Take my kids to work day, part 2 of 4

As you can see from the above picture, the highlight of the day was once again the delicious cafeteria. 

Harry lost a tooth last night, so instead of the bookstore we went to Targrt on the way home for another Nerf gun and also a cart full of horrifying junk food because he is having a sleepover tonight. But the basic formula of the day is the same: lunch, work while a kids tells me how bored he is, shopping, home. 

I am trying to revamp my criticism class because ever since I turned it into a partially online class my students have been telling me there's too much work, and I think the time has come to listen. Sigh. Naturally, I need more work time than I got today, but I am sure Cooper and Dorothy will be easy as pie next week and will let me make lots of tough choices about speeches and scholarly articles. LOL LOL LOL. 

I took this picture of Jack dripping into my pool bag yesterday because all summer long, I am forever looking up from my book to bark "Stop dripping on my stuff, man."  It's a hard knock life. 

 I came home from my walk to this lovely scene:

Oh! Yes! Speaking of water! We have finally thrown in the towel on Dorithy and swim lessons. She can front and back float, jump off the diving board and swim the othe side, doggy paddle, and swim underwater. But she freaking hates swimming lessons and refuses to get in or cries the whole time and it makes me see red with rage.

 Yesterday when she started crying that she didn't want to go in, I yanked everybody out of the water and we went home because I just cannot anymore. I guess I am not going to get to sit poolside and read my book for 30 minutes very morning no matter how badly I want to. 

Ben talked to the pool manager who is a former athletic director and swim coach and he said she is doing great, can swim better than her peers, and just might not be ready for instruction. He claims that 4 is the magic age for swim lessons and we should just let it go for these last 2 weeks. He said he doesn't want her to stop loving the water because she has so much fun swimming when it's not lessons time. So, I guess we'll stop making her do lessons. This kind of runs counter to everything I think I think about the subject, though. So I might want to enroll her in a swim school in September? 

I just want her to be able to go down the water slide by herself, and she's not quite there yet-- she can't swim all the way from the slide to the edge because of the slide pool's current, but next summer? I'd like to only go down the slide when I've had too many beers like all the other moms. Right now I average about 8 slides per pool visit. 

And when I write it all out like this I see that my reasoning for wanting her to do swim lessons is totally selfish-- basically I just want to spend my pool time on a lounge chair. Damnit.