So, rowing. (Or, I'm going out now and I may be some time.)

I don't know if Duchess's passion for rowing will last. But it is real passion. Every weekday she hustles out of school so she can catch a ride (with the family of a teammate) to the river, where she rows for two hours. Then she takes the bus home, eats dinner, showers, does her homework, texts (her rowing friends) as long as she can get away with it, and goes to bed. Every Saturday morning she gets up at 6:30 to take the bus to the river to row for 3 hours. She talks incessantly about pieces and ergs and strokes and 2Ks and the 3V and 4V boats. (Her goal is to get a place in the 4V boat so she can go to a regatta in San Diego; they're only taking the top four boats. Odds aren't great.)

I think this is great, mostly. She's outside, on the water,* moving her body, for hours a day. She's learning how hard she can work, a boundary she's never even come close to testing before, and that's incredibly valuable. Crew is (as I predicted, because I'm so good at parenting) basically perfect for her because it's all team. Your performance is your boat's performance, and it depends on your teammates and your ability to work together. All her life, Duchess has wanted to be part of a real team, to be part of effective and difficult collaborative work to achieve a shared goal. This is pretty much her dream.

I went to the "novice parents meeting" and listened the head coach talk about rowing, and everything he said made me think "Okay, THIS is why she likes this." He says rowing is a sport of repetition, and you get better mostly by doing a lot of rowing. He says that it's totally fine for kids to come to one or two practices a week, and some kids do that, but they just won't get much better, and they won't earn a place in the better boats. He says "there is no sacrifice; there are only choices." When Duchess's boat got first place in a race, and all the kids got medals to hang around their necks, her coach made them put their medals under their shirts so they wouldn't seem like they were gloating. There's an antiquated and certainly un-American emphasis on cheerful humility and endurance,** plus straightforwardness, grit and commitment to the team. Plus a little cult of personality around the head coach, who would totally have gone on Scott's Antarctic expedition and has zero interest in bullying or manipulating kids, but also zero patience for excuses or whining.

And she's achieving some initial success, in spite of being not terribly strong or fit, for the same reason she's at least a little good at everything; she pays attention, a deeply under-rated skill.  This is a sport where paying attention and putting in the hours can get you pretty far. I don't know when she'll run up against her limits (of strength, of physical geometry, of sheer grit) and see other kids advance past her, and I don't know how she'll respond when that happens. She may just lose interest; there may not be sacrifices, but the choice to spend 20 hours a week doing one thing is a hard choice when you're a person who is interested in most everything. In the meantime, though, I'm enjoying watching her dive into this.

*It's really cool, being down on the river. Even just walking down to the dock gives me a little thrill; seeing Portland from its river is so different, and you're reminded that hey, there's nature here. Duchess spends an astonishing amount of time travelling back and forth under all the bridges, experiencing her city in a way that most people never do.
**I think of Apsley Cherry-Garrard almost every time I have to listen to Duchess talk about rowing longer than 90 seconds. 

Fall vacation

First, an interlude. Duchess took these photos while escorting Skipper and a friend. The cat is Velvet Elvis, a neighbor, hanging out on our front steps contemplating the last of the Portland sunshine.

A three-day weekend adventure, for us, is pretty exhausting. We're a pretty bad driving family, and we also need time to do nothing built into the schedule. So this mini-vacation was a bit of a stretch for us, without enough down time, but we had fun regardless.

On Friday afternoon, we picked up Duchess at school and hit the road. She was mad at us, for some 13-year-old reason, and was an ass most of the way to Seattle.
















We spent Friday night in Seattle to hang with the Rock Star family and attended a celebratory picnic in honor of Momotaro's third birthday. I got to snuggle Ume the baby (who no longer sleeps ALL the time, but still sleeps MOST of the time) a lot, and that was delicious. Skipper got to spend time with her beloved Momotaro, and when we left, she wept bitterly in the car for half an hour.

We drove to Whidbey Island on Saturday afternoon, which included a ferry ride. We stayed in a vacation rental in Freeland two nights, and poked around Whidbey on Sunday. It was cold and grey, but lovely nonetheless. We had a pretty good time; the girls stopped fighting a few times long enough to enjoy each other's company. I experienced sciatica for the first time,* which makes sense because I'm getting super-old.

Here's where we stayed - right on the bay in Freeland. This is not a picture of the water, or of us taking advantage of the water, but it captures the zeitgeist of our vacation approach in general.

We went kayaking late one evening, and Duchess made friends with a seal.

Fort Casey, where everybody else went up in the lighthouse and took a picture of me way down on the ground, where I feel happiest. The girls had a lot of fun together here, for no particular reason. You'll notice Duchess is laughing a lot in these photos. That's genuine. When she's not being a sulky jerk,** she's delightfully easy to please, and she generously laughs at every one's jokes.

Coupeville, where we ate an enormous lunch.

Deception Pass, where we walked up to a terrifying bridge with a spectacular view, and also stopped on the beach to be reminded that Duchess's rock-skipping technique has not improved.

On Monday, we caught a ferry to Port Townsend. The kids (said they) saw a whale.

And then we went home. We had to, because Duchess was pretty mad about missing rowing practice Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, so we had to get her back for Monday afternoon practice, because she's trying to secure a good position in the boat before a regatta. (Or something. There's a lot of boring droning-on about rowing around here these days, and I'm trying to maintain a protective veneer of ignorance.***) Anyway, we got her back, and now life is back to normal, such as that is!

*It passed. I'm fine. But the kids really enjoyed me howling "ow my ass!" and clutching my hip/butt every time we got back in the car.
** You do not want me to get started on this topic.
*** Rowing has eaten Duchess. In the few hours when she's not actually at rowing practice, she's texting her rowing friends or following me around talking about rowing. I have never loved a sport even a fraction as much as she loves this. I hardly love ANYTHING as much as she loves this.
****You might get a letter from Duchess soon, fundraising for rowing. Sorry about that; they make her do it. 

Settling in

The kids are getting into the groove of serious school now, past the heady first days of orientation and nametag art projects. Skipper feels pretty optimistic* that this year will not be as terrible as last year, and that her teacher is less of a tyrant than last year's edition. Duchess is thrilled to be back among her people, and resigned to her class schedule. They're settling to the after-school schedule, as well - Skipper walks herself home and reads for hours after school (except for her once-weekly roller-skating class) and Duchess catches a ride from a teammate's family to her rowing adventures and busses** herself home afterward. 

There are two major battles we're working through with the kids right now.
1) Sibling assholery. They're awful to each other, and it poisons our family life. Our current approach is to pair off on a revolving basis for on-on-one time*** (which I'm calling "dates" in the absence of a better term, much to Duchess's dismay, because she's revolted by the notion of a date with her dad) to strengthen our connections to each of us so we can better deal with all of us.
2) Duchess's phone. I don't even... it's just shitty. What I  hate most is that her attention is always partly in phone-land. We just recalibrated our devices policy to create more blocks of phone-free time, so she's either totally on the phone or totally off it and she's pretty much being a jerk about even the mild restrictions we're enforcing. I'm sure the drama will continue to unfold.

What else? I have been reading this blog from the beginning (and so have the girls), and I was struck by how wearisome and unstable our life was from 2008-2012. Reading it, I remember how exhausted, how spread thin, and how despairing about the future I felt. Our current state, in which I can casually buy expensive groceries every week AND a new hammock chair for the porch AND a pair of brand-new shoes for Skipper AND save money for retirement, and our kids take care of themselves after school, is dramatically better in almost every way (except for trying-to-guide-a-kid-through-growing-up-in-the-smartphone-era and the president). Also, I really enjoyed watching videos of Skipper in her moray eel phase.

I might get a job for real (at the place where I've been temping in one form or another for four years). I'm interviewing in a few weeks.

That's pretty much the news. I'm leaving out The Great and Endless But Slow-Moving Saga of the Crumbling Foundation. You're welcome.


*Or what passes for optimistic in Skipper-ville.
**It will very soon become too dark after rowing ends for me and Cook to feel comfortable with this - she catches the bus at a physically isolated stop on a bridge (under another bridge) near multiple homeless encampments, a stop where I wouldn't feel comfortable waiting alone. So we're going to have to start picking her up, which adds another step to the evening. I recognize that it's still a much easier routine than when both kids needed retrieval from daycare/school, but it's annoying.
*** Some of the dates so far: Cook and Skipper went to see RBG, Skipper and I baked blondies and made lemonade, Duchess and Skipper went to see a bad second-run kids movie and eat lots of candy and popcorn, Cook and Duchess played video games together. They've been pretty successful. SO FAR.

It isn't summer any more.

It's fall!

Duchess is in eighth grade, and she seems cool with it so far. She has a pretty brutal rowing schedule lined up, so it remains to be seen how that works in balance with homework and her demanding social media brand. I'm guessing a bunch of tantrums will be part of the process, but I'm holding out hopes.

Skipper is in fourth grade. She would like to drop out of school. I'm guessing a bunch of tantrums will be part of her school year as well.

We took first-day-of-school photos, and they were really adorable. However, there was no memory card in the camera, so they exist only in my memory.

Summer catch-up, part two

Momotaro has a sister now! We got to visit her in August, combining the trip with Duchess's first rowing regatta. (I say first because she's decided to go all in on rowing this fall. She rows every weekday after school for two hours, and on Saturdays for three hours. Rowing is not a sport, it's a cult. More about that later.)

Momotaro, incidentally, doesn't think much of me.

Skipper was thrilled to see Momotaro, who is pretty much her favorite person in the world, but she was willing to spend a few moments with his sister.