Okay, so her first podcast happened a few years ago when she could barely sing Twinkle, Twinkle litter star and muddled her way through the Alphabet song.  I was playing around then and made the background music too loud so it was difficult to hear her tiny little voice.

I just set up all of the middle school podcasting equipment today and Maddie was kind enough to help me test it out!  I’ve listened to it many, many times now and you can tell that we just did this on the fly.  I decided to go ahead and put it on her blog because I want you all to know about the conversations I have with Maddie.  I love it that conversations take forever, I love it that she is silly, I love it that she is five, I just love her to pieces.  Let me know if this plays for you!

For those of you that subscr...

Every once in awhile I pop back to Wordle to see if they can create a cool pic for Maddie’s tags.  Today, I finally found one that I like so I decided to publish it.  Notice how the largest words are Maddie, Good, School and Year?

How did this happen? My daughter is attending her third first day of school. She has been chomping at the bit for nearly three weeks to get back to school. A week ago she chose what she would be wearing. Two days before she packed most of her snack for the first day of school. The day before school started we snuck into school at 5:00pm so we could go to the board where the class lists were posted. Alas, Maddie found out that she was going to have Mrs. Howitt. Maddie already has a connection with Ms. Howitt (actually she has a connection with most of the teachers since we work in the school). But she has a special connection with Lynsey. When Lynsey had her baby boy, Ben, back in May, Maddie drew a Baby ben a picture and delivered it to him in the hospital when he was a day old.

W...

What a full week it has been!  We got back to Shanghai late Thursday night and here it is Thursday night again so we’ve been back a week.  Maddie spent a fair amount of time in the pool which meant we had a lot of time for some interesting conversations.  Maddie has been on so many planes this summer that she has decided that she wants to be an airplane girl.  Later, when I asked her where she wanted to go she said that she wouldn’t ever get off the plane.  She would just stay on the plane forever to help people!  Okay, so maybe the 11 take-off and landings this summer had an impact on her mental health!

Like any good mom, I took Maddie to the doctor on her birthday because she needed a check-up in order to go to school this year...