Changes

Do you remember how I was looking forward to a relaxing summer with the kids? I got a call recently from an old boss (from an internship way back in the pre-Skipper days) who was looking to hire me for a short-term job that she needed to get rolling right away. I have mixed feelings about the job, but it pays well, is in a relevant field, and will get me out interacting with other people who might then think of me when THEY have short-term jobs to fill. We hired a babysitter* and I started work for real today.

So that's different than I expected.

However, the girls' summer has started. Duchess is doing swim team again, and Skipper has swim lessons during the same timeslot. They both work very hard. Skipper is fully on board with swimming now, and is determined to get better. She's still having trouble getting to the top of the water, as her tendency is to sink to the bottom. (This is weird, because she used to float without even trying, like her butt was made of styrofoam.) She is Ottering up a storm, though. And Duchess successfully convinced her kung fu best friend to do summer swim team, too, which makes the hour-a-day swimming routine a lot more fun for her.

Skipper also had her first hip-hop dance class. That was pretty hilarious. She actually participated the whole time, except for a brief sulk during which the teacher pointed at her from behind her back, looked at me, and mouthed "Is she okay?" and I smiled and gave a thumbs-up, which she seemed to correctly interpret as "I don't know if she's okay, per se, but she's probably not incurring any really deep emotional wounds, so carry on!" And Duchess went to her first beginning dance for older kids class, and actually refused to participate, which is a first. All the other kids in the class were small six-year-olds in tutus, so it really wasn't a great fit, and parks and rec is fantastic about customer service and will readily refund for classes, so I was fine with letting her drop the class. But she wept; she didn't want to be a quitter, and she didn't want the tutu girls to think she's a quitter. I did not say "Fuck 'em, Duchess, it's your life, not theirs," but I hope I managed to communicate that. She decided to switch to a "ballet basics class" parks and rec class to save face (still tutus, but older kids and more serious instruction).

Anyway, summer. I'll be working M-Th, mostly, but I'll be working long days, and it's a big change for all of us. Cook will be going to work very early, and I will be coming home fairly or very late all summer, trying to avoid paying for nine hours of babysitting a day. This will be the first time since Skipper was a baby that Cook and I will both be so busy, and I'm dreading it a bit. It's so nice to have one parent home at least part time to run errands and start dinner and handle doctor appointments and whatnot. But hey, I have a job! 

*This was actually very hard, as we were fortunate enough to have TWO candidates whom we all really liked. When the one we finally decided on (the older, more mellow one who has experience in caring for kids for a week at a time) showed up for work this week, Cook reported that he felt a pang of sadness that she wasn't the other one (the high-energy, dancing, world-traveling one with only casual babysitting experience). But the one we chose is working out great.