeks ago now.  The end of summer also means the end of the nice weather that we had here.  Back to rain and drizzle, kind of a bummer, I could have used another month of sunshine.  So we booked some tickets to Florida in December for Max's birthday.  Head back to the home of the Mouse for a week to get some sunshine, have some fun, and visit our friends in Florida.

Ella started 1st grade this year, she is back to all day school again.  She is really liking it, she has 2 teachers instead of 1, and they seem to be doing a really good job.  She picked up reading pretty well over the summer and is turning into a bit of a bookworm.  Ella took up running club, I think with all of my running, biking, and going to gym, she has a big interest in working out.  Every Tuesday night, she and a couple of hundred kids just run around a makeshift track at school.  At the completion of every quarter mile lap they get a cube, or a block or something.  Then when they get done, they count their blocks to see how far they went. I guess she ran 2 miles this last Tuesday, that is pretty impressive in my opinion.

Speaking of bookworms, Sarah decided to join a book club with some other mom's at school and is reading more than I am.  There have been a couple of occasions where I woke up at 3am or so and Sarah would still be reading.  She is getting a bit better at controlling it, but she has really got back into reading.

Max is now in pre-K, 3 days a week at our church, Timberlake Christian.  He has the same teacher as last year in his pre-school class and a lot of the same classmates, including his best friend Gavin.  We toyed with the idea of testing Max for Kindergarten and starting him a little early, the cutoff is end of November here in Washington, so we would have had to be pushy.  In the end we decided against it and will just have him start Kindergarten next year.  Starting them late seems to be en vogue here, more and more parents are holding their kids back a year to add some maturity I guess.  My personal opinion is that parents expect a little too much out of their Kindergarten students and forget what the intention is.  Max finally had a little growth spurt, he actually is wearing size 5 clothes before his 5th birthday.  He didn't get into 4's until this last spring, but he sprouted up over the summer.  Might get some height to him after all, still skinny as a rail, but at least he has some longness to him.

In big news for me, in my continued quest for better health (I have lost 40 pounds since April), I bought a new bike, a really sweet one too.  I started commuting to work by bike, my office is only 3 miles away.  However, I will be moving to a new building on Microsoft's main campus in December and we figured we would finally by a second car.  But I decided to go hardcore in my commuting (not for the planet, for my health) and bought a nicer bike instead.  It should only take about 30 minutes to get to the new office (with a nasty climb in there), and a little over 20 to get home.  I am stocking up on rain gear and cold gear and my plan is to ride through the weather, through the conditions just about every day to work.  One nice thing that Microsoft offers is free bike tune-ups and locker rooms with showers to accomodate us cyclers.  Road biking is turning out to be a lot of fun for me, I went out on a 25 mile ride last weekend, and am looking at maybe 50 this weekend.  The bike I got is a Specialized Roubaix, made completely out of carbon fiber, has race components, and is super comfortable.  I really like it so far, and got an unbelievable deal on an end of summer sale.  I had to get to the store an hour before they opened to make sure I got it, people were driving down from Canada because the sales were so good.

In coming news, the fall season is also the start of soccer season here.  Both Ella and Max are playing, I will post more on their conquests later.  And Ella lost her first tooth just tonight!  She was determined to get it out of there and won, I will also post separately on that.

0 comments:

Post a Comment