This Summer

As Green Day puts it, "Summer has come and passed." Monday is Labor Day, the official end of summer. (Put your white shoes away, people. No seersucker either.) The kids went back to school last Monday, so that's the end of summer around here. I don't remember exactly when school started starting in August, but I do remember that it was sometime when I was in grade school. That blew. I used to like how you would watch parts of the Jerry Lewis telethon and listen to the news talk about how the raisin growers were worried about their raisins getting rained on (did it rain every year around Labor Day when we were growing up? I don't -- I just remember hearing every damn year how the drying raisins might get rained on) and then we would go to school. I remember specifically that, the year I was starting third grade, my mom bought my sister The Force of Nature a dress for the first day of school, which was her first day of kindergarten, and then it rained and my sister couldn't wear it. Turned out rain on the first day of school was an omen for how school would go that year, but that's a different story.

This story is about The Mermaid and Enthusio. They had what seemed like a very good summer.

The Mermaid seemed to find Her Thing. (Don't even start on the phraseology.) I don't know if you ever watched the cartoon show Little Bill. Little Bill was a Cosby production that came out in the late '90s. It was about this African-American family and mostly about the baby of the family, Little Bill. It was pretty cute. It wasn't great in the sense that Chuck Jones animation is great -- Duck Season! Rabbit Season! -- but it was about 6,000 light-years better than, say, Barney. Anyway, there was a episode about how everyone has His or Her Thing and Little Bill needed to find his. Little Bill's dad's Thing was jazz (No way! In a Cosby show! People liking jazz! What a shock!). His mom had her Thing and Alice The Great (-grandmother) had her Thing. Anyway, Little Bill eventually found his.

This summer seemed to confirm that swimming is The Mermaid's Thing. The child would swim all day if you let her. She participated in a swim team for the first time and would swim for a hour every day. During my vacation, I took her to the gym pool with me when I swam laps and she had herself a practice and then, later, she went to swim practice too. When you take her to pool, she goes through what seems like her own practice. She would do a certain number of laps of freestyle, of breaststroke, of backstroke, of butterfly. She would swim over-unders. At the meets, she would swim different races everytime. She would swim freestyle and kickboards with a million other kids. She would swim butterfly with four other kids. She didn't give a fig what other kids were doing. She was just doing what made her happy.

This is really good. We've always known that she liked to swim, maybe partly because it's an immersive experience that allows her to take a break from working to process all of the stuff that we all process every day, but that comes at her so differently because of her condition. This summer, we discovered just how much she LOVED it. And that is good. She's going to keep swimming during the school year.

Enthusio made some progress socially this summer. He has what he calls "big emotions." He gets very excited and he gets very upset and, kids being kids, some kids have a tough time with that. (I take full credit for contributing these genes. I was similar and still don't really have a cool bone in my body.) He seemed to make some progress in dealing with other kids at his day camp and he has realized that he doesn't have to put himself out to be friends with everyone. So he made that progress in dealing with social situations.

And then, a small miracle happened. In early August, a new family moved in across the street, they have two little boys right about Enthusio's age (one older, one younger) and the three of them get along like three peas in a pod. As soon as Enthusio sees the boys outside, he wants out. He plays hide-and-seek with them, they ride bikes together, he goes over to their house (they have very nice parents who think this is OK). They play GameBoy together (kids born after about 1985 are going to thumb muscles unlike anyone has ever seen due to these things and text messaging). It's just great. It's kind of a new experience for me to see, having grown up on a farm and being a little anti-social and having The Mermaid as our first child. The Muse says that the way the three boys and the other kids on our block have started playing every evening is like what her cul-de-sac was like growing up. It's great for Enthusio. You can almost see a glow coming off him after he gets done playing outside with the other kids.

So summer's come and passed. It was good, although, next year, I'm not getting a massive ankle sprain in the middle of my vacation.