I am still here.

I seem to be running out of bloggy steam. Are you all still there?

Things are okay. My job situation is making me very tired, and the rainy season has begun. We refuse to turn the heat on until November, so we're using lots of blankets and sweaters (and slippers, thanks to Skipper's reminders). Dutch is blazing through her not-exactly-challenging academic benchmarks* and is getting much better at reading. She brings home very strange things from school - yesterday it was a photocopied picture of a crab, with a speech balloon in which Dutch had written "I am very popular!" - she explained that it had been the suggestion of the kid sitting next to her, and she had written that down instead of her own idea, which was "I am going to pinch you!"

Skipper is a HUGE pain in the ass right now, and incredibly cute, too. She and Dutch are thick as thieves about 30% of the time, and at loggerheads the rest of the time.** Cook is settling comfortably into his incredibly tedious job, and we have made all sorts of medical appointments so as to maximize his terrific benefits.

Skipper had a vaccine reaction Friday night, and was up all night with a fever, and cranky the next day. (Cook and I were cranky zombies, too.) Stupid public health.

Dutch is about to turn six. SIX. Can you believe it? I can't. I can't believe she's going to be sixteen, and twenty-six, and so on. We also just got her school photo, which is awesomely smirky...

That's all I've got for you today. I'll try to muster up some energy to write something more interesting!

*Last week she brought home the single most depressing piece of paper I had seen in her short academic career. It had a dotted outline of a rectangle for tracing, and, underneath that, the dotted outline of the word "rectangle" for tracing. That made me feel kind of broken-hearted, somehow. I know it's not a big deal, but REALLY? No child left behind in the great rectangle-tracing race with China? Couldn't they at least have asked her to try to spell the word by herself? Or even just copied the word freehand? Who learns this way? Does ANYBODY learn things by tracing them?

** They really like similes and metaphors.