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Saturday, June 05, 2004

mid-day ramble

I am less enamored with my inline skates than I was this morning. Let's just say that while I know and am grateful that falling full length on my side, somehow managing to avoid landing on any part of my body wearing protective padding while hitting every OTHER part, and impacting the ground in a most spectacularly forceful way -- I am envisioning it in a Bill Nye video, repeated several times backed by frenetic music and then played in slow-mo -- anyway, as I was saying, I realize that this is much easier on my 29-year-old body than it would be in, say, forty years. As in, I'm still alive. But dang. It is also a LOT less fun than it was when I was ten, you know? OUCH.

With that out of the way, I'll move on. We had our first swim of the year today, in the neighbor kids' pool. I love that feeling of coming home from swimming and changing out of my suit, and my skin is still all cool, so the warm air in the room feels a little bit pleasant, and I almost want to put on something long-sleeved just because I could wear it for five minutes without passing out from the heat. Have I mentioned I really don't like summer? The only things I like about it are the ones that temporarily put summer ickiness on hold -- like swimming, or being at the beach where the temperature is ALWAYS in the sixties or seventies. For the rest -- blah. Except for clothesline-dried sheets. Those are bliss and summer's the only time I can have them. Still and all I'd trade if I could.

I'm going to have a sappy moment right now. You can leave if you want to. Today my daughter began to read for the first time. As if that weren't emotional enough for me as it is. But then right after she did that, her brother was watching a home video, and there was my one-year-old daughter, saying her first word (which was "hat"). Sniff.

*C is an unschooler's dream. For all you mainstream people who don't know what unschooling is ;-), it's basically extreme homeschooling, where not only does the child not go to school, but the family doesn't even "do school" at home. They just kind of absorb knowledge as they go and study what they're interested in. Now, we don't do this. I don't quite have the guts for it and I'm always a little afraid that my kids would grow up with gaps in their knowledge -- like say the times tables, because who ever wants to learn those? -- although I am closer to it than I ever thought I would be. For example, instead of starting Sit Down School with C at 3, like I did with her brother, I have never done any of that with her at all, and she's been able to just play and color and do little workbook pages she liked or whatever while her brother does school. And yet she is reading at exactly the same age he did.