The girls came in and woke me up before 7, so instead of a proper breakfast I took them out for pancakes, and then off for La Serpiente’s climbing session.
Today she had a sort of competition where they broke into pairs to do things together and get awarded stickers. Because, we’ll, stickers. Destroyer and I entertained ourselves buying an ankle support and arguing about whether I would pay for her to ride around the mall on an electrified panda bear, and then La Serpiente was done, so we ate sweets and got a car home. The main highlight of that was the driver not putting his car into Park, and then starting to roll forward when I had my head in the back door and a foot in the way of his rear wheel. Fun times.
Back home for twenty minutes, then we went out to see friends for lunch at a Japanese restaurant (the girls ate plain noodles, I had their tempura) and then we rushed back home to prep for swimming. As we had an hour to go before we had to head out, I took a nap, and after ten minutes of deep sleep Destroyer woke me, demanding I witness her go to the toilet. Somehow, I fell back to sleep after that, and got up just in time to get the girls into a car and over to their swimming lesson.
La Serpiente continues to progress. I suppose it took me less than a year to learn to swim across the pool, so I’m beating her on that, but I also had a 36 year head start.
We went home. The kids were exhausted so I bullied them into tidying the living room with the promise of TV, and then put them to bed.
They’ve had a pretty terrible diet today: apart from all the snacks while we’ve been on the run, it’s been nothing but carbs: noodles for lunch, sushi and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. I forced them to eat banana and raisins to get some fruit into them, but tomorrow I need to get them on the food my wife cooked before she went. Or have her come back to two kids with scurvy.
La Serpiente said she didn’t want to go climbing any more because it’s too hard and the other kids are better than her. I was dismayed: after what I wrote a few weeks ago about how La Serpiente is gloriously unintimidated by those around her, it was sad to hear this (especially as she’d been so excited by climbing before). Then again, she’s the youngest and smallest in the class, and I can see how adult sized routes could be extra hard for her. I told her she could come and climb just with me and Jalean and some other friends of ours, and she seemed sort of convinced by this, but also wanting to stay where she is so she can climb with one of the girls she knows there. So that’s a bit of a quandary. Her lessons finish in the middle of November, the same day she flies to London, so that can be a natural break and we’ll see how she feels in the new year.
Both children were asleep very quickly tonight, leaving me to watch TV, do some laundry and lie on the sofa, exhausted. At least my foot seems to be much better…