Tyler is 6 1/2 years old

My little guy is 6 1/2 years old! Tyler is easy to sum up in one word these days... Minecraft! I think he eats, breaths, and sleeps Minecraft. He was introduced to it this summer by one of his friends, Lucas, and as part of a reward for him doing his summer homework packet that Ms. Crawford gave us (which, btw, he was one of six kids out of 19 to complete it- I was very proud of him!), was that I would download the Minecraft app to the iPad. Boy, if I could go back to that deal. HaHa! He plays Minecraft, watches how-to videos about Minecraft, watches You Tube videos of other people playing Minecraft, draws Minecraft pictures and characters, and talks about it all.day.long. I don't get the appeal and it sounds like he's speaking a foreign language when he does talk about Minecraft, but it's definitely his thing right now, so I just go with it. Summer flew by and first grade came before I knew it. He's doing so good in school. He struggled a little last year with phonics and time management. He left kinder at a reading level 4 (which was where he was supposed to be) and started first grade at a reading level 6! He put in the time and effort over summer! I'm not even going to pretend like it was easy because it sucked(!!) trying to get him to work for 20+ minutes everyday, but he did it and it paid off! He's now reading at a level 10 and still moving ahead! His time management is a completely different story. He's still pretty slow about things in general, but that's just him. We're working on it! :-) He likes his teacher this year, although she's soooo different than our teacher from last year (as I always say, change is hard... for ME). He loves art days, technology days and Friday free choice days. He moans about PE and music some days. Ha! He's watching "big kid" shows now (you know, not cartoons... shows with real life teenagers in them!). His favs are Jessie, Austin & Ally, and Dog with a Blog. He has ridden the bus a couple of times home and loves it. This will not be a regular thing, but a very occasional thing. He's been sleeping in his room with Kinley on the weekends for several weeks now. It has allowed me some extra sleeping time in the morning and he enjoys being able to turn on his tube and watch cartoons in his room. They are both still sleeping in my room during the week just because it's easier with our school routine, but I can see us making the full-time transition to upstairs pretty soon as we keep talking about getting bunk beds. As you can see, lots of big kid things going on here! Stay tuned for the next set of updates! :-)