First Hike on the AT
Year six has been a lot of fun! It is crazy to think that at this time last year he was getting ready for Kindergarten, and we were so worried how he would ever get out of the car by himself and walk to his class. Yeah, that took about two days of adjustment and he was running inside the school. So here are some other highlights from the past year:
1) Swimming! -We have been doing swim lessons all summer and watching it "click" has been like watching him take his first steps. Just this past week he has been able to jump into the deep end and swim the whole width of the pool. It's like a super proud moment that is also kind of terrifying.
2) Sports for him and coaching for me! - Over the past year he has played baseball and soccer. Coaching soccer last fall was a very new experience for me. I had my first whistle! I had a binder with plays and formations drawn out. I had these checklists and schedules to run our practices by. Maybe I took it a little too serious, but my team was really good! Coach pitch baseball this summer was a more laid back affair. I did pitch several games and was pretty proud of myself. I never hit more than three kids with the ball (per game) and none of them cried.
And not one of my pitches hit a kid in the face
3) Video Games - Back in the fall I did something really ridiculous, standing in line outside a Toys R Us, in the rain, to get one of the 11 SNES classics they had in stock. So we have been partying like it is 1992 since.
Only took 52 lives to beat Ganon in Legend of Zelda - Link to the Past
4) Reading! - He loves to read. About halfway through Kindergarten, he just pretty much started to take over reading before bedtime. I can pretty much just turn the pages and help with words now and then. Over the past few months, he will occasionally read the campaign signs that are all over the place. Have you ever tried to explain elections and democracy to a little kid? When he asked if he gets to vote, I started to explain how it was just for adults because they are supposed to know best...ummm....let's just talk about Sponge Bob.
5) Learning kid culture and loving it! When your kid is really little, yes the cartoons get to be super annoying. Disney Junior runs the same five episodes of each of their shows pretty much every day. But now we are finally getting into the cool stuff. I have had to do some research on the super heroes, but all in all, a lot of it is just a reboot of the same things I watched/played in the 80's and 90's. Even the video game stuff is pretty much the same, with Mario and Zelda. The water guns are still Super Soakers. The TV and movies include Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Sponge Bob, and even a remake of Inspector Gadget. It actually makes me have some sympathy for my parents because all of that stuff was foreign and new to them. Right now, one of his "favorite movies", is the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie. I like to tell him that his Granddaddy took me to see it at the theater was I was nine. And there is some new stuff, Like Captain Underpants, which I think is hilarious. I am probably a bigger Captain Underpants fan than he is.
So we are looking forward to another year of great adventures. Somebody has got to help Captain Underpants foil the evil plots of Professor Poopypants.....remember kids, "The emphasis is on the Poop!"
Tra - La - La!!!!!
