Photographic Evidence

Resting after a long day of hard work.

Another birthday party.

Halfway through Return of the Jedi...

Duchess's favorite character is Chewbacca.

I have surrendered to summer. Today we stayed at the pool (or at least within the park in which it is located) from 9 to 1:30, so we could enjoy the free open swim period. Then we biked straight over to drop Duchess at her afternoon circus camp, and Skipper and I biked home (I biked, while Skipper napped in an extremely uncomfortable-looking position in the trailer) to hang up swim suits and recuperate with all the blinds closed. She's quietly playing with the babies,* and I am computering. I feel pickled, and faintly grimy, and definitely overdosed in sunshine. I have mosquito bites. I have a pink-nosed husband newly sporting a summer haircut and a summer sunburn.** (He's sunburned because he spends all his leisure time painting the house. I spend mine complaining about the heat.)

I realized today that all of Duchess's summer pursuits are physical. Her brain is resting while her body swims (and swims and swims) and does martial arts and (this week) circuses. I think it's probably a positive thing - she's doing lots of reading, so it's not like she's truly mentally ossifying, and the habit of physical activity is a good one to start early. Math camp can wait a little longer.

It's also worth noting that Skipper, who is suddenly starting to look more like a kid and less like an elderly toddler, is really enjoying swim lessons. She participates with enthusiasm - she smiles, and even laughs during her lessons, which is unheard of. Next week she has a parks and rec preschool camp in the mornings - we'll see how that goes down...


*The babies are the favorite play activity right now - Duchess and Skipper appear to be operating a fairly sketchy orphanage. Yesterday they got ALL the baby and babyish dolls out, and got out lots of pretend food and whatnot so the babies could have a birthday party. Our whole dining room was committed to babies.

** Cook rarely sunburns, preferring instead to turn enviably golden of hair and skin as the season progresses. I met him at the end of a summer in which he had spent a lot of time outside, and it took me probably six months to realize that he was actually light-skinned and brown-haired.

Boring updates, again.

So. Summer.

We had family visit. We visited family and friends in Seattle. All of that was excellent, except that the kids turn out to be woefully ill-prepared for long car trips, and almost died of frustration during the drive to Seattle. Otherwise, lovely. Did you know there's a park in Seattle where you can ride a zip line, watch polynesian cricket, and visit a food forest? There is.

Then the girls and I went on a trip to visit friends, which was also lovely. The only sad part of our trip was that Cook stayed home to earn money and hoard his scarce vacation hours.

And THEN we went on a weekend camping trip with friends, which was also lovely. And now we’re home.

Our summer routine is anchored by Duchess's swim team practice, an hour every weekday morning. This is kind of an epic thing for an 8-year-old, as it turns out. I think she'll enjoy it more when she gets to know some of her teammates better, but for now it's just a lot of swimming. A LOT of swimming. Watching her attempt the butterfly after 45 minutes of nonstop swimming makes me feel tired, even as I lounge by the pool reading Richard Scarry books to Skipper. Duchess doesn't hate it, and she is proud to be pushing herself, but she's not enthusiastic.

For me, the summer so far is about learning the limits of my parenting toolkit. Skipper is in what I desperately hope is a difficult stage, and not the flowering of a sociopathic personality. She likes nothing more than provoking a response from me, and she's at least as happy with a negative response as a positive one. Duchess has had evil stages, but she's always remained heavily invested in getting approval from authority figures. Not so with Skipper. Skipper doesn't care. She is also very proud, and cannot admit fault. Oh, AND she's finally transitioning out of napping, which means she's exhausted and horrible by the end of the day. And timeouts just don't work on her. All of which, when you throw in an impatient, ungenerous parent, is a recipe for disaster. Or at least a lot of yelling.

The other thing we're doing this summer is watching the original Star Wars movies. We are very busy.

Swimming

Duchess is swimming every weekday morning with the local pool "swim team." She feels pretty neutral about it, but she's improving rapidly and getting a lot of exercise, so we're keeping it rolling. Today was the first day of Skipper's first session of swim lessons, so we'll be spending the whole morning at the pool for two weeks.

The girls were in an exceptionally good mood this morning, and they chose colorful clothing, so I brought the camera. 

Walking to the pool

Skipper and I hang out by the pool for an hour while Duchess swims.

Duchess and I watched Skipper's lesson together.

Skipper participated! Duchess and I were very proud.

Still here

I'm back! The girls and I returned yesterday from a vacation trip, the second of THREE exciting outings we've piled up at the beginning of our summer. I don't have much to say about our outings, except that so far they've all been fun, and we're off to the third tomorrow. 

Also, it's summer! We've got blueberries and strawberries and basil and garlic, and it's hot...

More later! 

Summer update

We're wrapping up the first week of summer, with mixed reviews so far. The kids have been relating to each other in three ways (in more or less equal amounts):

1) fighting like demented ferrets

2) playing together (mostly with small animal/people/houses-type toys) in a peaceful, persistent way

3) happily and manically screeching, laughing, running around, and yelling

States 1 and 3 make me insane, which means I'm insane 2/3rds of the day. I'm getting better about just ignoring both of them, but when I'm tired or in a hurry, I'm pretty incapable of handling it with grace. Something to work on, I guess.

Duchess is participating in the very low-key parks and rec swim team, which means an hour swimming every weekday. She's still warming up to it, but I think she'll soon make some friends and feel more confident. Skipper, after watching the swim team practice for three days, is getting excited for her swim lessons in a few weeks, and has decided that she WILL put her face in the water.

Duchess left school in tears, because she found out on the last day that the Nerd King is, after all, headed off to The School for Smart Kids. Stupid smart kids. Also, in case you're interested, this year's round of budget cuts hit only the disadvantaged kids at Duchess's school. The school will maintain a .5 FTE PE teacher and .5 FTE librarian, and add a .5 FTE music teacher, but will lose a total of 1.0 FTE in reading and ESL assistance. 

What else? There's a lot of stuff going on around here. In the first four days of summer vacation, we had several firsts - Duchess was stung by a bee,* the girls met one of their cousins (and loved him so much they have requested that he become their brother), and the girls drank their first lime rickey. Skipper now substantially overestimates her ability to drive both her bike and her scooter, and keeps her knees scraped up and bruised at all times. We found a candy store that sells a wide variety of gummy candies, which is thrilling. Duchess has read a tall pile of books already. We have THREE exciting trips coming up in the next few weeks, and in general this summer already feels packed with excitement. If I can just come to better terms with states 1 and 2, I think it's shaping up to be an excellent summer.

*She handled this as might be expected, with much sobbing and wailing and general freaking out. Skipper, of course, immediately pitched a fit because I was paying too much attention to Duchess, threw her scooter on the ground, and refused to move. As we were half a mile from home, at the tail end of a long errand-running trip that had involved quite a bit of shitty behavior, this was a pretty maddening episode. Luckily, Duchess pulled herself together admirably (to be fair, this also might have been expected - Duchess is a ridiculous over-reactor, but she usually rises to the occasion when necessary), and Skipper recognized that she was not acting in her own best interest, so after about fifteen minutes of deep unpleasantness, we finally managed to start limping home.

It's the first day of Summer Reading!

Skipper and I are at the library, looking for books in the non-fiction section, in companionable silence. She's looking for books on dinosaur fossils, and I'm looking for anything that might be fodder for Duchess's hungry brain.

Skipper: I wish I was a bee.
Me: Why do you wish you were a bee?
Skipper: So I could sting people.
Me: Who are you going to sting?
Skipper: I don't know. Just somebody.

It's not about me.

Yesterday Skipper and I met up with another kid who's going to be attending the preschool program in the fall at the local school. The kid and her parents seemed like lovely people, but I found the meet-up very stressful. I mean, it's always a little stressful meeting new people, particularly in an artificial let's-build-a-relationship-so-we-can-maybe-share-childcare-and-provide-emergency-backup-for-eachother way, but this was particularly exhausting and demoralizing for me because of Skipper's behavior. She refused to interact with the other kid, who kept hopefully inviting her to play, and wouldn't talk or look anybody in the eye. She watched the other kid very carefully, glowering through the curtain of her hair, but that was all she offered.

This is totally normal for Skipper, and I'm confident that she will eventually warm up to this kid (who seems like exactly Skipper's cup of tea, actually). Skipper's behavior is not entirely out of the realm of normal for preschoolers I have met, but she's definitely toward the end of the shyness continuum, and I haven't really figured out a way to handle it. I don't mean helping her handle it - I have no idea how to do that, since nothing I have done so far has made her less shy, and I suspect it's pretty baked in - I just mean handling it myself. I feel like I should apologize for her antisocial behavior, or explain that she's always this way (not a sociopath, I swear!), but I really don't want to be APOLOGIZING for my child's personality, or making public generalizations about who she is. (In front of her, I mean. Obviously, I make public generalizations about her behind her back all the time!) I swing back and forth between these two opposing feelings, and end up feeling like I failed both to help this other family understand the context for her unwelcoming behavior AND to make her feel that it's okay to be shy and that there's nothing wrong with her.

I want to let my kids be themselves, but I also want other people to see them positively, or at least as the complicated, worth-getting-to-know people that they are. I think this tension will get more challenging for me over the next couple of years, as Duchess bounds toward adolescence and Skipper stays shy. I cannot keep up with the kind of strength of character that parenting seems to require, though I swear I'm building it as fast as I can.

Camping

Skipper decided last night that she wanted to sleep in the play tent in the back yard. Duchess, who had to get up early for a swim meet, was not allowed to camp, but Skipper decided she would camp by herself. This is her at 7:30 last night.















And this is her at 9 last night, when Duchess announced she was not able to sleep without Skipper in her room, and Cook and I (who had not expected that Skipper would actually fall asleep) determined that because she can't operate the back door, it was probably best to bring Skipper in.

More Science Fair photos

Electromagnetism

Duchess has been working on her science fair project. Tantrums have been thrown, and the end product isn't exactly awesome, but Duchess has learned quite a bit about how hard it can be to get your methodology working smoothly, and about the puzzlement of unexpected results. Plus, she's put quite a bit of time into drawing cartoons about the dangers of electricity, because science.