Mail and Friends

Josie's birthday is coming up and her friends and family have been showering her with mail and gifts all week.  THANK YOU!!!  From gifts and books sent to our house to money to buy her own gift (as she gets older the list of things she wants to by "on her own" grows longer)
It was so fun for her to come home each day and see what came in the day's mail.  Heck, it was fun for Marty and I to open the mail box and see personal mail. 

Benjamin continues to make friends and enjoy school for the most part. He still complains about going in the mornings, as he often did in Seattle, but once there he walks into the school building confidently and happily.  We have fallen into a pretty comfortable rhythm of Marty picking him up at 1PM and the boys eat lunch together in the school cafeteria.  Because grades K-1 are dismissed at 1PM they don't have an actual lunch period but two small snack periods during the school day.  Benjamin would only be allowed to eat at the cafeteria if he were doing one of the two after school programs.  (Late Birds is a pay as you go program and you can drop in as many or as few days as you want.  He says he may want to do this at some point as some of his good friends go there every day after school.  Then there is Hort which from what I can gather is a state funded program for after school care for working parents.  This is free and a lot of kids go here after school as well.)

So since Benjamin isn't in either of these program his school day ends at 1 and could only eat while supervised by an adult and since he would love to eat like the big kids Marty meets him and this has developed into a very special time for the two of them.  Benjamin has discovered that if he doesn't ride his bike to school and Marty rides his bike to pick him up then he can ride on the back rack all the way home.  I'm pretty certain it is the best part of his - maybe both, of their days!!

Marty always comes home chuckling and saying that nearly every kid in the cafeteria comes over and says hello to Benjamin. And not just a casual wave but a big hearty hello and says his name.  Benjamin claims he "knows them but doesn't know their name"  How do so many kids know Benjamin's name?  He isn't the most social kid and so I was a bit suspicious of Marty's take on what actually happens at lunch. 
On Wednesday I had to go to school for something and then met the boys in the lunch room.  It was actually almost comical how many kids came up and said hello to him.  And Marty was right, they all know his name.  I can only attribute this to the fact that the school does a looping system where kids stay with their same class for usually 2 years except in K-2 where they stay together for 3.  So the majority of his class has been with the same kids for 3 years.  Not only was Benjamin new to the school but also new to this already existing cohort.  Thankfully kids at this age are quite inclusive. 
Benjamin says he still digs in the sand with his same friend, Clayton, so I got a little giggle when he came home from school with this note and his friends email address written above.

And the class gave out a student directory with photos of each kid and their home telephone number.  That very night he got a phone call from one of his classmates. First personal phone call we have gotten on the land line.