3rd Day at School

Return to School: Tuesday was Kade's third day back at school. He was doing great while we were getting ready to go and when we first got into the car. Then he asked for me to play his "cartoons" (a.k.a., Backyardigan's CD) which he usually sing's happily with in the back seat...well, this time he wasn't singing at all. Let the apprehension begin. Then we finally get to school and as soon as we enter the front door...the meltdown begins. Luckily the teacher and I were able to distract him long enough for dad to make a clean get-away! His bud Zack was there too which apparently helped throughout the day. The teacher said that once he settled in, he actually did pretty good...whew! Once we picked him up from school he was in pretty good spirits and said he wants to go back. He is always talking about the "big gym" and how they get to play football or "soccer monster". For those of you who don't follow the Backyardigans, that is from one of their episodes...

Monster Detective: PABLO is a noisy but lonely Soccer-Ball-Monster who hordes soccer balls in his castle's gym. TYRONE is a no-nonsense, Dragnet-style Detective. He and his client, UNIQUA, must brave the Monster's Castle and rescue UNIQUA'S kidnapped soccer ball. 60's Rock underscores this action- packed investigation. Will they get the job done without being turned into Monsters themselves?

But I digress. All in all, it appears that we may be making some headway...hopefully. It does appear that mom taking him to school works better. Probably because the first go around with daycare it was always me who took him...

GMAIL: Jen and I both have had email accounts through my web hosting service for our family website cavinet.com. Our main complaints regarding this service had been two fold. First, SPAM!!! The spam explosion is unstoppable and I could not keep up with it. I tried both server based blockers as well as client based blockers but both were just a pain to maintain and generally failed. The second is PC migration. I tend to rebuild our systems about every year (I will be doing Jen's in another week or so...maybe I will publish directions as I do it...) and migrating email is a MAJOR headache due to Outlooks clunky import/export mechanisms. As such, I looked at multiple options and settled on GMAIL..."the Google's" email service. I know that many of you already have gmail accounts but for those who don't...it is really great.

1. Their spam filters are wonderful. They immediately started catching about 90% of my spam and with their "report spam" button they are now catching about 98% of my spam with little to no effort (Jen really likes this a lot).
   
2. There are no migration problems as everything is stored online so you can easily access your email from any computer!
   
3. They do not have "folders"! I really hate having to move email to folders because to me that takes too much thought and ultimately you get it wrong and end up searching forever to find that email you misplaced. Obviously "the Google" has the technology to make that problem go away...basically you just dump all your email into one archive directory and then you just search for what you want. You would be surprised just how easy it is to pull things back out.
   
4. It is free and has no annoying pop-ups (although there are ads on the sidebar but those don't seem to bother me).

And conversion is a snap...all I do is forward our email from *@cavinet.com over to *@gmail.com and we don't miss a beat...easy as pie. Gotta run...Payton is calling.

PS - message from Payton (who wants to type): uhj bbbbbbb trchyubnuhy yhhu uuuu uj. And there you have it, Payton's first JOURNAL entry ;-)