Blazing Trails ...

Well, it seems like I spend an awful lot of time on this blog lately waxing poetic about Laney and her many accomplishments. You have to cut me a little bit of slack since there are so many monumental things going on in Laney's life right now. If I am still a (sort of) prolific blogger as the rest of the Blau crew hit this stage of life I'm sure that I'll have tons to say at that time too.

But we do actually have other excellent Blau children who are forging their way through life and doing amazing things. Here's one story:

There must be something about the junior year of high school for our family. When Laney hit this year of schooling she decided that she needed to be homeschooled for that year. That was an adventure that turned out quite lovely for her and for our family. Now Savannah has hit her junior year and has decided to take a bit of a different path.

School has always been super easy for Savannah. She taught herself to read before she entered kindergarten and was reading fairly complicated chapter books by the time she hit first grade. She has always communicated on a level far above those of her peers, and it made elementary school pretty interesting for her. Her teachers thought she was hilarious. Many of her peers weren't quite at a level to understand her wicked good humor ... yet. She relates pretty well to everyone now. Still, she has been crazily advanced for her age. When she was in 7th grade she took the ACT as part of a talent search for Duke University. I freaked out when I (did a very bad parent thing and) opened her score sheet and saw that she got a 30. A 30! That is a score that many college students could not attain. I had no idea that Savannah had that sort of capability. The neat thing was that she got a perfect score on the reading portion of the test and qualified for a full ride scholarship to Duke's summer program. Only 50 students in the entire country qualified for this. So amazing!

Well, because of these scores and her performance in school she was able to take freshman English at the high school when she was in 8th grade. We didn't know how this would go, but it turned out wonderfully for her. She was able to excel in this class, and since then she has excelled in all of her high school classes. In fact, things are probably a bit too easy for her. Her lowest grade in the past four years has been a 97%. I have worried that she would suffer from horrible boredom, but Savannah manages to find ways to stay engaged and interested in school, thank goodness.

This blurry picture shows Savannah's class rank of 1 out of 375 and her excellent current ACT scores. 

Still, it has become pretty obvious that Savannah is mentally and emotionally ready to move on to the next level. She only would lack four credits at the end of this year in order to graduate. I asked her if she might be interested in skipping her senior year and graduating early. I didn't really think that she would go for that since she does have a lot of friends her age, but she jumped at the chance. She has signed up for those four classes online, and if she can get them completed she will be on track to graduate this year. She'll be missing that final year with a good group of friends who have grown up with her, but I think that ultimately she will be better for heading to college a bit earlier. We'll see how things play out.

It is hard to wrap my head around the fact that Savannah will be graduating and heading to college in less than a year. I've hardly gotten used to Laney being gone, and already we are losing another one. Spencer will follow close behind. Time, YOU MUST SLOW DOWN! I'm not ready for this. But it's going to happen whether I'm ready or not, so I'd better just figure out how I'm going to manage things I guess. This week we are working on narrowing down choices for colleges. With Laney this was pretty easy. She just needed to choose between BYU in Provo or BYU in Rexburg. Fairly simple. Savannah has no idea where she wants to go. I finally got her to admit that she would prefer a smaller college, but her options are limitless. That makes things so much harder. I gave her the challenge to narrow her choices down to her top ten choices by this time next week. With that we'll be able to start making some progress on completing applications.

Life is blazing forward faster and faster, but Team Blau is ready for it ... mostly.