A House of Learning

This spring's theme in our house has most definitely been Learning.

Jake has started his second semester of Grad School. It is a lot of work and eats up what little family time we do have but he loves it. You can really tell he loves what he's doing by seeing how excited he is to talk about new research, studies or whatever psychology news comes up in class. If we stay on track he should be graduating and job-searching by the time Chucky Sue enters Kindergarten.

Speaking of, little miss has been doing a lot of learning herself! Like I posted in the recap she's beginning to understand simple school workbooks and she loves showing everyone who comes over her school books. She recently had her 3 year check up and the doctor was impressed with her smarts. She's right on track with letters and numbers and advanced in fine motor skills, shapes and colors. (not too much of a shocker when you think she's being taught by an artist.) She's still a tiny pipsqueak- 29lbs and 3'1" but she's well out of the "danger" zone of 3% on the growth charts. But that's not all she has been learning. Lately Jake and I have noticed that her social skills have improved by leaps and bounds in a short span- maybe a month or so. She no longer fights us tooth and nail about going to church, and actually begs to go on Wednesdays on the off-chance one of her nursery friends will be there to play with her! She is still shy and apprehensive in public but warms up faster than ever before and has even shocked me by being the first to introduce herself at the playground. Hopefully all this continues so preschool come this fall (WHAT?) won't be such a hard transition.

One of my first illustrator works. Eh.

As for me I'm not taking any "official" courses but I am doing a lot of self-teaching with the help of Youtube tutorials and Google searches. I also signed up for a few classes on Coursera.org this summer. Mostly design and marketing related, but a few business ones as well. My library card has also been hard at work, I've checked out dozens of how-to books in the past few months to help with work and even more biographies/history books just for the heck of it. My current goal is to learn the entire Adobe Creative suite at least to a basic proficiency so I can use all the programs for work. I've started with Illustrator and InDesign. I can scraping by with online guides and program manuals but I think I'm going to look into local college courses to get some hands-on training.

So even though for most people the school year is winding down, looks like we're in for a summer of  essays, textbooks and tests!