Camping

Okay, so I'm willing to admit that I might be all wrong about "smart". It seems Americans use it to mean "cheeky" all the time, and are not in the least confused by its simultaneously meaning just plain clever. What they aren't used to, as Bethany pointed out, is hearing it in connection with how a person is dressed.

But this is why I write these things - so you guys can chime in and tell me where I've got it wrong. So thank you for chiming, and please continue to do so.

------------

In other news, there was Dash's week of camp. This was the first summer I'd felt he was ready for any sort of camp-like activity, at the ripe old age of six and a bit. Even last year, though five sounds reasonably old, I would have thought that a full nine-to-four day was too long, that I wouldn't trust him to go to the bathroom when he needed to, and that I couldn't remotely see him towelling himself off and getting dressed in reasonable time after swimming. This year, so long as he was willing, I didn't even spend more than ten seconds worrying about any of that. He was ready, and it was great.

He went to gymnastics camp, a long-established summer tradition run by the gym troupe at the university close by. Their daily schedule went like this: gym, gym, gym, lunch, art & craft, swimming, and more gym. (Except on Friday, when swimming was replaced by ice-cream, and then there was a show for the parents to admire all that had been learned.) The counsellors were great - some of them had done the camp themselves every year as kids and moved seamlessly into the instructing role now they were older. I had heard it was well run, and it only took ten minutes to get him there and pick him up. I admit there was also some element of living vicariously in my choice - I was the girl who spent hours perfecting my cartwheels and handstands on our very uneven front lawn, and would have killed for this opportunity to use real gym apparatus when I was his age.

But he loved it. He had a great time, and can't wait to do it again next year. And my week with Mabel was so peaceful, and so productive, that I'm thinking next year maybe he can do two weeks. Unfortunately, they don't take campers under five, so it will be two more years till Mabel can do it too - but I think she'll be ready for some other sort of local camp by next summer. Precocious minx.

Here he is, doing "The birdcage" on the hoops for the show. Sorry about the fuzzy, but Mabel didn't like the way attention was centered on something other than her, so she was jumping around on top of me the whole time.

The downside is that this morning he was in camp withdrawal. It rained, we stayed in, and by 11am he was antsy and belligerant, looking for someone to wrestle or some large object to lift up. Maybe I need to suspend some hoops from the ceiling.