One week down, ten to go.

I feel I should post an interesting update, but I have no interesting updates. I can, however, give you boring updates. Here they are!

1) Duchess loves summer. Change! New stuff to do every day! Two big workbooks to work through!* Perfect.

2) Skipper feels uneasy about summer. See above. She does like her "workbook," though, because it's a Hello Kitty coloring book.

3) Swim lessons have begun. Duchess is finding that she lost quite a bit of ground (water?) since last August, and is, I think, a little frustrated already. But she loves her teacher, of course, and her classmates, and will surely enjoy her lessons overall. Skipper is the big surprise, though, demonstrating a startling willingness to get in the water and do swimmy kinds of things. She hasn't had any lessons before, and hasn't even been in a bathtub very often. What with that, her hatred of being washed, and her dislike of any kind of new thing at all, we were pretty sure that she was going to be the Kid Who Spends The Week Sitting By the Pool Crying. There's been some crying, and some resisting, but mostly she's been shockingly enthusiastic about the whole thing. In fact, she's been an entirely different kid-at-swim-lesson type - the Cheerful Kid Who Isn't Paying Attention At All. She looks around, she tries to lick the water, she wiggles around on the steps and falls off and tries to drown herself.... So, yeah. Yet another lesson on How My Expectations About My Kids Maybe Should Be A Little More Flexible. Also, a reminder to acknowledge and appreciate the focused attention that Duchess has always brought to her activities - I've never seen her in a class where she didn't hang on the teacher's every word. Skipper has a different approach and will probably not collect so many rave reviews of her behavior as her sister has.

4) Summer entails biking all over the freaking place. Duchess is a bike champ, riding 3 miles to her daycamp in the morning, and then riding to the pool in the afternoon and then home afterward. Skipper travels even further, in the trailer, requiring patience, if not any actual physical effort. This morning, after we dropped Duchess off, she sang loudly to me most of the way to her preschool. She covered "Clementine," "Twinkle Twinkle," "Shake Your Sillies Out," and "Wheels on the Bus," inspiring me to pedal very quickly.  On the way up hills, she chanted "Go, bike, GO!"

Further updates as events warrant! 

*We can't have any summer slump here, people. She's got one general and one math-only workbook. She's going to learn all 50 states and their capitols by Sept 1. Maybe you forgot that I'm a Tiger Mom now? Or at least a Bobcat Mom.