BethaBlip 56...

This is my monthly track of my children as they grow to see how they change as time goes by. I take the same photo in the same place each 1st and 15th of each month along with a wee diary of what has happened and how life has progressed for each of them. Bethany on the 1st and Ewan on the 15th. It is quite remarkable and is accentuated by the 1 year ago thumbnail down in the bottom right.

Well, this marks Bethany's first major step to becoming part of the machine. Bethany started primary one school this month. She started on half days for the first two weeks or so and is now on 0900 to 1530 days. We got a wee surprise in that the school, during the course of the holidays and people moving out of the area, went down from 3 primary one classes to two. The significance of this is that Bethany's best friend, Annie, is now in her class where before, she was scheduled to not be. She was made up. She seems to be really enjoying it but as has always been the case, we don't get many details of what goes on in her day. She does come back every day with a different pre-readers book. These are wee 6 or 7 page books that focus primarily on a single letter of the alphabet and go over words for that letter.

The other main point of note this month is the eye patch which Bethany kindly put on for me to take this photo. She had an appointment with the hospital optometrist and they prescribed that she have her good eye patched for 6 hours a day. This is to make her bad eye do the leg work as the eyes continue to develop until the age of 7. I've been drawing different things on the patches to help her get accustomed to them. She chooses at night what she'd like on the patch and I draw it up for the next morning. This one has a cheese string drawn on it but the requests have been as random as milk cartons, glasses of water and apples with a face, hands and feet. This patch is possibly a transitional thing as she's putting up a bit of protest. There is an alternative of eye drops in her good eye to make it dilate and go out of focus so we'll see how she goes with that.

Tonight Bethany is sporting her rather silky kimono pyjamas that her Uncle Coco sent her from his holiday in Vietnam.

You can check out the rest of this series and see her progress by entering the words tagged BethaBlip into the Blip Search facility.