William 6.3

We walk to and from school together each day and so far its been a lovely little bit of exercise through the neighborhood each day. The neighbor's boy Alfred often accompanies us as well, so we are quite the pack walking around. When I am dropping him off, he and Alfred will run ahead towards the playground, but while Alfred continues up the stairs to the playground, Will stops and waits for me to give him a hug and a kiss goodbye. Similarly at pick up time, when he is excused by his teacher, he comes running towards me at full speed and give me the most exuberant hug. He is such a sweet, loving little boy! I will enjoy it while it lasts!

The other day we were getting supplies for Halloween and I bought them a bunch of glow sticks for walking around that night. The kit included way more than we'd need, so I started giving them each one before bed to play with. Then one night I noticed Will chewing on the end of one. One time when he was two he chewed on a blue glow stick and then I went into his room that night and his whole face was blue. So I told Will that story about why we don't chew on glow sticks. He said that he understood and I thought my work was done. Then about 20 minutes later he comes tearing down the stairs, into the office proclaiming that something amazing was happening! His finger was glowing! And his sheets and carpet were glowing too! I sighed and asked him if he had chewed a hole into his glow stick like I had just told him NOT to do. He denied any knowledge and I had to remove the sticks from his possession and put them in the trash. He said that he finally understood why he shouldn't bite glow sticks, but honestly I will probably deal with this again sometime soon. This kid STILL has not outgrown the phase of putting random stuff into his mouth. SIGH.

Since the age of 4, Will has been an abundant art producer. Each day he colors at least one or two masterpieces and sometimes many more. Now that kindergarten has started, that hasn't really changed, and now there are reams of papers coming home with him each day. I swear I am forced to recycle a small tree each week! Then once he comes home he will often produce even more art. At the moment the things he most likes to draw/color/paint are aliens and creepy, Halloween based scenes. His people are starting to look a little less like blobs though, so that's progress. Otherwise he really does have a pretty good eye for color and design! I've always been impressed with his ability to render things, even at a pretty young age.

He is very into space right now. He talks all the time about planets and wants to know things like what their various temperatures are, how long it would take to travel there, and how big they are in relation to earth. He surprises me with little factoids that he picks up either in school or on shows, all the time. He also likes to build lego space ships all the time and will often draw either space vehicles or aliens and alien spacecraft. He is just really interested in that subject at the moment. I think its great and I will help him look up facts all the time to encourage his interest. Hes such a curious guy, I love it!

I talked to his teacher at his first parent-teacher conference this week and she had a lot of positive things to say about him. Not surprisingly he is grade levels ahead in both math and reading, and she gave me some additional resources that we can challenge him with a bit more at home, she said that he is a very responsible guy (they have class chores and he is always apparently very good at doing his chores) and always sets a good example for the other kids. She also said something very sweet about how evident it is that he loves his sister. She said that he will often include references to Nora on many of the assignments they do, such as a self portrait (his included himself as well as Nora), or he will often sign his name as well as Nora's. Her visage often appears in many of his story scenes that he draws. Its all very sweet. Though he loves to pester her, he clearly loves her to pieces and thinks of her when hes at school. On the whole though he is doing very well and has adjusted to school fabulously. So while I am not surprised by any of that, it was still very nice to hear!