Day 6 of 23

We had a nice Christmas Eve. The Russis, our friends from Switzerland and Peru, had us over for dinner with several other folks. It was the usual cross-cultural experience: Christmas in Switzerland with Peruvian food while conversations took place in German, English, and Spanish, whichever was handiest at the moment. We'll be spending tomorrow evening with our German friends. That means we might have trouble calling people back in the States on Christmas Day. By the time you're all waking up, we'll be heading over for dinner with our friends. We'll have to catch people when we can. It might not be until Saturday.

On another note, I don't think I've ever mentioned that Tanner was formally diagnosed with dyslexia last month. We've been doing some fairly intensive drills during the break to help his brain learn how to decode letter combinations in written words. It's a myth that dyslexia just means seeing things backward, but one of the common symptoms is difficulty distinguishing between "d" and "b" (and sometimes "p"). It's interesting to see Tanner struggle with that. We can have him read a nonsense word like "peb" over and over again, then when we come back to it fifteen seconds later and he'll read it as "ped." He's got a few other things working against him. He's also got ADHD and very poor working memory. I'm sure my dad can describe this better than I can, but my understanding is that working memory is even shorter than short-term memory. It has to do with holding facts in the brain long enough to apply them to the problem at hand. Tests show that he's in the very low percentiles in that ability. So we've got some interesting challenges ahead of us.

On yet another note, for those of you in the Twin Cities, good luck surviving what I'm hearing described as the "snownami." We wish we were there to enjoy it with you. No, really.