School Girl

Hannah successfully made it through her first preschool class on Tuesday. It was only an hour long (tomorrow she goes the full two and half hours) and had only 6 of the 12 kids, but I still count it as a success. As far as I know she did not interact at all with any of the children, but there was only one episode of tears that lasted only briefly because another child became hysterical when his mother left so that at least was better than I had expected. There were no melt downs and no real crying. I also did surprisingly well leaving her. I think meeting with the teachers before school began and going over some of Hannah's special needs and how to best address them to make things easiest for everyone helped ease some of my fears. The teachers really seemed to be willing to do whatever it took to make Hannah successful. Hopefully tomorrow they will encourage her to have some interaction with the other kids.

In the last few weeks Hannah has had several full days with Daddy and has really enjoyed herself. Two weeks ago I went with Kristie, Chris, and Heather to Trader's Point Charity Horse Show. It was just like the good ole days when we used to go every year except for this year we all had serious photography equipment! It was a lot of fun, but VERY hot. Kyle and Hannah hung out and went to church and to play on the playground. Kyle was pretty exhausted when I got home! Last weekend I went to a town garage sale with Kristie and found some smoking deals on all sorts of stuff for Hannah. I got her a toy kitchen for only $10, some new puzzles, lots of books, and a beautiful wool winter dress coat that has barely even been worn for only $15. You can't get a cheap winter coat just to play outside with for that money at Walmart even! I was so proud of my bargain shopping. I love to get good deals. This time Kyle and Hannah had a jam packed day. They went to the playground, to open tumble at gymnastics, out to eat, and more playing on our swing set! Hannah was exhausted this time as well as Kyle! Today Hannah spent the day with Kyle again, but not nearly for as fun of reason. I've been having some pretty bad back pain for several months that has increased in intensity the past week. This morning when I woke up I could not even stand up. I had to call Kyle to come home from work and take me to the doctor and watch Hannah and help me to the bathroom and various other everyday tasks. Between toting me around to the doctor and to get x-rays, taking Hannah to gymnastics, taking care of all of Hannah and my needs and the daily household chores there wasn't much time for Hannah and Kyle to have a very good day. I would say no one in the Spontak house had a good day today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Hannah has started another fun segment of her learning. She's begun to learn her address, phone number and birthday. She's mastered her birthday since that's the easiest and only needs a small prompt(the first 2 of the 4 numbers of our house number) to get her address. The phone number is slower in coming, but I think it's the hardest since it's all random numbers. She's got the last four digits and can sometimes get either the first three or the middle three along with the last four, but she's never gotten all 10 of them together by herself.

A funny story about Hannah happened last night. We took a walk to a small retention pond near our house to watch the ducks and muskrats. On the way there we saw some birds sitting on the power lines. After point out that the poles were "T"s Hannah got very excited when some of the birds flew away and swooped down pretty close to us. There was one bird left up on the wire and Hannah desperately wanted it to fly away too. She thought that we ought to be able to just command the bird to fly away for her, but of course this wasn't the case. After explaining that to her, Hannah all of a sudden stopped dead in her tracks, placed her hands in praying position, looked longingly up at the bird, and whispered "please" in the most pitiful voice we had ever heard. It was quite funny, but maybe you had to be there to get the full effect.

These pictures by the way are from July (I'm WAY behind in my photos!) when we went to see my sister and ride her horse Harley. Hannah had a blast riding Harley and even got to "jump" some poles on the ground. She thought that was pretty cool and even got up into two point. I even threw in a picture of me riding Harley and my cousin Becky too. Harley got quite the workout giving pony rides that day!