Last night, she swam the length of the pool, pausing only once to flip over and rest on her back.
Tonight, I took her back and braved cold water and only 80-degree air to practice again. More making it, more tired and heaving breaths from the little redheaded duck, who this week seems to be exerting herself physically more than ever before.
I am too tired to finish this post.
But there will be swimming.
Last week, the little angel started crying at bedtime. Howling, actually. Because she was the only kid in her summer camp class that failed the swimming test.
Swimming has been a challenge for her.
My heart broke, again, as it does every time. I'm not a great swimmer myself, and I know that feeling of being the one who can't seem to get it in the pool. I manage to get across the pool and back, but part of my paranoia about her in the water stems from my marked inability to save anyone from drowning, almost not even myself.
The next morning, I talked to the swim instructor at camp. I asked what we could work on with her. She started to tell me, and I started to seize up, because I knew I would be useless at teaching my daughter what to do -- I hardly know how to do it myself. I think the instructor thought I was trying to convince her to let the little angel go with her friends even if she wasn't ready, but I wasn't. I was asking for help.
She offered to give the little angel one emergency lesson before she goes out of town on vacation for three weeks and before the little angel's two-week intensive swim lessons start in mid-July. I thanked her, moved some stuff in my schedule around, and girded my loins for the water. The lesson is in a few hours.
This morning, the little angel tried to talk her way out of the lesson. She said she didn't care if she was the only kid with the babies in the shallow end. She said she hated swimming lessons. But I know she was upset this weekend when I made her wear her life jacket in the deep end when none of her friends had to. And she commented at least eight times how happy she was that everyone was wearing their life jackets when our neighbors took us out for a surprise boat ride last night.
"It's done," I told her as we got in the car this morning. "You have to. There are a few things in our family that are nonnegotiable, and wearing your seatbelt and learning to swim are two of them."
After I dropped her off, I started thinking of other things that are nonnegotiable in my brand of parenting: reading/writing/arithmetic, learning to drive, learning about credit, basic first aid. Then there's a deep gray chasm filled with things I want her to master: how to cook, how to sew on buttons, how to iron and do laundry, how to break down sales pitches, how to blog -- but these things don't fall into the life-and-death arena for me.
Swimming does.
She'll hate it, I'll hate it -- but this? This could be the year. She is so close. She can dive for rings and dog paddle -- she just can't do the crawl across the pool yet.
Hoping for salvation this summer.
Dear Beloved,
I had this great plan. Well, my first plan was that we would go back to the beach where we got married and, you know, renew vows and eat cake and drink champagne. Only that sort of didn't happen.
Then I told all my girlfriends I was going to have someone take a picture of me in my wedding dress, you know, sort of arty snapshot thing, that I could give you, only I would look okay in it, not totally thrown together. I had it lined up and planned for the day you were going to be working, but then you didn't work. Oops.
So then I started trying to think of back-up ideas, and the pressure of the ten-year anniversary gift started to freak me out every time I thought about it. You know how much I like ritual. I wanted something kind of formal and fantastic.
Then, just now, as I was getting out of the shower at 3, which I know is an extremely endearing quality about me, much like my inability to get out of bed and the fact that my feet stink, I decided to just take it. I didn't even wait for my hair to dry.
Only I forgot I got sunscreen on the lens of the phone camera at Worlds of Fun and didn't realize how heinously blurry these were until I emailed them to myself and opened them up, and dammit, I have a conference call in a half hour and then I have to go get the little angel, and you know this is how it is, this life thing that keeps happening while I'm planning the fabulous things I'm going to do for you.
But the carpet almost looks like the sand we stood on.
And the little beads still remind me of stars.
I couldn't get the whole dress no matter how I stretched and thus gave myself double chins. Another endearing quality: I have really freakishly short arms.
Maybe if I leaned over? Nope. Not going to happen.
Baby, I love you. I really wanted to get you something amazing, something heartfelt, but I realized I do have this blog, and maybe telling the Internet how lucky I am, how amazing you are, how astonished I am that our lives turned out so perfectly after these ten years, how much more comfortable I am in that dress than I was that day when I was so worried about the details and the sand and our relatives and friends, that today when I put on that dress all I thought about was us, and you, and how there's no one I'd rather see at the end of every day and when I first wake up and when something bad happens and when something good happens and when nothing happens at all.
I love you. Happy anniversary.
She stood on her tiptoes to put the Father's Day cards in the mailbox, her pigtails so long they hung halfway down her back, blowing occasionally in the hot summer wind already sweltering at eight in the morning. From the back, she could've been my seven-year-old sister back in 1984.
Most of my childhood memories are of summer -- on my grandparents' porch or under the weeping willow, visiting Gran in the hairdryer heat of Arizona or running around my own yard barefoot. Hot wind blowing through my pigtails.
Sometimes, when the wind is just right, the memories come back with such clarity, I can taste the rhubarb pie or feel the upholstery of my gran's ancient car. I can see the firefly jar.
What will she see when the hot winds blow on her at 37? I wonder.
Today the little angel and I and two of our dear friends ventured down I-70 to Heins Farms, a working dairy farm about an hour outside Kansas City. They supply Roberts. We had a grand old time, extended NY subway version to follow, but please to enjoy this cow video for now.
Here's a link to all the cow pics and videos that I took while on the Heins farm.
And!
For weeks now, my sister has been emailing me news links and photos of the Missouri River escaping its banks upstream of my hometown in Iowa. Everyone back home just keeps saying it: The flood is coming. The flood is coming.
The road to home is starting to close. Parts of I-29 between Kansas City and Omaha will be shut down if necessary. The levees in Hamburg, Iowa were breached yesterday. Amtrack stopped the trains through Iowa yesterday.
It's not rain. It's earlier rain, and release rates from upstream dams. I asked Pa what it all meant, what caused it, and he started talking about the Army Corps of Engineers and planned releases from dams and cubic feet per second of water twice to three times the normal amount due to early rain and significantly higher snowmelt in Montana. None of it made much sense to me.
Here's how the Corps of Engineers explained cubic feet:
A cubic foot of water can be compared to the size of a basketball, Jacobson said. On Wednesday, the Missouri River was 21.8 feet at Boonville, half a foot above flood stage, and was flowing at 166,000 cubic feet per second. Imagine watching 166,000 basketballs fly by every second, as Jacobson explains it. The Corps' forecast doubles that by the middle of the month.
Farmers are going to lose entire crops. Insurance won't cover the entire loss, not by a long shot. Hamburg pretty much needs to move its entire town. Businesses shut down, houses under water.
Sometimes I wonder if it's better to get hit out of the clear blue sky, like with a tornado, or whether it's better to have weeks and months to plan, like this flood.
I'm glad my family was able to move some stored crops out of the way so perhaps those won't be lost. I'm glad people are able to evacuate. But there's also the psychological impact of knowing the water is coming and there's really nothing you can do about it. The cubic feet per second are just too great.
Here in Kansas City, Parkville is the community most affected by the river. They're planning to hold back the river with tarp and sandbags. We've always groused Kansas City doesn't make enough of its riverfront, but maybe in this case that's a good thing.
Warning, no warning: Loss is loss. Maybe knowing in advance doesn't mean a thing if you're going to lose it all, anyway.
I asked Pa if there was going to be a blame game, and he said there always is with these sorts of things, but I think this one may be just too many cubic feet of water per second. Too much rain. Too much snowmelt.
The weather is changing, and the days in which we benefited from living by the river may have floated away with yesterday's barges and canoes.
The other night, the little angel wanted ice cream. We hauled out some sort of chocolate brownie something from Blue Bunny.
"No," she said. "The brownies taste bad in that ice cream."
"Well, then we should call them and tell them that."
Her mouth dropped open.
"Seriously, that's what you do when you're not satisfied with a product."
So we looked up the 800 number on the package and called them.
Beloved introduced himself.
"We have a problem. My daughter and I like to buy your ice cream, in many flavors, but she is REJECTING the brownie chocolate ice cream."
He took a deep breath.
"She says the brownies taste bad."
"That's the problem. We have a large carton of this ice cream, but the brownies don't taste good."
And then he hung up and we had a good laugh.
Imagine my surprise when at nine the next morning, the phone rang. Area code: 712. Wells HQ, on the phone.
The woman was very pleasant. She asked for the lot number and some other information from the bottom of the carton. "It's possible there was something wrong with the brownies," she said finally, taking the entire situation very seriously. "Would you like a coupon so your daughter can try a different flavor?"
Of course we would like a coupon.
When the little angel got home yesterday after a very exciting day at summer camp, I told her about the call and the coupon.
"See?" I said. "That's how it works."
Usually.
Well played, Le Mars, Iowa.
I've been to urgent care twice and the ER once in the past week with my family. Nobody died (though Beloved's going to have a scar), but after a long stretch of no doctors, we were due.
Yesterday morning the little angel woke up clawing at her neck, which was fiery red and covered with bumps. I immediately thought she'd gotten into poison ivy down at the lake. Hydrocortizone didn't work, so I reached for the only thing that saved me from insanity when I had chiggar bites last time -- baking soda.
As we drove to the pediatrician's office for early morning walk-in hours, she complained only slightly as large clumps of baking soda fell off her neck onto her clothes.
The examination room was decorated like an ocean, just like my girl's room. There were metal crabs hanging from the walls, just like hers. I wondered where they shopped. I liked the seahorse.
The pediatrician told us it wasn't poison ivy, just some sort of bug bite -- or rather, about 35 of some sort of bug bite. Just on her neck. Totally weird. What kind of bug? Did it really matter? No.
So she prescribed some steroid cream to put on it and recommended Benadryl or Zyrtec -- which I totally could've given my girl when I first noticed the bumps on Sunday. Could've spared her a day of frantic itching.
Now, I realize this doesn't make me a bad mother. I'm not beating myself up over forgetting Benadryl. But sometimes I wonder where my common sense went. Did it get stuffed down under Internet Volume or Job Stress or Why Haven't I Heard From Those Agents Yet Worries? Is it hiding under my swimming suit? Did I sell it at the garage sale last weekend?
Why didn't I think of this completely obvious solution myself? Damn.
Speaking of novels, I was totally jealous of Jane Austen when I read my last BlogHer Book Club selection, A Jane Austen Education. Review (and jealousy explanation) here.
I've often told my daughter that I try so hard not to rush, because I've noticed that rushing is one of the only things 100% guaranteed to make me yell. Anything else is a crapshoot, but rushing = yelling for me, unfortunately. I HATE TO RUSH. And I have a seven-year-old who moves at the speed of an ant.
This hatred of rushing is a real problem, since I work with the Internets and you can literally hack at the list all day and never ever ever get done. So why do I try to do just one more thing when I know I need to leave right away? It just grows back. Just like the grass in my lawn. That grows back every three days and takes an hour and a half to mow.
Wow, sorry. Got distracted there.
Imagine my amusement when my girl handed me a story she wrote recently about a mouse family.
Well, at least the mouse family never rushed.
