Today

The Summer Olympics are starting soon!

Last week I rode the bus with a woman who looked pretty normal from the waist up - in her 50s, discreet makeup, tidy hair, dressed casually and neatly - but was wearing jodhpurs and soccer cleats.

I photodocumented the first really summery day of the year.

 

Breakfast

Going out

Library

Post-library walk home

Antarctic Uncle is renovating our basement, so every time we come home, there's something new to see. Today, the door getting sanded in the garage, and the toilet in the yard.

 

Daydreaming

Lunch

They made up a song and dance routine about seeds and spiders.

On the way to swim lessons

Dinner at the cart pod!

Antartic Uncle bought Duchess an oyster shooter, and offered to pay her $5 if she ate it. She did.

Ice cream at the cart pod.

Going home

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. 

Change of title

Dutch has just requested that she be referred to in the blog as Duchess. It shall be so.

Threat level orange

After Spruce and O. Blond left yesterday,  Dutch and Skipper hung out in the backyard, drawing pictures. When I came out to hang laundry, I saw Skipper looking thoughtfully up at the sky. "What are you looking at?" I asked, and Dutch said, without looking up, "Evidence." 

"Evidence of what?" I asked, and she said "Of what we're writing notes about." And then she handed me a note, and ran inside to give notes to Cook and Antarctic Uncle. This is my copy:

As usual,* while Dutch was flirting with a scary idea to give herself a thrill, she succeeded in deeply scaring Skipper, who spent a long time interrogating me about how likely the house would be to explode if somebody dropped a bomb on it.


*Skipper still believes that she has a lost sister who was stolen out of the bathroom before she was born.

Dutch slept in braids, woke up all preraphaelite

First day of summer break...

Spruce (who has been friends with Dutch since they were both just barely 3) and O.Blond came over for the day. Playmobil happened.



















And you can look forward to a summer of photos of Dutch and Skipper making strange faces.

The future?

I was listening to Dutch galumph around the house this morning, and I realized that when I imagine her future self, it strongly resembles the actor Kristen Johnston.

Recent additions to our household

1. This. Imagine it fully inflated, drifting silently around your home. Sneaking up on you while you're reading on the couch... nudging your elbow when you're washing dishes... gah.
2. Walking sticks. Dutch's teacher needed a summer home for them (they live in her classroom during the year) and Dutch begged Cook to take them when he picked her up today. He had low blood sugar, compromising his decision-making capacity, and so now we have stick insects. Apparently, they eat blackberry leaves.
3. A library copy of Callista Gingrich's badly-written children's book/crap propaganda. The kids love it, probably because Dutch saw my face when I realized what it was, and gets subversive delight in annoying me.

Music in schools

I'd write about it, but I'll just let Sheila Esquivel tell you about it.

Oh, I saw it.

Venus transitted for me all evening long, baby. It was both overwhelming (somehow seeing a smaller thing cross the sun made me vividly aware of the fact that we're all floating around in space) and underwhelming (that was a pretty small dot - poor Cook couldn't make it out at all, with his crappy eyesight). But it was really cool. And it was fun to share - I handed out glasses to everybody who wanted one, and I shared mine with some ne'er-do-wells hanging around downtown Gresham who saw me gaping at the sky with my awesome solar shades.

In other news, Antarctic Uncle is visiting. Today, his first day living in the Grotto, he organized the basement* and built shelves to store everything neatly. And he played with the kids for hours.* He's setting the bar high; we have no idea what he'll do tomorrow.


*Not a small job.
**They think he's The Best Thing Ever. Cook and I have been reduced to the role of lame substitutes for situations when the Uncle is not available.

Last chance to see!

Tomorrow! It's the Transit of Venus, you guys! Don't miss it!

Shameless

Why indeed you CAN contribute money to Dutch's school to pay a music teacher!* If you wish to,you can do it through the Portland Public Schools foundation website at https://www.thinkschools.org/index.php?page=ways-to-give . Make sure you designate Atkinson Elementary as the specific PPS school to receive your gift, either in the web form or on your check.

However, you can also save your money for the nine million fundraising campaigns my kids will probably put you through over the years. (And all you other parents of school-aged kids? I'll totally sponsor your kids in their run/jump/whatever pledge fundraisers. Hit me up.) Or you can save your money so you can watch Dutch perform in many important theatrical equine productions when she grows up, because her latest career plan is to be "an actor and also a person who helps take care of horses."

*Well, probably a small fraction of a music teacher. One who's freshly minted and at the bottom of the payscale. 

Today's news.

1. I am allergic to Brazil nuts. I didn't know that.
2. Dutch is currently deeply engaged with this book. It's a very strange book.

Small triumphs.

Today I spent an hour calling people and asking them for money. I have gotten involved in the efforts of the brand-new school foundation* to raise enough money to pay for staffing for some small scrap of a music program. We're shooting for a half-time position, though it's extremely unlikely we'll get there. However, we have raised about $13,000 so far, which I think is actually pretty awesome considering half the kids at the school get reduced-price/free lunch, the foundation only started fundraising a few weeks ago, and all the families have been asked all year to pony up for stuff like school supplies, playground balls, field trips, PTA fundraisers and direct donation drives, etc. So I called people. Talking on the phone is not my favorite thing, and asking people for stuff makes me feel sick to my stomach, so I felt pretty much like throwing up the whole time. But I did it. Nobody gave me their credit card numbers on the spot, but several people said they plan to donate,** and nobody yelled at me, so I consider the experience a huge success.

I also helped organize a letter-writing event last week after school, in which participants used our talking points and materials to write their own letters to legislators about the need to reform school funding at the state level. It was a good event,*** though also kind of sad. People kept looking up and asking things like "Hey, how do you spell 'appalling'? How about 'hopeless'?" The legislator who attended (it's her district) was very pessimistic about the prospects of any kind of improvement, given the refusal of Republicans to entertain any discussion of revenue reform. Actually, what I was told by somebody who knows more about this stuff than I do was that the pension expenses should be under control in about 15 years, at which point the spending on schools will immediately improve, barring social collapse.**** So after Dutch and Skipper are done with their public schooling, things might look up a bit.

Anyway. That's why I've been doing all this asking. It's very tiring, but I'm trying not to feel hopeless.


*I hate the idea of school communities fundraising from their own pockets to pay for stuff. There are deep-pocketed schools that support multiple FTEs through fundraising, and others who have no foundation at all. But I don't want our school to keep losing enrollment, and I don't want any kids at the school to go without music. So I decided to start participating in the foundation effort AND the legislative reform stuff, in an effort to feel less awful about the foundation fundraising. 


**At that point a good fundraiser would ask them to pledge to donate a specific (high) amount, but I'm a terrible fundraiser, so I just said "Great!"


*** There were bubbles!


**** My disclaimer for most statements about the future.