THE SON SHINES!

Parenting expands a self! Which is a good thing -- before we adopted Michael, I was mostly focused on MeMeMe and might have believed the P.R. in the last post's reviews (grin)!

Well, speaking of parenting, this morning, we attended a student-to-parent presentation by Michael where he updated us on his schoolwork, as well as shared his goals for the future. I was very moved by the whole presentation -- he's struggled so hard in the past two years and puberty didn't help (ick). Anyway, here he is starting out the presentation with a book collating his progress -- please note his shirt: he'd initially come down for breakfast in shorts and t-shirt but then, just as we were about to leave the house, he decided to change to better clothes as he thought "this conference thing is important":



Then, here he is holding up a pamphlet that he and two other students had created in his science class. It was an introduction to solar power:



I asked which part of the pamphlet he produced, and he pointed to a page -- apparently, much of the graphics was done by the girl in their 3-student group. I jokingly-grumbled, "Hey, how come it's always the girls who have to do most of the work?" (you ladies know what I mean, right?). In response, Michael giggled. He's not giggling in this photo, though, because he felt self-conscious about my picture-taking. I calmly advised him, "Moms take pictures -- live with it, son."

In other news, we're going through prepping for high school. I'm happy to report that Michael got accepted to one of the two schools to which he'd applied. We're still waiting for the second school's decision, but meanwhile, Congratulations Michael! You've come so far -- in two years, you moved from from 2nd-to-4th grade, Spanish only orphanage schooling to 8th grade in a top-quality, English-only middle school. May you continue to fluourish! As the bio of you is entitled, SON SHINE!