C.J. - Years Six, Seven, and Eight

In September, C.J. started kindergarten at St. Francis Cabrini Catholic School.  His teacher was the best one he would ever have!  Kidding...his teacher was me.

Kindergarten was still only half a day so we did mornings and a different teacher would do the afternoons.  
  He made some great friends that year.

These were two of his three best friends that year.  Unfortunately the little boy in the devil costume ended up relapsing with leukemia in April of that year and never made it back to school.  He lost his battle two years later.
By October that year, C.J. was reading fluently!  He loved to read.

and read

and read

He was still pretty small despite being one of the oldest in the class, as you can see by this picture of the Christmas concert.

And as unbelievable as it sounds...that is my future step-daughter in the front row at the end in the red and black dress.  She was in the afternoon kindergarten that year so I was not her teacher and therefore, never really crossed paths with my husband back then.

That summer C.J. played soccer again...although I am not really sure how much he enjoyed it.

He also lost his first two teeth (you can see them missing in the picture) that summer...finally.  I had a missing tooth board in the kindergarten room and he was disappointed that he didn't get to put his name on it.  
In September, he started 1st grade at Cabrini again.

It took me a while to get used to him being gone all day.  
He did really well in school and never really needed to study for anything.  He was the best reader in his class and math also came easy for him.

And he was still full of personality.

He saved his craziness for his family though.  For everyone else, he was very quiet.  
Right after school got out that May, we moved to Palm Coast, Florida...to this house.

For his eighth birthday that July we flew back to Wisconsin and he had a party with his first grade classmates and another one with our family.

Once we moved, we checked out the only local Catholic school and were put on a waiting list.  A couple days before school was going to start I realized we were not going to get in there and enrolled them in public school.  I figured that if I didn't like it, I would take them out and home school them.
They began at Old Kings Elementary School on August 18th that year.

C.J.'s probably going to give me a hard time for the way he's dressed here. Anyway, I loved the school...they loved the school...and they remained there for all of Elementary.
It was probably a good thing we didn't get in the Catholic school because even though C.J. made his First Communion in May:

that was the last Catholic thing we ever did.  I then left the church in favor of being a non-denominational Christian.