My van, Zach's job, and Emily

I still don't have my van back from my little run in with the flying tire.  There was $2500 worth of damage.  Thank goodness for insurance.  Hopefully we'll see her again by the end of the week.

Zach has a paying job again.  He's actually been working since he left Chick-fil-A back in September, but not for actual money.  He worked out a deal with a new comic book store owner where he got paid in used comic books.  Zach has quite a collection now.  Now the business has grown enough that the owner was able to hire Zach for 2 days a week.  We hadn't pushed the job issue at all because we just wanted Zach to concentrate on finishing high school.  Now he's almost done!  By the end of this week, he'll have finished all but two courses.  However one of them is English IV which he hates - lots of papers and projects.  I'm really hoping he'll buckle down and finish by the end of February.  It will be such a relief to have him done.  I feel like our major parenting of him will be mostly done once he graduates.  What he makes of his life after that is up to him.

Emily is doing great.  She's such a smarty pants.  I still can't believe she knows the whole alphabet.  Now that I realize what she's capable of, I'm working with her more.  She's learning her colors and numbers and we keep working on the letters too.  We have puzzles for all those that she like to play with.  She has not come very far on her speech yet.  She only has maybe 10 words that are understandable.  We are still waiting to start speech therapy.  She's been assigned a therapist, but I still haven't heard from her yet.  Her favorite toy right now is the singing Minnie Mouse the boys got her for Christmas.  Her favorite TV shows are Mickey Mouse Club House (of course) and Word World.  I love Word World.  It's a PBS show where all the characters are formed out of the letters of their name.  Go look - so cute!  It teaches spelling (duh!), but the stories are hilarious.

Wow, I was wordy today.  Thanks for sticking with me if you actually read this far.  I do this blogging thing as much for me as anything else.  Here's your reward!