Emerging reader

Parker is soaking up Kindergarten like a sponge. They spend the first half of the day focusing on reading and writing, and she is becoming a great reader. Her new parlor trick to to pick up a book and start reading it....she still can only do simple words and has to do lots of sounding out, but she's very confident and is really enjoying knowing what signs and labels and words around her say. Her favorite thing is to read words, usually dialog, that have exclamation marks.
The days of spelling things out in front of her are fading. The other day at dinner I told Bob, "someone in Garland with Swine Flu D-I-E-D." and Parker said "SOMEONE DIED?" She said she figured it out by using the first and last letter sounds, and context clues.

Speaking of Swine Flu, or actually, the flu formerly know as Swine, we are bracing for it. There were hundreds of absences at the middle school last week, and at our doctor's visit (a followup on her reflux stomach issues) there were several kids being carried in and out by their parents, obviously quite sick. And if the flu doesn't get us, the school nurse said that lice is being passed around too. Flu sounds like less work.

The outcome of Parker's doc visit was that she's going to continue to take Prevacid for a while until she is totally symptom free, and then we'll try to ween her off. I'm not crazy about the idea of her being on medince long term, but the ped says that it's very safe and much prefered over having an inflmaed esophagus for long periods of time. We are also going to do a blood test for Celiac disease and something else just to cover all the bases. I hope the HIPAA police don't come after me for posting that. If anyone has any opinions on any of that, feel free to share them.

I'm expecting a super busy week, but I'll try to at least scan some artwork or something so my sister doesn't have to resort to watching zoo cams because there is nothing new on the blog.