Rolling Along

There’s one thing I know about life. It goes on.

And so on it has gone at the Nichols household. I am very grateful for my darling little distractions who constantly need to be snuggled and fed and clothed … and who also entertain me so thoroughly and occasionally break my heart with their insight and sadness. I am busy and that is mostly nice.

The kids started karate lessons basically in the midst of all this mess. We went to try things out the week before Mom went into the hospital. Ben was the original target, but after seeing what was up, Tabby REALLY WANTED (“Please please, Mommy, let me take Karate too!”) to join him and we agreed to let her. They have private lessons two days a week (this will only be for a couple of months before they go to 1 day/week) and then Tabby can attend up to 3 group sessions per week. Ben is not yet ready for them, but they think he’ll be there in a few months.

I really like what it is doing for the kids. It is all about concentration and determination and there is a good bit of memorizing and precision as well, even when they’re little and of course the physical conditioning. Tabby is her focused self throughout her lessons and Ben is all energy and power – the concentration is a bit harder for him yet. I really really love watching them do their stuff.

Ben is doing only karate and it feels like enough for him, but Tabby is involved in a couple more activities. She is taking Spanish lessons after school two days a week. This is only the second week, so I don’t know a ton about them, but they do “normal kid activities” like duck-duck-goose in Spanish and she seems to be enjoying it.

The other activity that Tabby is doing is Let’s Play Music, a music curriculum specifically for little kids (pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before). It uses fun activities to teach music theory in a pretty sneaky way. They’re learning things like relative pitch, audiation and beat and rhythm divisions. I attend with Tabby every other week and she goes on her own the other weeks. It’s been really fun and I hope to start Ben next year.

At school, things are pretty normal for Ben (just how he likes them) but Tabby is in a whole new league as a first grader. We get lots and lots of paperwork for us to read about curriculum concepts and classroom rules, etc. and Tabby gets a packet of homework every week. We have generally about 4 assignments to complete over the course of the week and it’s a good idea in theory, but with all that’s been going on, we’ve been hard pressed to get it done on time, especially since we had the equivalent of an extra week of work from the day she missed. Oy.

I do think her teacher is a good one and I know she’s learning a lot, but with our extra crazy (on top of normal crazy) schedule lately, I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with his expectations. I’m really hoping as things are getting back to “new normal” that it will feel more manageable.

We had a great time camping this weekend. It was a great way to end our wonderful camping season and the fact that Dad and Kelly were able to join us made it that much better. I hope to soon actually download some photos from the camera and write about it!