The past month has been the busiest yet for our family.  Thinking back over the activities the girls did, it doesn’t seem that bad, and it wasn’t.  It’s just that things felt a little tight for my liking.  I prefer to have a little wiggle room in my schedule.  We didn’t do a good job of thinking things through when we signed the girls up for some last-minute, going-fast get-it-while-it’s-hot sort of opportunities.  But if we hadn’t, the couple of months wouldn’t have been as exciting and interesting as they were.   

Mornings have gotten steadily better over the past few years.  I’m fairly certain that we’ve gotten to the point where both girls are aware that their primary concern in the morning is getting to school.  They don’t always make it easy.  But we’ve come a long way from the end of the last school year, when they’d behave as though they had no clue that everything we were doing in the morning was leading up to the end goal of arriving at school, and on top of that, they had a specific (well, general) time they had to arrive there.  Recently, the only problem has been Monday mornings, which move slower than the other days of the week.  Both of the girls push their bedtimes regularly, and my wife and I let them stay up too late on weekends.  Sometimes there’s a good reason to stay up.  Sometimes there’s no good reason to not let them.  They still get plenty of sleep.  And, perhaps by abetting in these lousy Monday mornings we are teaching them the lesson in the importance of a good night’s rest.  Maybe we’ll get an award. 

School pick-up is pretty straightforward.  I wait for the girls near the street with the other parents who stand there, while the parents who stand directly in front of the door stand in front of the door.  We had enough time between school and Dee Dee’s theater practice.  Audio always did a great job of getting ready, making it easier than leaving the house in the morning.  She usually got to have some sort of snack and all the attention she wanted from me once Dee Dee was dropped off.  On practice nights, Audio would go with her mom to pick up Dee Dee.  Sometimes on Mondays I had to leave before they returned, so I could participate in an activity of my own.  On Wednesdays, I’d collect Dee Dee after practice so I could bring her to her swimming lessons.  On a couple occasions, we drove home another girl who was in the theater group, and we still made it to swimming in plenty of time every time. 

Swimming ended with both girls being told that they will need to repeat the class-level they were in.  Dee Dee didn’t pass because she couldn’t swim freestyle the entire length of the pool.  She felt bad, but we talked about how, in order to be safe in the water, she needs to be able to pass all the tests to move ahead to the next level.  And, how it’s for her own good.  And all that.  But, she still felt bad about it.  So, we talked about how she can do pushups and sit-ups to get stronger, so she can swim better and graduate out of the level she’s in.  She did somewhere between two and three pushups and quit feeling bad about having to repeat the class.  Audio wasn’t passed last time she took “Level 1 Swimming.”  She didn’t pass it this time around.  And, I’m not betting that she’ll pass it next time.  But, she is having a lot of fun. 

Dee Dee’s play, on the other hand, was a success.   Not every moment of every practice, but a success in the end.  There was a boy, and a candy machine, and lost script, and Dee Dee got lost in that triangle a couple of times.  But, she knew all of her lines and delivered them with gusto.  I sat at the end of a row so that Audio had an escape route that wouldn’t interfere with the other audience members’ enjoyment of the performance.  So, I was a bit off-center to hear the actors.  And when there were sound effects, they were much louder than that cast.  I mentioned that to Dee Dee while having some post-show ice cream with some others afterwards.  Dee Dee said, “The speaker was RIGHT above your head!”  Somehow, I’d managed to miss that.  And, although there were a couple of bad moments, she seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience.  So much so that she really had a hard time dealing with it being over.  We were up pretty late the night of the play talking about how it used to bother me how my mom would say, “It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.”  I never agreed with her until I had children to say it to.  We can probably always be able to think up some way to deal with the loss of something that made us happy.  But we can’t imagine things as wonderful as the things that made us as happy before we lost them.  We can’t dream up the experiences that make us happy.  And, all feelings are temporary, anyway.  So, stay busy, stay happy.  Another advantage of an overloaded schedule.  Seems like my wife and I deserve another award.