for a few days.  I'm totally excited about moving and managed to convince myself that I need to spend all of my time searching for info on Toronto, the transit system, and apartments, or decluttering and figuring out packing.  :P  I think tomorrow morning (assuming I manage to drag myself out of bed) I will manage to let it go.  I have come to accept that when I get excited about something, I completely immerse myself in it until I start to get bored, and then I can be more rational about how much time I spend on it. 

S has started practising writing letters.  He wrote four or so notes to me, all Ns and Os with an I or two thrown in.  Today, he pulled out a notebook of his and started writing lines of letters -- mostly Ns, Ms, Os, and Is.  He has also been working on sounding out short words.  He's figuring out about silent "e" -- I read some word to him recently when he asked what it was, and he asked why I didn't say the e.  I explained briefly that it was a silent e -- it didn't get pronounced, instead its job was to help us know how to pronounce the whole word.  He was looking at a book about a dinosaur bone today, and suddenly he exclaimed, "That's a silent e!  The word is bone and it has a silent e!"  :D

Both boys were feeling a bit under the weather today.  I started reading "Little Men" out loud at bedtime last night.  I read an abriged version of Little Women a long time ago, and came across this book on my most recent visit to the used book store.  Now I'll have to try and get Little Women from the library.  We didn't read much of it last night -- D was really tired and fell asleep almost before the lights were off -- and tonight, I asked him if he wanted to read it or something else, because I wasn't sure if he liked the book.  He said he loved it -- it had boys and dancing and tag, after all, what's not to love?

D played checkers with the girls we babysit who is about his age.  Since she had talked about playing checkers, I assumed she knew the rules.  D is a very rules-oriented kid (when it suits his needs, hehe), and I guess it didn't occur to me that not every kid is.  So she had to learn how to play while playing with him.  D won all three games that they played.  The girl was such a good sport about it -- when D announced the first time that he won because he took all of her pieces, she just said "Whatever, do you want to play again?" and going on to lose twice more didn't seem to dampen her enthusiasm for it.  I just hope D was soaking up her example! 

I am considering hauling the play pen my cousin gave me out of storage (I think we set it up once, D enjoyed it until the novelty wore off, and it takes up a lot of room) so that the boys have a safe place to play without M being able to get at them.  They haven't been able to play with legos or the train set or the marble track thing or the car track, or anything that she can demolish, for a while now.