Growing Up

My small herd of offspring has shown remarkable signs of growth this week and I'm trying to process everything.

The Princess lost her first tooth. It should have come out months ago as there are big teeth coming up behind it but she seemed nervous about letting it go and refused to help it along. I think she though it was going to hurt. It fell out quite by surprise in last night's bath but the new teeth are pretty much in place, so no goofy gap-toothed photos to share, darn it. When we told her to make sure and tuck the tooth under her pillow she informed us that she didn't believe in the Tooth Fairy which rather bummed me out. Seeing my look of disappointment (or possibly realizing she was losing a chance for free money) she decided to put the tooth under her pillow anyway.

MonkeyBoy has been taking a class called A Guide to Democracy through the new eastside Village Homeschool Resource Center. This wan't his first choice but when it turned out to be the only offering for kids in his age group I asked to him to just try the first class and he was hooked. The teacher is fantastic and my boy, who has always claimed that "history is stupid" is now loving learning about how our country works. As part of his final project, he was required to attend a City Council meeting which neither of us were excited about.

We finally got it together to attend yesterday's meeting and what a surprise! My boy paid close attention, asked me a lot of questions, took lots of notes and, not surprisingly, drew some fabulous portraits of the council members. We sat through the entire two hours of topics which ranged from beekeeping to sewer systems and found it far more entertaining than we'd imagined possible. When we left, my boy was thrilled. He couldn't believe that he sat through the whole thing and actually followed most of what was going on. I was also pleasantly surprised at his maturity.

And here's the thing that's getting me slightly ferklempt today: The Dark Lord is now enrolled at Portland Community College. He's taking his placement test tonight which will determine his fall classes and he plans on taking a weekly non-credit guitar class over the summer. My boy is starting college! How crazy is that?

My Tiniest Artist

The Princess recently got involved in an artist trading card swap for kids through the Wise Craft blog. She'll be sending out six of her lovely creations and hopefully getting the same number in return from kids as far away as Australia. I love the cards she made. Note the awesome sailboat noses on the portraits! And clearly she's got her mama's love of shiny things and collage.

And in other artist offspring news, it seems The Dark Lord has been asked to contribute something to regional show for high school artists later this year.