What's been going on in the Ernest household? A whole lot (as usual). Andrew and Nicholas started the spring soccer season and of course because of their age difference they are no longer playing on the same fields which makes for fun Saturdays when their games overlap! We had a fun spring break last week with lots of relaxing! On Friday, we went to Fossil Rim Wildlife in Glen Rose. It's a wildlife park that you drive through and the animals come up to your car and you can feed them. It was a lot of fun but very crowded. Because of the crowds and constant feedings, the animals were not as eager as normal to come up to the cars for more food. We did have some rams come to the car and eat out of the kids hands so they thought that was pretty cool. Noah had never been before so he had a blast calling all the animals "pigs" and all the birds "ducks". One of these "ducks" (an ostrich) also came up to the car and reached its head in for a treat. Noah thought it was hilarious and said "Silly Duck". He's doing so much better with his speech and loves his PPCD class.
On that note, I found out this week that McKinney ISD will be opening an Early Childhood Learning Center to house all of their preschool programs such as PALS, PPCD, Headstart, etc. This will remove these programs from the elementary schools and put them in a central location thus alleviating some space issues in the current schools. It's also great for parents like me who had kids in multiple schools because of different needs. Noah is at one school and Nicholas was at another one until he graduated PALS and is now at a third school for his once a week speech therapy. And of course these are all different than our home campus at Valley Creek! So when does this new school open? Fall of 2010 - the year Noah starts kindergarten. Even though it comes a little too late for us, I'm still glad it's being done as I think it's a huge need for MISD.
Andrew and Jacob are staying busy with school. Andrew just got his results back from his first TAKS test and only missed two questions and therefore was "Commended". He will take the math portion later in April. Jacob was invited to participate in the "Alpha" program which is McKinney ISD's gifted and talented program. He has definitely come a long way from where he was at this time last year. As I mentioned earlier, Nicholas "graduated" from PALS and is now going in for speech therapy once a week for his stuttering. I was going to put him in a preschool program for the remainder of the school year, but decided I wanted to keep him home and just enjoy having him with me during the day since he'll be starting kindergarten in the fall.
Paul is staying busy as ever at work. He just hired a full-time designer to help out so hopefully that will take some of the load off of him. I'm staying busy too. I just took on the role of Treasurer of the Valley Creek PTA. So far, it's been a lot of fun and it let's me combine my work background with helping at my kids school.
I know I say this far too much, but I am going to try to get better with posting more regularly! I have some pics to post too.
