In exchange for sitting through a 30-minute vendor call about 2 months ago, I got a free Amazon Echo. It arrived a few days ago and I set it up last night.

First of all, we had to change the "Wake Word" from "Alexa" to "Echo" to avoid obvious confusion. Tho A did have a lot of fun asking her alter ego Alexa to answer a bunch of questions.

M&A both asked Echo to play Hamilton within about 10 seconds of using it. It complied! "How does a bastard, orphan…"

N had a lot of fun with Echo this morning, but I think he was a little frustrated because it had trouble answering a lot of his questions, such as 'How high is the sky?", "How small is dirt?", "What is the biggest animal?", "How much does a snake weigh?" and "Will it snow today?"

Meanwhile my friend Dave lent me a blazer to see if it fits N, to wear for the bat mitz. It fits! So cute.

I volunteer in N's library once a week for an hour, shelving books. I always hope that his class will have library time while I am there. Today, it turns out that Yellow Base WOULD have had library time when I was there, but they didn't because they had a speaker. So I didn't get to see N, so I stopped by his classroom to see what was happening before I left. Aurora's mom was there, talking to the kids about Italy. I heard her say something about Venice, and then N said, "I have been there before!" It was so cute. He wanted to get her attention but he's always polite and not really loud and aggressive about it. I was happy to be there to see it!

And in M's word today, a text from her math teacher: