What's Bailey Doing?

In the world of Bailey Celeste, there are a couple of big updates.

The first is that she has a loose tooth. I forgot how all-consuming the losing teeth thing is for kids. Apparently her teacher has a whole bulletin board dedicated to documenting lost teeth. Bailey tells us every day how "wiggly" the tooth is that day and has started to be bothered by it when she eats certain foods. I'm not sure how long it will take to actually lose it. I seem to recall some of my teeth hanging on by threads but maybe I was just too wimpy to go ahead and pull them. I sort of want her to keep her teeth as long as possible, as I've seen some kids look so awkward when they essentially have no teeth in their mouth for an extended period of time. But, I'm sure I'll think MY kid looks precious when she's toothless. :-)

The other big deal in her little 5 year-old world is the introduction of sight words. I don't remember much about learning to read except teary sessions in our kitchen on 14th street reading "Spot the Dog" books with my mom. I remember one instance when I threw the book and stormed off to bed because I was so frustrated with a certain page. Perhaps we had sight words to learn and I don't remember, or perhaps times have changed. (Don't get me started on the brief period of time when the experts thought teaching kids math through the "dot method" was brilliant. I happened to be one of the guinea pigs during this time of brilliance, and the result is that, to this day, I don't know how to add 2 numbers together without counting magical dots. But, I digress.) All I know is that the teacher is sending home 5 words at a time for the kids to learn by sight. Thus far, she knows "a", "is", "it", "go", and "but". I looked online and there are over 50 total so I went ahead and made flash cards for all of them. This has become our evening activity. Jason is far better at giving her thought associations to go with the words she's learning, although some of them have been a little less "clean" than I would want her to repeat in the presence of her teacher or classmates!

I'm sure the kindergarten experience will yield many blog-worthy stories in the months to come. Stay tuned!