Grateful for Our Gifts

God has blessed our family in so many wonderful ways, but especially with our beautiful, healthy, intelligent little boys. Through this blog, my goal is to memorialize their childhood, share our fun stories and milestones, and to track our unique educational journey.

Brendan, our five year old, is profoundly gifted with an extraordinary IQ. After an already long educational history for such a little boy, we are now homeschooling. Much of this blog will likely focus on this journey, since we always get lots of questions and interest about this from friends & acquaintances with gifted children or those considering homeschooling. While Brendan's academic talents are truly amazing and fun to share, though, he is much more than a little brainiac. He is the sweetest, funniest, most loving child! He is the greatest big brother in the world, he is very focused on his taekwondo and soccer, he has typical "boy" interests like Star Wars, Legos, and Harry Potter, and he has deep friendships with his peers. He is also a talented author, and I hope to share his creative writing here, too.

Ryan, our almost-two year old, is our little joy. Like his brother, Ryan excels far beyond most toddler milestones. At 19 months, he knew all of his letters, and at 23 months he can tell you the phonetical sounds for each letter, the 10 basic colors, 8 basic shapes, and numbers to 10, can spell his name, and recognizes several "sight words" in books. (The amazing thing about this is that he does not watch tv and gets very little one-on-one time to practice these things. Ry just picks up what he wants to pick up.) Like Bren, Ryan would read books all day long if he could. He is extremely social and is already developing friendships. Yet he has his own uniqueness and is much more athletic. He can throw and kick a ball as well as the big kids, and loves to be outside and play on the highest slides on the playground. He is also much more exploratory, which will be a wonderful attribute some day, but right now keeps Mommy on her toes!