Yesterday was long and grueling and largely thankless. AJ was crabby in a particularly infectious way. I spent my work sessions working on job application prep work instead of the stuff I really wanted to be doing. And everything moved at a snail�s pace, so that I was forced to stay up late researching job postings. On the plus side, however, I was reminded of just how devastating a small typo can be sometimes when I came across a posting from a small college music department seeking a professor of the �doubleass� to shore up its instrumental program.

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We�ve recently discovered that AJ has a weird gift for word jumbles. This is peculiar not just because he�s only four but because he can�t really spell.

In his preschool, when they do a particularly good job at something, they get to pick a toy out of the Treasure Box. The treasure box is filled with small, donated toys, mostly culled from Happy Meals and cereal boxes. On Monday, AJ picked out a calculator-like object called something like a Kids Travel Companion. You can type in your state and which highway you�re on and which way you�re traveling and it will tell you how to get to assorted kid-friendly attractions, such as roller coasters, fast food restaurants, and playgrounds. The machine also has a word jumble mode, which allows you to pick one of 15 or 20 categories and then gives you words to unscramble. AJ, for the most part, glances briefly at the jumbled word and tells you what it is. The first one we did was no big surprise. The category was �Animals� and the scramble was GOD. �Dog!� AJ shouted enthusiastically. But the next one was LPANEHLETN. He said �elephant� just as quickly. He even correctly shouted out some words I didn�t think he knew.

Somehow I feel that this skill is the key to understanding the way he�s acquired his reading skills. He is so clearly not phonics oriented. He doesn�t sound words out and never has, unless pressed to do so. He just reads them. If he doesn�t know a given word, he usually will substitute something that contains a similar collection of letters. I�m starting to wonder if he views words as a collection rather than an ordered set. This would explain why he struggles with spelling even as he challenges himself with books of a steadily increasing degree of difficulty.

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Tomorrow is our fifth wedding anniversary and once again, we are completely unprepared. We are the most pathetic happily married couple you ever saw. Last year we�d both been dieting very strictly for a month and the only thing we wanted to do was eat pizza. So we rented a couple of old movies and ate pizza out of the box while washing it down with beer. It was exactly what we wanted to do. This year we�ve just been indecisive. We�d originally planned on getting a hotel room downtown for the night, but we had trouble finding someone to watch AJ overnight. Then we talked about either going out to dinner or taking AJ downtown with us and finding a babysitter there. But each of us thought the other was figuring it out, and so, on the eve of our anniversary, we have no babysitter and no reservations. And the worst part of it is, I�m not sure either of us cares that much. We are totally lame. This is what happens when two people who spend a lot of time wrapped up in their own heads get married. Don�t say I didn�t warn you.

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