Hi Mary Anne,

I never would have thought a visit to the opthamologist was in order. Have you given that any consideration?

Hmm, I never really considered it at this age. However my vision* is so bad, that perhaps I should, it may run in the family. At 4 years old, I'm not too concerned, there's plenty of time. She could recognize all letters and numbers by 3 1/2. She's also been memorizing books my wife and I read to her since she started speaking sentences. We kind of started a tradition a while back, out of something i did to keep from being bored and falling asleep while reading to her. I started making silly changes to the text on about the 3rd or 4th night of reading the same book. She would catch me at it and it turned into a bit of a game where the unspoken rules were that I couldn't change the text until she had a good grasp on the book. It's fun and keeps us both awake until the last page of the last book every night. Sometimes when she "reads" the books to herself she uses my silly substitutions depending on her mood.

The whole "teach me to read and write" phase started around valentines day, when I decided to let her write her own valentine's Day cards. I wrote down the names on a seperate paper and she copied them onto the valentine. By the end of the night she could write her own name without looking at my paper. My only real worry with this was that she insisted on doing letters her way and not my way. So her R's look like aliens and her E's have about 10 prongs. I figure she'll outgrow it when she becomes more serious about it.

Hope you had an enjoyable Mother's Day Mary Anne.

-Steve G.

* I got glasses sometime around the beginning of the second grade. I couldn't read the chalk board, but figured none of the kids could. What really stressed me out was that for Fire Drills certain kids were assigned to close the windows and hold the doors and count kids, etc. I couldn't read the chart and had know idea what I was supposed to do that week. Stressed out, I told my mom, who realized there was a problem and took me to the optometrist. I still remember the awe of wearing glasses that first day and seeing the world in its crispness that I had forgotten about. I still cringe about the whole Fire Drill thing. If there's a fire drill get the kids out of the building, don't stress them out about closing windows and crap.