I've known this woman since 1993 and I have never beaten her in a game of ping-pong. Well, my friends, that has ALL changed now. Tonight, I am the winner!

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.

It was a kid's baseball night at Frontier stadium. The kids got to do a lap around the baseball field. We stayed for the fireworks which meant a really late night for M. It was after 11PM by the time we got home. She had a lot of fun playing around with her friends and eating junk food. As I carried her on my shoulders out of the stadium, she declared I was the best Dad ever. :)

 

Emma graduated from kindergarten today.  Its hard to believe another milestone has been reached.  It  seems like yesterday that she nervously waited for the bus to arrive for her first real day of school.

She's grown much since then.  She has learned a lot at her new school - about God, life, and of course traditional educational topics like reading and math.  She received an award for reading the most books - 720 of them throughout the year.  Now since she is reading full chapter books, like Trixie Beldon, Magic Treehouse, and classics like Charlotte's web, the teachers agreed each chapter would be considered a book.  Am I bragging?  Am I proud?  You bet.  Apologies and gratitude go out to my friends and family for enduring our constant bragging about her strong points and apparent blindness to her.. weaker areas.  We are proud parents and can't help ourselves.  

Anyway the graduation ceremony was very nice and driven largely by the students recitals and songs.

Friends and family can view the full set of photos and video on my flickr page: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jduprey/5846229556/in/set-72157626866582157/ 

After graduation, we took Emma and one of her school friends and mom out to lunch.  I went to work, while the rest had a play date.

That evening I asked Emma what she thought of kindergarten and moving on to first grade.  She shrugged and said it was "OK", but she really wanted to go back to pre-school.  She liked to play, do artwork, and she loved the friendly teachers (the nuns are less friendly, I suppose).  I sympathized but told her there is no going back.  We can cheerish our memories, but we have to accept that change is inevitable - that we should look forward to the new adventures that life has for us.  She agreed, begrudgingly.  

As I dropped these sage words of wisdom, I secretly wished I could freeze time, even go back a bit, and savor the purity and sweetness of M's childhood just a little longer.  I selfishly considered that with each of her passing milestones, marks the decline and relevance of myself.

Well, we will all have our memories and there are spectacular adventures to be had yet.  If life is a journey, does it make any sense to regret the parts that have already passed and missing the parts that are happening right now or those that are soon to be?

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jduprey/sets/72157626847900253

Last summer, Emma enjoyed a mini ant farm that Abby found somewhere.  This summer we got a bigger version and sent away for some "big" Red Harvester ants.  She's mesmerized by there tunneling and behavior.  Hey, maybe she'll be a scientist!?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jduprey/5838219680/in/set-72157626847876455/