Milestones

These past few weeks we've reached some exciting milestones in our family.
One of the most..... life-changing.... for us is that Elijah is now mobile.
In the last few days he's really started crawling! The only thing that is
saving the rest of us is that he's still pretty slow. Sometimes it's more
like "2 steps forward, 1 step back". But he's getting there, and he's
figuring out how to get to the places he most wants to get to.
Unfortunately, one of the places he most wants to go are the 2 bottom
cupboards in the kitchen which only have curtains over them. He loves to
hide behind the curtain, his chunky diapered bum and feet the only parts of
him that are visible, and then proceed to pull out as many canned goods as
he can manage. I figure I have about a week at the most before I have to
start moving anything breakable out and up. I haven't thought about it for
some time, but it's definitely that time when I need to "child proof" the
house and get all the cleaning supplies and such up high.

Another exciting milestone is that Justin (5 1/2 years old) is reading now.
To all my FB friends, you probably knew this already, as he started just
before we came out to the village. But it's really fun to see his reading
just exploding. He was so close to reading before we came out to the
village, so I had started collecting some beginning readers from friends to
bring out here with me. But just days before we left, he came and found me
in the kitchen (where I was probably frantically working to prepare some
food stuff for the village) and told me "Hey, Mom! I can read every two
letter word in this book!". He then proceeded to go thru the entire book
and read every 2 letter word in it. So much for me teaching him. So for
the last 4 weeks out here, I've continued to work on his reading with him.
We practice some phonics almost daily and he's loving to get books and read
them on his own. I'm amazed at how well he's reading after only 4ish weeks!


I think watching a kiddo learn to read is one of the most fun things! It's
fun to see the letters and sounds click in their heads and the blending and
such make sense. And while I'm proud of him, I sure can't take any credit!
Justin did it on his own.

So between chasing a mobile 7 month old, and reading with Justin, life is
busy, but fun.