Ikey's goals

Ikey made four goals at the beginning of this year: 

1) KYHFAOOTY at school

2) Pass the next level at ski lessons

3) Practice drums every work day

4) Paint the matroyshkas

Here's the current status:

1) He only had KYHFAOOTY troubles one day during January. That is an amazing improvement! He's happy, Miss Terry is happy, and the parents are really happy.

2) Ski lessons are going well. He has two lessons left so we'll get the verdict soon enough.

3) I lost all good parenting sense and couldn't remember how to motivate a 5-year-old on how to work on something that is good for him, so I checked in with my sister. She reminded me about the power of charts and stickers. How did I forget? So we worked up a little chart with lots of little pictures of drum sets and tiny little drumstick stickers. When he does a good practice or a good job at Class with Cathy, he earns his drumsticks for that day. When he has a whole drumline done, he gets a prize. 

Two little drumsticks so far!

He finished the first one this week, so we had a pizza party and movie night with Grandma Rainey. It was awesome. Along the way, he learned how to play the Crash Cymbal Beat, the Dance Beat, and the Rock Beat pretty well and we didn't have too much bossiness by me. Yay!

4) We printed out an example of the owl matroyshkas we wanted to paint, and Ikey choose the colors (see his design sheet in the photo below). 

 It took three days to finish these cute guys. He was very proud and so was I. 

Ikey is a smart and earnest little fella. He likes to accomplish things and he is great at paying attention to his projects. He is a very enjoyable person to live with. He was sick this week, so he missed three days of school. I wasn't sad to spend the day even with the slightly ill version of him, and in fact, I missed him a lot when he went back today.