Our last update spoke of Carly's first lost tooth and now she's lost her second. At least with the second one, it was meant to come out (without the assistance of the sidewalk). Anyway, Scott's 36th and Gillie's 8th birthdays have come and gone. Gillie had a magician come to the house for her party and it seemed to be a hit. Halloween also came and went as Gillie was one of several young witches on the block and Carly was a rabbit. There's a photo of Carly in part of her costume in the photo gallery.
The girls continue to do well in school and both are quite a bit above the expected reading level for the grades they are in. Gillie got to take home the second grade class's guinea pig, Eddie, for a long weekend in October. It was a very nice experience although the odor lingered in the girls' room for a few days afterward. There's a photo in the photo gallery of Gillie with Eddie. The girls are especially excited about the fact that they are now getting an allowance. They're starting with one dollar a week which they are encouraged to save, spend, and donate to charity. In order to encourage saving, we've had the "First Bank of Yanoff" around for over a year now. Since the girls' savings are small and we want to teach them the value of saving, the interest rate is a whopping 1% every month.
While Scott's trying a second season of adult co-ed intramural volleyball this fall, both he and Gillie have started Taekwondo lessons. After 3 lessons, we've learned 8 basic offensive movements and the 20 moves of Kibon, the first form needed to complete our white belt training and move on to a gold belt. We saw the Borat movie and found it pretty funny. It's more than just goofy humor, but it can actually be seen as a study in how society acts or reacts in various situations. Lastly, we celebrated thanksgiving with a humanely-raised turkey, but a smaller one than usual. We offered a buffet at our house for both sides of our family so that they could sample some of the vegetarian dishes we've become fond of as we move through our second meat-less year.
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School started for the girls about two weeks ago and both girls are actually enthusiastic about it. Gillie started 2nd grade and Carly started 1st grade so now both of them are in the same building once again. This makes morning drop-off easier.
There are changes with both girls as well. Gillie now has glasses for reading the chalkboard at school as she's myopic, just like the rest of her family. Carly might need them next year. Gillie lost her 4th tooth so she's got quite the gap going as they're the middle teeth on both the top and the bottom. We had planned to also state that Carly has her first loose tooth but today she spilled head-first while riding her scooter and after a quick trip to the emergency room, she's minus one tooth on top in the front. No stitches were needed and it was a baby tooth, so she'll have a gap for a while until something is ready to come in.
Gillie's now been playing the piano for a full year and is excelling at it. Carly lasted about 5 months with the violin and has decided to find a new interest. The girls and Scott are considering taking a karate or tai kwon do class together.
If you have not visited the site in a while, there are actually a few new quotes since May as well as recently-scanned artwork, more recipes from Kathy, and photos from summer visits from Kathy's family as well as our week-long vacation to the East coast. We spent one night in New York city and went all over. We had two lovely nights in Princeton with Kathy's brother, John, where we went to the Jersey shore for a day and spent time with Kathy's brother Andy as well. Then, it was up to the Poconos mountains for a 3-night stay with Kathy's uncle Jim at their cottage where we really had a great time fishing, boating, and riding on a mule. Our last night was in Philadelphia where we got to see Scott's Uncle Kenny and grandmom.
Just a reminder that you can now subscribe to updates to our website via email.
It's hard to believe that school is almost out and that summer break is about to start. Both girls are progressing well with their instruments. Gillie's about to launch into the 4th book in her lesson series and Carly is moving at a rapid pace with the violin. Meanwhile, May Klisch wrote about our switch to a vegetarian (well, except for seafood) diet in the Entrée section of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
The site's been updated in a number of ways. First off, we've added an RSS feed. You can now also receive updates to our website via email. Lastly, there's now quite a few more photos uploaded to the site. And, the photos section now has a "slideshow" mode (click on the icon) above the photos in case you don't want to keep clicking the "next" arrow button.
Everyone in the family is enjoying the piano we purchased in January. In fact, at Gillie's first Federation review she scored the highest rating, a "superior". Meanwhile, she's on book #3 of the lesson series. Scott has started following along and is currently about a quarter-way through book #2 as he attempts to learn piano on his own. Lastly, Carly has had a few weeks of violin lessons and can already play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and is showing great potential.
Our bedroom closet re-work from January was completed and it is such a pleasure for Scott to finally get dressed in the bedroom rather than out in the hallway.
The training wheels just came off of Carly's bike and she seems like she will be keeping them off as she's picked up the balancing act in just a few days. She's still the house's reigning "Blink" champion. The girls' favorite TV show these days are the reruns of Brady Bunch shown on TV Land each day. They've also enjoyed a couple more sleep-overs since they went on their first one early this year.
Lastly, some medical updates. Kathy's Graves' Disease went into remission a few months ago and so it seems that the 18-month course of medicene has done the trick. It can still come back, but for now she is off the medication. Meanwhile, Scott had out-patient surgery on April 13 for an inguinal hernia and has been recovering at home but he hopes to return to work on the following Monday.
We've added more photos to the Photos section, including a few for 2005 and some for 2006. Meanwhile, we bought a used piano in January seeing as how Gillie continues to enjoy taking lessons and continues to pick it up quickly. Everyone in the family enjoys tickling the ivories, but it will sound better once it receives a tuning.
Gillie continues to devour children's series of books. She's burned through a few of the mystery/suspense ones but she tends to avoid things along the lines of fantasy. She's started having spelling tests on a weekly basis in school and so far she's been doing excellent with them. She had a couple of field trips this month. One was to see The Princess and the Pea and another was to visit the Urban Ecology Center. She has 3 loose teeth and we've begun making a lasso out of dental floss each night and roping her loosest tooth so that she can give it an encouraging yank.
Carly recently appeared to go through a brief growth spurt. She consistently cleared her dinner plate, her dessert plate, and then often came back for more, continually nibbling for long periods of time. She seems to be past it now, perhaps, and her pants are all now a bit shorter. She's practicing handwriting in K-5 but she's still not quite taking the time to form all her letters properly, but she does write in mixed case. She's actually reading to everyone now, too, and not just the I-recognize-the-way-that-word-looks type of reading. You can see and hear her sounding out what she sees. We've been practicing with the word list Gillie got for 1st grade and she's already in good shape for what would be expected for her in the fall. Carly loves naming things such as animals she sees and she's also into nicknames. So far, Dad is "Dude", Pop Pop is "Poppy Fish", Gillie is "Gil" or "Gil-Gil". She's even tagged Gillie's friend, Penelope, with "Pel-Pel".
The entire family has gone ga-ga over Suduko, the 9x9 puzzles whereby only a few numbers are filled in and you have to deduce the rest. Kathy and Scott made it up to the hard puzzles but recently resorted to finding a Suduko strategy guide online. Kathy found a few sites that let you print off puzzles and she's printed 4x4 and 4x6 puzzles for Gillie and Carly. Gillie even attempts some easy 9x9 ones! We're in the process of having the master bedroom closet redone as Scott's closet has been accessible only via the hallway. Now, we'll have one connected closet in the master bedroom with sliding mirrored doors. It should be a much better use of the space.