Dillo will be 7 in 3 weeks.

Lexiles: [link] - search box for titles in the top corner. You have to dig a bit under "about" to find the lexile-to-grade-level correspondence, and there are useful caveats: [link]

Oooooh!

I didn't realize he and Dylan were so close in age. (Within a year, anyway.) I always think of your kids as way older than mine for some reason.

Is this a good deal? Can I do better someplace else? Does furniture from Pottery Barn have a rep?

Tom, that's very pricey for a banker's chair. I was looking for some online a couple years ago and turned up natural wood finish options that ran about $140 (ultimately found a local option on sale for $99 that I could pick up myself). When I get home from work I'll check my old shopping bookmarks and see if I can turn up any current links for you.

Well, a year is a long time when you're a baby. It's actually still a long time at 5-6 for many kids - Dillo's class was K-1 this year, and you could mostly pick the Ks from the 1s just by watching them (and not by size, but by how they acted.) A couple of K parents would always compliment me on how well Dillo behaved at the playground after school, and I would always be like, "He is a whole year older than your kid! That is 20% of your life when you are 5!"

Too braggy for Facebook: Dillo just sat down and read a picture book (The Bake Shop Ghost, one of my favorites) and I thought to myself, "That's a hard book," so I looked up the Lexile and it's an 880! Which is about the 50th percentile for 5th grade. Damn that boy can read on the very rare occasions that he actually sits down and does so.

Right the fuck on, Dillo!

Emmett's college application counselor wants him to read a book this week during the summer. So his friend/prom date Laura foisted a book on him: Looking For Alaska. He was unimpressed when I told him the author went to Kenyon.

"He is a whole year older than your kid! That is 20% of your life when you are 5!"

That is a really good point. Our neighbors have a son just 6 months younger than Dylan, and there have been many periods in their lives when that tiny age difference suddenly becomes a HUGE difference developmentally.

So his friend/prom date Laura foisted a book on him: Looking For Alaska.

Ben loved it. He wanted to know what else John Green had written aside from that and The Fault in Our Stars.

Well, a year is a long time when you're a baby. It's actually still a long time at 5-6 for many kids

This is much on our mind right now, as this month we'll be deciding whether to enrol Ryan in school next year. He was born bang on the cutoff date, so in theory at least, he has the choice of either being the youngest in his class, or the oldest. (In practice, I expect there'll be some older redshirts.) His kindergarten supports him going next year; we have a preschool field officer (which is a thing, apparently) coming out to provide a second opinion.

I just got my first CSA batch, and it is strawberries (!!!) swiss chard, beets, kale, lettuce, scallions, and garlic scapes. Lets see if I can eat all of this. The strawberries are so good!

bt - we had the same thing with Em and we chose to start her and she is the youngest in her class. She is fine (great, even) in content and learning. However, developmentally she is behind. The ADHD accounts for some of that, but I really believe that if we had waited a year, she would be further along. Some of the ELA stuff is developmental as is some of the maths stuff and those are the areas that she struggles with. Also, I didn't do the calculations on that and Em will be 16 when she's a senior and she'll start college at 17. If she stays developmentally behind her peers, she could have some issues when she gets to college.