It’s been a while since the kids got posts of their own!

Owlet has discovered showers. For years she has been petrified of them, refusing to hear us when we explain it’s like warm rain. She has stubbornly stuck with her cold baths. (Yes, cold. We call her our little polar bear.) Well, she came home on Monday and told us that a grade six boy explained how much fun showers were. They were like rain! (There was some internal eyerolling on the part of the parental units.) She said she felt comfortable enough to try it. So I set it up, nice and cool, and angled the spray straight down so she had plenty of room to move toward and away from the water, so she could control her interaction with it. She started by putting a toe in and pulling it out, then the other foot, then hands, and twenty minutes later she was dancing in and out, sitting down and tilting her head back under the cascade, giggling. Tuesday she asked to have another one, then Wednesday, and again on Thursday. She sings away in them, and even asked for warmer water. So we have another shower convert.

Owlet has also started piano lessons, and is adoring them. There has been resistance and not listening and refusal to follow instructions at school lately, so it’s quite a relief to have her piano teacher come out with her after a lesson and say how very well it had gone. I think part of it comes from Owlet having done her Intro to Music class last fall and being somewhat familiar with the scale, which was reinforced by her very rudimentary piano intro at junior camp this summer. She raced through four pages of review at her first lesson, and started off with one piece to work on the first week, and was assigned two more the next. That first week she raced up the stairs to practice after school while I prepped her snack. It’s nice.

As I mentioned, there is resistance happening at school, which is frustrating both for her teacher and on a parental level. Her transition from kindergarten in one school to grade one in another school has not gone well, and I frequently hear her complain that she wants to go back to kindergarten, or even daycare. It’s hard to grow up, but everyone has to do it. In the meantime, she has been adopted by a group of sixth graders who think she’s the most adorable thing and let her direct their play at recess and lunch. They call out her name and greet her with happy hugs at the gate in the morning and meet her at her classroom door at the end of the day to take her out to the schoolyard. They make her flower chains and generally spoil the heck out of her. So basically, Owlet has minions almost twice her age. And one of Sparky’s best friends who is a year behind himis her substitute big brother at school who has told her that if she needs anything to come to him, so all told, her school life is fine except for that whole focusing and working part. She is reading French sentences with sight words and vocabulary words in them, and doing all right; I just wish she had more confidence in herself in class and less of a tendency to try to push aside anything that requires focus.

And the last bit of big news: Owlet is no longer afraid of pools! She usually cried whenever she was at a pool because she wanted to get in and swim, but was terrified and froze up on the steps. Labour Day weekend at a party she finally stepped onto the floor of the pool, bounced around a bit, then grabbed a pool noodle and started kicking on her own. She was in for a solid ninety minutes. Hurray! I sat and watched her, but didn’t go in. I let her control it all herself. What would I do if she went under, I was asked? Kick off my nice grey suede shoes and jump in fully clothed, I said. But I didn’t have to.

And that is the Owlet update. There’s a Sparky one overdue as well, which I’ll get to asap. Spoiler: He is loving high school and the transition has gone incredibly well.