the art of bread making

Quick accomplishments, by the kid:

• 2yo can recognize "Publix", both the logo and the word. She pointed it out on her body wash, a bag of flour, seltzer. (Now you know where I prefer to shop!) I gave her Chobani yogurt yesterday. While eating it, she told me that it has her name on it. She meant that it has Ch, just like the beginning of her name. She can also orally continue patterns: red, blue, red, blue, etc. She spent a lot of time making "birthday cake" with geoboard. And she is working hard on memorizing a few of her favorite books.
• 6yo finally got the hang of tying his shoelaces. We tried last year, but it was an exercise in frustration. This time, the first time I showed him, he was able to tie them. His math is going smoothly, he wants more greater than/less than problems. He got his first notch in tae kwon do. He reads books to 2 yo, when he's in the mood. He is riding his bike.
• 8yo wrote another ambitious plan for today, with 20-plus points. By late afternoon, he accomplished six. He wrote Chumash and math first, and those went well. Right now, he is reading his way through Yahadus textbook, based on Rambam's Sefer haMitzvot. He informed me that he reached his first mitzvah derabanan. 

I called boys to unload the dishwasher and set up the table for dinner. When they were not coming fast enough, I discovered that they were actually cleaning up a Pokemon game. They used to leave things like that for some hazy later, which never happened. We also ended up having most of our dinner meal in Hebrew. I didn't know how to say "string beans", but the kids knew orez (rice), dag (fish), mitz (juice), mayim (water). They also thought it was great fun, and kind of started it themselves.

I keep reminding myself to take deep breaths and to look at the big picture. There is such a drive to get something accomplished NOW, that sometimes it is hard to realize that skills take a long time. I keep looking at all the things that were such a struggle for 6 yo last year, and now they are going much smoother. A child is like a loaf of bread: you cannot hurry up the dough to rise, nor you can bake it super-quickly. To get a good result, everything needs to take time.