Emma started First Grade this week.  These are photos of her waiting for the bus which, like last year, failed to pick her up!  Abby drove her to school and she had a great day.  In fact she didn't want to leave!  Pictures of the bus at the end are from her second day.

M starts school tomorrow.  This, for me, signals the end of summer... wow.. where did the time go?  I took this last week for vacation and am glad I got to spend quality time with her before the bustle of the school year starts again.

My daughter likes to play post office.  She likes to exchange letters with me using a toy mailbox.  Its a great way for her to practice her hand writing.. and she doesn't even know it.  She and I built a new mailbox to exchange messages today.  Sometimes she likes to encode her messages using an en/decoder card she got somewhere along the line.  It being a terribly gray and rainy day, we decided to write a program to encode/decode messages.  I had already taught her to play tic-tac-toe using row-column coordinates.  We computer geeks know that row/column structure to be a "matrix" in computer science terms.   I've also given her a lesson or two on Logo - an educational programming language.   (Please understand that she had been asking me to teach her to program - "like what you do at work, Daddy."  I'm not, necessarily, trying build a super-nerd so that I can live vicariously through her nerdy accomplishments.. although worse things could happen to a person. :)   Anyway...

This de/encoder simply shifts letters by one, but to make a fully working program there was quite a bit for a 6 year old to take in.  I threw a lot at her and with no introduction - functions, hash maps, and variables.  Forget the UI/HTML glue needed to drive it!  Needless to say, most of it went over her head but conceptually, she understood that we were taking each letter and doing a lookup to return its encoded/decoded form.  She helped type in the "cipher" which was just a map from letter to encoded letter.

Regardless of what she may have learned, she loved the end result and has already requested a "print encoded message feature."  (Only then did it feel like a program " at work". :)  We'll revisit this one agains sometime soon..

The end result is a simple web app - nothing more than some HTML and some Javascript.  You can view/run it here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/261443/www/SecretDecoder/decoder.html

Rainy days and secret decoders.. and treasured moments.

M caught a fish last weekend all by herself. We didn't even know she had one until she walked up to us with it still flopping around on her line.

She got her Grandpa ("Bacca") to skin it and cook it for her.

M, decided to fish for rabbits.. or squirrels.. or chipmunks.  She attached a bag of carrots to a rope and cast it down our hill.

 

Emma had her first soccer practice today. It was a beautiful morning for it - well into the 70's by the time we left, I believe. I was happy to see how friendly the coaches were and patient with the children. I think this will be a good first introduction to soccer. More importantly, it will keep her active and healthy. Its great for my health too. With the exception of having to be on the field by 8:30, I get a lot of enjoyment out of watching the kids.

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We celebrated Emma's fifth birthday at home with Grandma and Grandpa (Bacca) Chapman. This Friday there will be a kid's party.

Emma made this hat for her stuffed animal, a barn swallow.
She has made many clever things with paper and tape - including a house for the same bird, diapers for her other dolls, a mailbox, etc.