The Big Boy Update:  When we were over having dinner with our now, "virtual neighbors" who moved away recently, my son wanted to leave the table as soon as he'd finished his meal.   Getting him to sit for the meal was a feat in and of itself because, on that particular night, he didn't even want to sit down.   I gave him the eye, followed by a minimal hand gesture that indicated he should sit down and then watched him pretend to put the barest amount of his backside on the edge of the seat.   

The feigned sitting lasted for only a few seconds; my son was too excited to be at their new house and wanted to look around.   The house had the same possessions as their prior one and he'd seen them countless times before.   This was different though because they were in a different arrangement and he wanted to go around and play hide and seek or other games. 

I gave him a more stern eye, followed by a, "you need to sit down now" hand motion but I got little more by way of actual sitting that time either.  He was bouncing around and just didn't have the ability to sit right then.   That didn't change the fact that the rest of us were sitting, eating, and talking together.   

I tried a third time, this time giving him a serious glare coupled with actual words, instructing him to put his butt in the seat.   It didn't work.  He was too excited.   By this time, my daughter was finished eating as well and had the same lack of interest in being with us not to mention an aversion to adult conversation, so I released the two of them and said the classic parent line of, "don't break anything."

They didn't break anything and we had a nice half-hour to continue our conversations finishing dinner and then retiring to the living room as a group.   Our ex-neighbors, virtual neighbors, the neighbors that got away, are the kind of friends we could talk with for hours, and be disappointed when we had to stop.   My son rounded the corner into the living room for probably the eighth time as he went from the ground floor up the stairs to the second floor and took a detour to come over and ask us something.  "Why do talk so much?"   We told him it was what adults did and he'd understand when he was older. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son built his first PowerPoint presentation today.   I had to help him a good bit, but he did it.   Creating a presentation is a whole different thing from writing a formalized book report where you read word-for-word what you've written.   I explained how the slides were the talking points about a thing and when you got to the slide, you didn't read the slide, you talked about what was on the slide.  He got the concept, but it's a new way of thinking about things.   Several times he told me, "I'm so overwhelmed." so we'd take a break.   He's going to practice tomorrow to figure out what to say and then he'll present his slide show to his classmates on the first day back to school to tell everyone about a book he read over the summer. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is going to have a lot more online classes until she is able to go back to in-person school.   She's been doing fairly well with it so far.   Today, she had art class, which was a lot of discussion about anything the students had created since they last saw her art teacher.   When I asked my daughter what she wanted to talk about, she pointed way up high to what would have been the top edge of her corkboard over her desk and said, "I want to show them Crabby."  Woah.   I pinned that model up there months ago when she made it for a VI meeting.   She hasn't seen it since because she doesn't go hunting around on that board, I mostly use it for putting things up there for safe keeping or to have a spot for things she doesn't want to throw away.   She remembered about Crabby and she also knew exactly where he was.   She is fascinating to me.