Apparently I Blog Once a Week Now

I drove past the house we are buying again, just for fun, and I cannot WAIT to move into it.  The rental here is wearing on me a bit, but mainly I am just ready to really settle down and unpack all our boxes and feel like we've found our home.  It won't be that much longer, as I keep reminding myself.  We got the inspection back and the sellers say they are going to fix everything we asked them to (despite the fact that those other buyers who were competing with put in a back-up offer that is higher than what we are paying-- we find this puzzling, to say the least, but we are grateful).  Also, we have given the mortgage people document after document after bank statement after tax return and supposedly we are all on track to have money with which to buy this house, so that is also good.  We are supposed to close the end of next week, I think, which is very exciting.  After that, we'll start all the floor refinishing and other stuff we need to do before actually getting ourselves into it sometime the middle of September, probably.  So soon!  And so exciting!

We've been working with Grace on her reading skills for a while and we've run into some frustration.  Months and months ago, even before her 4th birthday, she was so interested in letters and sounds and rhyming and how it all went together and I thought, "Wow!  She is so ready to move forward with this!"  She learned all the sounds the letters make quite quickly, but she has been having real trouble with putting the sounds together to make a word.  She will go through a word and correctly say all the sounds, but then not be able to smoosh the sounds together to make a word.  At first, I thought, "OK, fine, she needs more practice and hasn't made that cognitive leap yet and doesn't get it yet."  The letter-sound connection can be a bit of a rote memory thing and sounding out words is more a skill, not just memorizing.  However, it has been MONTHS now that she has been at this stage and she doesn't seem to be making any headway.  I wonder if she is just not ready and we need to put it on the back burner and not worry about it for a while, or if we should keep plugging away a little bit every day on it to help her make whatever connection is not happening right now.  It doesn't help that I lean toward the first option and Rob leans toward the second.  Grace is finding the process REALLY frustrating right now and is not enjoying herself when we do her reading books and tries to put it off and just generally is not having fun with it, and this of course really worries me.  Wanting her to enjoy reading is right up there with my very top desires for her childhood and I wonder if what I am doing is hurting or helping that.

In contrast, Grace IS enjoying her week this week tremendously because she is doing a swim camp at the community center where we go to the gym and where she'll go to preschool and so forth.  We didn't get any swim lessons in our schedule this summer before now, what with the move and all, so these are the first lessons since last summer.  It is 3.5 hours every morning for 5 days, and yes, she was EXHAUSTED yesterday after I picked her up.  She doesn't nap very often these days, but I predict she will nap every afternoon this week.  Oh, how she loves it, and she is doing so well.  I worked out yesterday and today after dropping her off and I could see her little class out the windows while exercising; it is so amazing to see her little self hanging out in the deep end and actually swimming.  She can't figure out how to take a breath yet but she actually swims.

Oh, and speaking of working out, we have now come to the TMI section of this post.  I have been exercising a lot, most days of the week, since settling into life here.  I have been doing a variety of things: running around our neighborhood, elliptical and weights at the gym, and classes at the gym, like yoga (oh, how I love yoga; at the end of a good class, I feel about as wonderful as after a massage) or a resistance/weight class or whatnot.  Yesterday I went to an indoor cycle class, you know, spinning or whatever.  I tried this kind of thing one other time, way back in grad school, and both times I left with really intense soreness from the bike seat.  Not good muscle soreness meaning I'd worked hard, just pain from the seat.  I did like the class otherwise, though, so rather than immediately decide this is not for me like I did last time, I've been trying to figure out what my options are.  This has led me to google things like "spinning class sore crotch".  Apparently, it is something that gets better as you get used to it, although I find this an unappealing idea.  I don't exactly want my lady parts toughened up, if you know what I mean, and perhaps unsurprisingly Rob says he is categorically opposed to the idea.  Many people on the internet suggest padded bike shorts, and now that I know what they look like, I have realized that about half of the women in the class (the class was about 2/3 women) were wearing them.  Another fitness thing to buy...  I see why being in shape and thin is more and more a privilege of the wealthy.  Between what is costs to buy fresh produce (not to mention organic) and what it costs to do most exercise, it's no wonder that obesity problems skew with economic status.