Deep Summer

"Deep Summer is when laziness finds respectability." ~Sam Keen

We find ourselves in the midst of summer, for better or for worse. Job changes, childcare changes, taking on new hobbies, shedding old identities. I found myself spending the first 6 weeks or so spinning out of control. My phone would chirp or vibrate almost constantly with reminders from my calendar to do this thing, run this errand, make it to this play date, pay this bill. Dano makes fun of me that I need my calendar to tell me when to have a period. He isn't wrong.

Lilah Rose started violin lessons with our friend John. I can feel my heart swell when I watch her practice and concentrate so hard, trying hard to get it right. The violin itself is so small that it looks like a toy, yet it still makes music. Having a tiny violin player in the house isn't as awful as it sounds. She can't stand when it makes screechy noises and tries her hardest to make it sound good. She isn't playing songs (her goal is to learn Rye Whiskey) but she's playing notes. John is working with her weekly to build up her muscles and work on rhythm.

She is also in swim lessons. If someone bet me she wouldn't drown, after 5 weeks of class, I would not take that bet. She'd still sink like a stone. The good part is she isn't afraid to get her head in the water anymore, and she has learned not to inhale while underwater. Baby steps.

I was looking forward to our trip to the UP/family reunion. It's always...interesting...when that much family gathers in one place. Too much of a good thing sometimes. But the high points were staying in a beautiful wooden cabin overlooking Indian Lake. I hadn't stayed in Manistique since I was pregnant. It's a lovely little town on Lake Michigan. Our cabin was right next to the Ball's, so the kids would meet at the playground in between cabins every morning after breakfast. They fished for hours (and didn't catch a thing). They paddle-boated around (Lilah sat regally in the back, allowing herself to be paddled). There was swimming and grilling and bonfires and hiking. Dano, Lilah, and I took a short day trip jaunt over to Munising to meet the ever-lovely Mia and Matti, some of the best things to come out of our time in Marquette. We hiked to several waterfalls. Lilah hiked the trails well, never asking to be carried and exercising a reasonable amount of caution. It always takes me back to when we first hiked those trails with her in a backpack at 9 months old. We've done it every year since.

Being in Manistique was funny, in a way. People would hold out our debit cards and read our names, asking who we were related to in town, this person or that person. They unashamedly asked what we were doing in town, where were we staying, and how we liked it out there. It was never unpleasant (although I'm sure it could be if you lived there year-round and everyone knew your business) or meant unkindly. Just people being curious. Our check-out lady at the little grocery store asked us where we were from and why we were visiting. The owner/manager/line cook of Floyd's Diner (incidentally named Tony) sat at our table with us, squeezed my shoulder, patted Lilah's cheek, and threw an arm around Dano while striking up a conversation about anything at all - whether I could cook an egg, why this was the best city in the world to retire.

When we got back, I realized in horror that summer was half over. In a few short weeks, Lilah would be starting kindergarten. I wasn't ready. Was she ready? Would we ever be ready? Nabi time this past 10 days or so has been a fight. I wasn't sure what was going on. They were concepts she knew, I knew she knew them, and had been plugging away happily at until recently. Now, every day was a fight. It took her 45 minutes to do 15 minutes worth of exercises. I even caught her lying one day and telling me she'd already done Nabi time with her dad, like we wouldn't talk about it. I was losing my mind one night just trying to get her to do a particular math exercise. I didn't feel like 15 minutes of disciplined, sit-down, learning time was too much to ask considering she'd be doing just that for her whole day in a few short weeks. I finally threw my hands up in frustration.
"Lilah Rose, what is the matter with you? All you have to do is count how many circles there are. Why can't you just count the circles? I know you know how." Lilah tossed the Nabi aside and sighed heavily.

"Mama, counting circles is so boring." I was surprised. She'd been doing those math exercises for weeks without complaint. I took the tablet from her and made some adjustments to the lessons, bumping her up from Pre-K to K and beyond in some areas. She started flying through problems again, and asking for more. I moved her from basic letter recognition (something she struggled so much with last year) into phonics, word building, and more abstract English concepts like parts of a story. She ate it up and did the lessons perfectly with no help. In a screen filled with pictures of objects that started with D, and a row of letters at the bottom, the only instructions it gave her were to choose the letter that the pictures started with. She chose correctly every time, without me telling her what the objects started with, what sound that letter made, or the names of the letters themselves. She was loving the science lessons, parts of the body and physical properties, how magnets work, seasons, and weather. She filled a bag with toys one day to take to a friend's pool because she wanted to know which were high-density and which were low-density. The only thing she still struggles with is social studies. The lessons are absurd, and it's hard for me to blame her. The questions want Common Core, trite answers. She'd prefer the essay questions and imagining a creative answer. She isn't always wrong, but her answers aren't the ones the quizzes are looking for and she gets frustrated to see that she got one "wrong". Did Columbus set out to find new lands in which to build houses and grow food? Yes, probably, but the Nabi wants you to focus on trade. Lilah does not give two shits about trade, plus she's seen Pocahontas.

I think in light of the way she's blossomed and progressed over the summer, she'll be just fine in school. I watched her write the other day after leaving her alone about it and encouraging play dough time, cutting, coloring, and painting, and her fine motor skills had come such a long way. As long as her teacher can recognize her boredom cues (I wish him/her luck, since I gave birth to her and still didn't know that's what her problem was) and challenge her appropriately, and as long as they appreciate (to a reasonable extent) her creative answers and interesting perspectives, she'll thrive. In the meantime, we're just careening toward Autumn at a pace I'm not entirely comfortable with. We're about to leave behind such a large chapter of our family story and step into this new epoch.