Jaelyn is Mariah!

Jaelyn came home from school today very excited. She gets to play Mariah! She had tried out for a role in her third grade Christmas show and today she found out that she got it! Mariah is a back-up singer for Elfis. I think that Jaelyn will do an amazing job and has been reading over her script to start memorizing lines all night.

(I haven't been doing very well in documenting our journey as a family very well lately, so I thought that I would just pick up where we are today and go from there... But, since this post is on the big news of Jaelyn's life, I thought I'd give a couple more highlights of her life as of late.)

I don't know that I blogged it, but Trent, I, Jaelyn and a whole bunch of other people made the decision throughout the year last year to advance Jaelyn to third grade this year instead of going into second. As her mommy, I was pretty torn in this decision. Academically, I knew that she was fine and ready, but socially, I was concerned. She was already one of the youngest of her class and she was just a normal six year old learning social skills with the rest of her class. She had been spending a chunk of her first grade day in with a second grade class, and you could tell that she was younger, but yet well loved by her older friends.

Jaelyn has always loved school, but she has LOVED it this year. It has been great to feel like we made the right decision for her both academically and socially. A big component of this, I believe, is that she got to move in with the second grade class that she had been a part of, up into third, and their teacher rolled up with them.

She has continued to grow in knowledge. She rarely misses a word on her spelling tests. Loves to work with numbers, solving equations and organizing information. Just this week she was moved up a reading group level. And has become quite the author. She loves to make books and newspapers.

She has continued to grow on the playground. She is learning to spin and twirl on the high bars at school. Squeal and be girly. She is wanting to wear just what she has picked out and do her own hair, without mom's touches. When I try to make a suggestion, I get, "Mom, it is what is on the inside that makes me beautiful. It doesn't matter what my clothes look like or if they match." How do you argue with that and who taught her that anyway? She is learning to stay up way into the night at sleepovers and talk, about, ahem...boys. She is becoming a beautiful almost tween at the age of seven and I am privledged to have some amazing talks with her about her journey in life.

And her journey continues...