Al rescate, amigos!

Agatha's been watching a lot of "Diego" lately. I'm not too proud of it, but on the other hand the Netflix on demand is a pretty wonderful thing for helping Mommy get through the day! She gets to watch one in the morning when she wakes up, one after waking from naptime, and usually another one at some other critical moment. Her love of Diego has translated into her speaking some words in Spanish and concocting various schemes for rescuing animals in trouble. She loves to shout out, "al rescate, amigos!" and head off running. This morning she ran all way to her preschool, stopping only at the crosswalks. Seriously, that's seven-tenths of a mile! (or so says Google maps) The whole way she was talking about the roadrunners having a race and rescuing the pygmy marmoset and so on. But the cutest thing is to hear her count in Spanish, which she can do up to 10: "uno, dos, trays, kwat-roh..." It sounds like Scooby Doo speaking Spanish.

Speaking of numbers, Henry is learning multiplication! He brought home worksheets he'd filled out with the times 2s, 3s, and 4s ("Ones are just too easy, Mom.") At the Montessori school they use beads to calculate the multiplication and get a visual grasp on the concepts; the worksheets are just the traces of that process in the classroom. Pretty neat. Next year it looks like we will be transferring him to a high-powered, more traditional-format private school, about which we are both excited and anxious. I'm glad he's had four years to learn in this more hands-on and play-based Montessori way, but I think he's ready for more rigor and structure. We'll see.

Besides multiplication Henry is also very interested in time right now. He has a clock that speaks the current time when a button is pressed, and he has certain "favorite times" that he likes the clock to speak out to him: 7:11 is the most beloved, but also the palindromic 12:51, and the hilarious 5:55 and 4:44 and so on. He has figured out that his clock happens to be set about 3 minutes fast, so when he sees it is 7:08 in the kitchen he races upstairs to hear his clock say "seven-eleven, a.m.," which gives him great satisfaction.