[ED NOTE on 19 AUG 2013: This was originally written two weeks ago. No, three, since it was when Sparky had just begun his second two-week session of camp, and he has been done with camp for a week. Sigh. In my own defence, I was working on a project that ate up all the time ever, because it needed tonnes of fact checking. (Not because things were wrong, I hasten to point out. Just because there were lots of real-world facts, and part of my job is to make sure the author hasn’t mixed things up or misremembered something, especially if those facts affect key plot points.) Anyway, that project is now done, and I will get a nice big cheque for it late next month.

So I’m backdating this instead of updating it. The update is basically that “Yay, Sparky adored camp, and I got to go to the last parents’ day with HRH while HRH’s parents stayed with Owlet, and then we took him out for ice cream. The end.”)]

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Sparky is in his second two-week session of day camp, and is loving it. We have impromptu little songs about, “Oooh, I love camp, I love camp, I’m going to camp” in the car on the ten-minute drive there in the morning.

At the end of each two-week session there’s a presentation for the parents on Friday afternoon. Each class has a fifteen-minute block in which to demonstrate their new skills or talk about what they did and learned in the class, and then the bell rings (they use a huge old-fashioned school handbell, and it has a glorious sound) and everyone moves to their next class. At the end, there’s a half-hour concert where the whole camp population sings whatever songs they’ve chosen to work on over the session in choir. As the parents’ afternoon takes place the very same time Owlet’s nap does, I stayed home this time and HRH went. He recorded a couple of Sparky’s demonstrations for me, though.

Sparky chose to do piano this summer as his music class at camp. He learned a two-hand scale and some finger exercises in the first two weeks. We were expecting him to play the scale for his presentation, which is what he told us he was doing, and that’s what he did. There was applause… but then he went right into something else, a simple piece that he played with both hands and read from the music on the piano in front of him. We were so excited. After only two weeks! He really, really enjoys piano, he says. I am slightly anxious, because I want to ask him if he likes it more than cello and would prefer to study it instead, but I don’t know if I want to hear the answer. On one hand, a local teacher for an instrument we didn’t need to lug around would be great. On the other hand, we’d have to prepay a season’s worth of lessons, and we don’t have that kind of available money. Our cello teacher asks for a month’s worth of lessons at a time. And cello is something that we do together, and he benefits from a parent who has a different understanding of the instrument than one who doesn’t play can offer. If he ends up doing Suzuki piano I will end up learning it with him, which is not a bad thing, but also perhaps one more thing I do not need on my plate right now. It is to be seriously ruminated upon, however.

The next thing HRH recorded for me was Sparky’s martial arts demonstration. They did different kicks and punches to break practice boards, which was fun, but the best part was the last bit. Sparky was first in the lineup for this one. The teacher braced, held out his hand with what looked like a pencil upright in it, and Sparky clapped his hands around the instructor’s hand and the pencil thing flipped away. When he was showing me, HRH was excited and said, “Did you see that? That was amazing!” It was filmed far away, so I couldn’t see any detail and had no idea why this was so fantastic. I had to ask a couple of times for it to be explained properly. Turns out the teacher was holding a practice knife, and Sparky hit the tendons in his wrist with one hand and the back of the instructor’s hand with the other, which forces the gripping hand to snap open in reflex. And he did it so well that the practice knife spun up and halfway across the room. So my kid knows the rudiments of disarming someone with a knife. Holy wow.

I finally finished his Gryffindor socks. He loves them, in case you can’t tell.

And since we’re talking about feet… he has worn through his fourth pair of shoes this year. School hasn’t even started yet.

He is very excited about water and pools these days. But he’s resisting actually trusting himself, the water, and the parent teaching him to swim, which is so argh-inducing from the parental POV that we’re pretty much at our wits’ end. It may be time to register him in lessons this fall, at an indoor civic pool. His French is good enough now, which was the main stumbling point before.

He’s currently in love with my Calvin and Hobbes books, and the Mutts collections as well. At least one goes with him everywhere. They’re getting a bit tattered, but since it’s from love, my rule about with keeping books pristine is somewhat relaxed.