Lily started back at Morgan Swim School today in her second year of swim lessons. She was less afraid and only cried for a few minutes during the lesson. They don’t allow you to be in the area during the lesson, but I could hear her from outside the door. I must have PMS or something because during the lesson, I read some of the articles about the school and one of them made me cry. Basically it was about a parent who’s 2 1/2 year old drowned, and how when she had her second and third child, she was determined to make swimming as important as potty training. The woman who runs the school is tough as nails - her nickname is the “Swim Nazi”, she has 11 kids, and has home schooled all of them - but her approach works and Lily has done very well there. She was already back in the water tonight, picking up where she left off. By the end of the summer last year she was swimming a few feet at a time under water. Most importantly, if she were to fall into a pool, she could swim to the pool edge and pull herself out. It was pretty amazing to see a 2 year old be able to save herself from drowning.
I’ve been spending my evenings online at DirectBuy trying to research the items we need to purchase for the new house. In my usual anal retentive form I have a humungous spreadsheet of everything we need to do and buy on it, as well as a word document with pictures of all the items I’ve picked out so that Mike can look through them and say no to the ones he doesn’t like. My theory is that the half day we take off to spend at DirectBuy ordering the stuff will be much faster and more organized. I’ll let you know if my theory works.
We had a mellow weekend which was nice after two weeks in a row of constant house showings and open houses. We messed up the house, threw dirty laundry around, and brazenly allowed the girls to leave their toys around on the floor. We’re wild, I’ll tell you. We had a good time at the park on Saturday. Arden isn’t into the swings but enjoyed learning to slide and attempting to follow Lily around. Lily loved the tire swing until she forgot to hang on and went flying off it, landing on her side and scraping up her chin. She cried for a few moments and got over it. She’s pretty tough. Arden, on the other hand . . .
During “naptime” yesterday, Mike went up to Lily’s room to see if he could get her to sleep. She asked him which Care Bear he’d like to cuddle with. He told her the red one. She smiled at him, tucked the purple one into the crook of his arm, and said, “Um, you can have DIS one. I have the red one.” He cracked up. They spent the rest of naptime making the Care Bears hair into mohawks, slicks, and Einsteins. I think Mike had a better time at the beauty parlor than even Lily. It was pretty cute.
We are convinced that Arden is going to be a dancer. I’ll try to capture more of her insanity the next time she’s doing it. She even dances now when Lily is screaming the ABC song at the top of her lungs. It’s not melodic, but that doesn’t seem to bother Arden much.
The morning started off with a temper tantrum on Lily’s part. I was home this afternoon waiting on some movers to give us a quote, and turned on Dr. Phil. It was entirely disturbing, featuring this mother who went completely ballistic with her children. She was a stay at home mom and literally cussed her children out, beat them about the head, slapped and shoved them, and used a stick occasionally to beat them when they were really bad. She was a screamer, too. I resolved once again to try not to yell at the girls. I’m not saying I’ve got rage problems like that woman, but Dr. Phil’s point was that all mothers could see a bit of themselves in her. She’s just a very extreme example. So I took a lot of deep breaths tonight when Lily mouthed off or threw her toothbrush at me and tried to be calm and very, very firm, instead of very, very loud.
