Back to our regularly scheduled programming

Enough about me, at least for the moment.

On the kid front it's mostly been about the walking and the teething lately, with the start of a very long career as teachers pet thrown in for good measure.

Lupe has pretty much mastered walking, at this point. He can go pretty much indefinitely, and has even taken to going more quickly (although I will restrain myself from calling this running) on occasion. The biggest thing, though, is that he can now stand himself up without using a prop, which means that he can fall, which he does very, very often, and still get himself right back up, whereas before he had to crawl over to some object in order to pull himself up.

It's all very exciting to him, of course. What is less exciting is the teething. It just seems never ending at this point. He got two good nights in this week where he wasn't sick and wasn't teething, then a bad night, and sure enough, we found a new tooth poking through the next morning. At least there is always an identifiable reason when he gets fussy, unlike some other small people.

Let's see, the only other news about him I can think of right now is that he got his first haircut last week, which was a serious pain because he just never stops moving, but in spite of the horrible butchery, he actually looks a bit better than the seriously wierd shagginess that was going on before.

And, so, on to news of big sis (who has yet to have a haircut, incidentally). As you may know, she is going to preschool three days a week, which she started in November. It took her a couple of weeks to say a single word, and longer than that to start to really warm up, but now she is fully acclimated and integrated. The school is really small, and right around the corner, so it's absolutely perfect for her. Unfortunately, it's less so for us in that it's really expensive. We're probably going to have to move her at some point since our money is fairly rapidly running out, but in the meantime, she has become, according to the director and lead teacher Kathleen (or as Ruby says it Kap-a-leen), her "star student".

This has pleased Mommy enormously, and probably bought her a couple extra months at the school. I think it's mainly due to that fact that she seems to be making big strides in learning how to read. I've noticed that she has moved from identifying the letters of the alphabet by name to making the sounds, so she must be doing some sort of sounds-phonics thing. When I was dropping her off the other day, a teacher asked Ruby if she was "going to read for us today". I'm not exactly sure what that meant, but it did seem to be related to her star-ness.

No doubt this will endear her to her schoolmates, now and for years to come.