Our webkinz blog has taken off. It started climbing over the past few weeks, hitting about 600-800 page views a day. Then the past week has been a new high almost every day. Friday - 1,300 page views… Saturday - 1,800 page views and then today a whopping 4,733 page views and one post with 350 comments alone. Hayley is so excited by it all, she predicts page count totals each day.

Evidently parents are cool with their kids on the blog b/c it is overseen by a mother and the kids like to trade object through the blog, not to mention get hints, etc. I’ve had so many nice posts from parents. One told me that their kid had read more of our blog than the combination of all the books he cracked - and the parent thought it was awesome because the kid was happy to read it, looking for tips and such. At this rate, Hayley might be near the same levels in terms of how much she has written or work on this summer.

Hayley loves posting on it. She is now comfortable with taking a screenshot, cropping and saving it in photoshop, then ftping it to our server and posting it in the blog with some text. I helped her but she typed her first line of straight html on Friday. She can now copy an img src line and edit it to call a different image. How cool is that??

I’ve even got some of the regular kids to start their own blogs and helped them with some basic html stuff. I like interacting with them all this way.

I fear Hayley will never be the kind of kid who likes schoolwork. So far, she doesn’t have the focus of Jeff or the curiousity about things that I had but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things and ways of learning that she won’t excel in. She could be a late bloomer anyway but knowing she can do something - something most kids can’t - is really good for her self-esteem and her academic skills. Perhaps she is a graphic learner and will use visual things to illustrate her work. She might be a photographer, a graphic designer, a fashion designer, an architect, who knows. But as Jeff said tonight, we just need to play to her strengths and go from there. And right now, her unabashed love of webkinz tops the list.