Gymnastics!

I got the girls back into gymnastics two weeks ago after a 6 month break. Strawberry is loving it! On her first day they said that she needed to stay in level 1 for a while because she was a little rusty, but on her third lesson, she had improved enough that they moved her back up to level 2. She has been so happy to be back that she has been giving it her all and has tons of energy and drive. I love it. She says her new favorite apparatus is the bars and she has gotten pretty good at flipping around on those things. She has really surprised herself by how quickly she has been able to improve.

The gym is about 25 minutes from our house and so on the way there and back, she has been reading to me her AR books and reading assignments from school. She has really taking to reading well, but AR has been a problem. She rocketed up the reading levels and went from her first evaluation of 1st grade level to well into the 4th grade level before Christmas. But now she is a little slower and is struggling a little more with the books and isn't really interested in the books the school has to offer anyway. Instead of reading what she wants to, she has to read AR that she doesn't like and the teacher keeps sending home notes about how behind she is. It's making me crazy. This is on top of the 1-2 hours of homework she has every night. I'm not going to let reading become something that she enjoys to do turn into something that she is forced to do against her will. Her grade will take a hit, but who cares? The thing that frustrates me the most is some things her teacher has said to Strawberry about this and about some other things, basically judging my parents skills. Grrr. It's hard to know what to do because I don't want to be the stupid mom who doesn't understand what it is like to be a teacher, but I can't let her be the stupid teacher who doesn't understand my kid. Sigh. The older they get, the more complicated things are. :)

She's been doing really well with this deployment, mostly due to awesome friends in the neighborhood. She still misses her daddy a lot. She told me that the other day in class, she started getting tears in her eyes because she was thinking about him. She can't wait until he is back. She has been planning backpacking trips for the two of them.