Thanksgiving Break

Can you believe that kids have a week off of school now during Thanksgiving? When we were kids, we had 2 days off! Seems like kids these days hardly go to school anymore, with all the extra days off, early release days, etc. due to budget cuts!

With that said, we met with Jadon's teacher for parent/teacher conferences this week (already!) He is doing very well, on track and above in all areas.  Especially in reading.  He is really excelling in reading.  They have reading groups in his class, and each group consists of just a handful of the kids. His teacher said they are at the point in the reading now where a lot of the kids start to slow down in the learning, but she said Jadon keeps climbing away, and she doesn't want to keep him from continuing that so she wants to move him to the next group level. So, she sent us home with 2 extra lessons to get him caught up to the next group, which we are working on and so far is easy peezy for him, and he is very excited to move up! He enjoys reading and is eager to learn.
His writing and drawing/coloring are not the best, only because he is not interested in those things, so he doesn't put any effort into it.  He has no problem in actually doing them though.  He can easily write his letters now, its just sloppy. I have to get on to him about writing with nice handwriting, especially when writing things like schoolwork or thank you cards. Of course, I can't talk, I have terrible handwriting so who am I to tell him to write nicer!?

On friday he and a couple other kids in his class got to go with the principal and get a cookie because they ran the most laps in their class for the jog-a-thon!  We are pretty proud of him! He is really enjoying school!

So in other news, our bug problem persists. I've been trying desperately to get rid of these ants, but it seems that no matter what, they are all over the place. Since they are all over just randomly, I cant place any bait traps. The last straw for me came the other day when I found about 5 on my couch throughout the day. Also that was a bad day and I was finding ants in every room of the house pretty frequently. I spent 2 hours vacuuming the house, and taking the hose and vacuuming the floorboards and around the walls, moving the couches.
The bug guy will be here bright and early Tuesday morning to treat the bugs. :)

Every year we do Operation Christmas Child.  If you're not familiar with it, basically people can create shoe boxes full of toys, toiletries, school supplies, etc. for kids in less fortunate countries, and every year they send millions of boxes to children.  You can make a box online through the website and they will pack the box or you can pack your own and drop it off at a designated location.  In the past we've just done it online, but the kids have not seemed to understand the point much.  This year, since Jadon seems to be having an issue with being quite ungrateful lately, and because we want the kids to understand that Christmas isn't about getting. We want them to experience the joy of giving, and to see that while yes, its nice to get gifts, but its even nicer to give gifts. So this year we packed our own boxes.  This way the kids had to go to the store, pick out stuff that they would not get to keep, that would not be for them, and then give it away to children who would get to keep it.  In addition, Derek showed the kids videos and pictures of kids receiving their boxes. The kids liked seeing the children so happy. It always brings a tear to my eye to see those videos of those happy faces.
For me, its bittersweet.  I wish that I could make hundreds of boxes, and I wish that I could personally deliver each one.  The reactions from the the children receiving the boxes are always the reactions that I hope to see from my own kids when they get presents from anyone, but its usually not that way. One of the downsides of being so fortunate is that you grow up not appreciating what you have and what you get, so we are hoping to instill this into our kids early on so that they realize that they are really and truly blessed.