First day of school!

Today was Duchess's first day of second grade. I feel pretty confident that she'll cruise through the year again; she had a few butterflies on the way there, but otherwise slipped right back into school like a comfortable sweater.She also had her first day of her after-school kung fu program (which, you may recall, picks her up at school and whisks her off to the studio for a snack/socializing break and then an hour of martial arts instruction), immediately followed by a 2-mile walk to soccer practice, an hour of soccer, and a 2-mile walk home. We're all waiting to see how her over-subscribed fall works out. For somebody like Duchess, constant physical and social activity might turn out to be kind of perfect. However, she's already concerned that she won't have enough lying-on-the-couch-and-reading-books time. (To make matters worse, I'm making her fill her Skipper-free hour every morning with piano practice, lunch preparation, and breakfast dishes.)* Apparently, her designated "book basket" at school, intended for her use during reading breaks,  has only picture books in it. Picture books! Oh, the humanity.**

*Breakfast dishes! I love this.
** I just looked this quote up (actually, first I asked Cook, who knew exactly where it came from, because he's like the internet but only for old things), and then I felt kind of bad jokingly comparing the Hindenburg disaster to my daughter's irritation at being deprived of chapter books. Then I thought "Eh, whatever" and I decided to leave it in. Because if you can't trivialize disasters by offhandedly comparing them to your petty personal life, that's just UN-AMERICAN!