February 26, 2007: My little guy did his homework all by himself.

I know what you're thinking: Big deal. Mom needs to get a life.

But it is a big deal, a really big deal. A big milestone for a kid that, a little more than one year ago was viewed only in the negative.

I adopted my little guy in October 2005, a few months short of his fifth birthday. I put him into pre-school almost immediately, a school that my older child had been to for kindergarten. A local Russian grandma, to whom I owe a huge debt of thanks, served as translator and aide for nearly a month. That would do it I thought. Get him over the big hump. He'd fall as easily into pre-school as my older guy had into day care.

Wrong.

You can file the next part of this saga under "Red Flags I Have Seen And Ignored To My Regret." The teacher of the four-year-olds group wanted nothing to do with a kid from the other side of the planet who spoke no English, and made it eminently clear in language both verbal and body. I saw and heard it, but pushed it aside because this school had been such a great place for my older son. "The children in my group are doing this now," the teacher would say of my younger son, "and he can't." "Yet," I would reply, "he can't do that yet." Subtext: If you step up as a teacher, he can and will. Day after day, she measured his progress in negatives: Threw a temper tantrum. Check. Ran around at story time. Check.

It wasn't all bad. The school had a marvelous aide, who had come to the U.S. as a small child herself from South America. She loved my son and set positive goals for him. But the big break came when the compassionate, caring teachers of the three-year-olds class took my son in. We made it to the end of the school year intact, but without much in the way of pre-kindergarten prep. (Don't laugh. You have no idea how intense kindergarten is these days.)

Predictably, that landed us right in the next challenge. Convincing the local public school that he was ready for kindergarten. No, he wasn't where the other four and five year olds where. But holding him back a year really wasn't a good option: He would have had to go into the four-year-olds class at pre-school, with the same negative-minded teacher. If I put him into a different pre-school, it would have just perpetuated the pattern he had had in Russian: Transferred from one place to another, without a sense of permanence. He needed a place he could belong to for more than one year at a time.

And so, last July, I said, No, he's starting kindergarten this fall. I didn't know then, and in many ways I still don't know what learning challenges my little guy has. But I knew that every day, he was learning buckets more than American kids his age. And I knew that the school had very, very little experience with older adopted kids. Don't get me wrong: I love this school. It is one of the best in the state and it has a principal and teachers who know every one of their kids and deeply care for them. None of us really knew what he was capable of, but to me, he was, and is, the little engine who could.

Guess what? He got a kindergarten teacher who believes in him and cheers him every step of the way. In just a few short months, he's learned his numbers to 100, a handful of sight words and good classroom behavior.

And he is doing his homework.