Happy Girl

It was finally warm enough for Gigi to go outside for longer than 5 minutes. We got all dressed up in barn clothes and headed to got help Daddy do chores. She had so much fun. I got a few minutes caught on tape and you can see her smile.
The house became a nightmare. Even Nene, MD's beloved cat, found a mouse and walked into his bedroom with a dead little thing as a gift. She just left it there in the carpet in front of him.
As a disclosure for those who may be thinking :"Oh my!! She has mice in her house" . Yes we do. With all the grain out in the farm as soon as it gets cold they are in the house. The cats help a lot but it is impossible to get rid of the pesky creatures.
Today I was talking to a friend of mine from Sweden about how here in the US they are more and more pushing kids to learn to read earlier. She is also and uschooler and we have many great talks about children, parenting, partners, family and life in general. As I recall in Brazil kids where not "alphabetized" until they were 7 or 8. Why do they want kids her in the US to be reading at five or else they are labeled learning disable or behind?
I hear about people teaching their kids to learn as early as 3 even 2. It seems like the more they push younger kids, more hours, more school days, less recess... the worse it gets.
Also the amount of time kids spend here is just way more than in my time. In my time in Brazil you either went to school from 8:00AM until noon or 1:00PM until 4:30-5:00PM all the way until you graduated. So no one stayed in school as long as American kids do.
I went to a Brazilian private school all my life until 11th grade when I did go to private American high school. In my experience the Brazilian school covered more subjects even deeper than the American school.
Not that it was "better". I can talk about all the damage my brothers and sister suffered in school there. I did a little better in some ways. But I still studied to pass the tests and not because I wanted to learn. Talk about a waste of time!
I was fortunate to have a mom who when I wanted to come to the US to work for a dog handler at 16 year old supported me all the way. I left school for a year and it was a life changing experience. She was always that way. She would wake up and it would be too beautiful of a day to go to school so she would just declare that we would go to the beach or hiking and not school.
Well it is almost 1:00AM and I will stop rambling and go to sleep.
Good night.