There's (not) 104 days of summer vacation

Is there a better way to start summer vacation than with a home mani/pedi? Part of Lolli's birthday pack of goodies included a bottle of nailpolish. On this first day of summer vacation, she picked her favorite color (out of my collection) and now she has matching toes and fingers in "Pink Chrome." I'm glad the color looks so much better on her than on me.

A couple of days ago, I had 'Shroom write thank you notes to all his teachers (being in the Learning Center and receiving special ed services at school, he had four thank you notes to write). It was a good thing I had him start a week before the end of school. He utilized every day until the night before to finish off his thank you notes. It involved a three step process:

1) he would write a draft on scratch paper
2) I would correct his spelling (insert step 1A before this: he would "decipher" his message for me so that I could correct the spelling)
3) he would write the final draft on the blank notecard

One of the step 3's looked like this:

Oh dear. I've always known he's struggled with reversing his "b" and his "d" and even his "3" in math. Okay, his seventy-one would come out as "17" and when asked to write thirty-seven, he would write "73" but still, I figured it was still on par with 8 year olds who ocassionally reverse letters and numbers.

He was copying this text from his draft. Should I have reason to worry that this is something beyond "typical" mistakes of an eight year old boy? His Learning Center teacher, in a recent conference, mentioned that he may benefit being screened for "d-y-s-l-e-x-i-a" as she had spelled out since he was within earshot. She needn't worry as 'Shroom has a hard time with auditory processing.

Well, this may be something we'll need to pursue with the neurologist as we look to find out more about his learning disabilities. I'm sure more to come on this topic will be forthcoming . . .