basketcase

My time in Atlanta went swimmingly. It was so good to see the kids and my sister. I missed them so much. Taking care of the kids on my own for 5 day was easier than expected, but still quite the test. Waking up at 6:30am, making breakfast for my 6 year old nephew while he watches cartoons, packing his lunch while he eats, waking my 2.5 year old niece and getting both of them in the car at 7:30am and dropping my nephew off at school... was not quite my idea of a morning. But we managed pretty well. Passed the time with my niece by playing, watching TV/movies, and snacks until lunch, then tucking her in for naptime around noon, did dishes and cleaned or watched Dexter, woke her by 2:30 to get her into the car again to go pick up my nephew from school at 2:45pm. Home for snacks, playing inside, watching TV/movies, going outside to play in the grassy area in the middle of the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids, inside for dinner, playtime before tucking my nephew into bed by 9pm, hanging out with my niece until I tucked her in between 10 and 11pm, and I tried to get to bed shortly thereafter. My sister texted me last night saying "I'm not sure what you did with 'the girl-child' while we were gone, but she's going to be with very little fussing all by herself. Thank you. It's really nice to have that time alone." Which is funny, because on my first night alone with the kids, my niece acted like that's exactly how she always did it... let me tuck her in and walk out of the room to let her fall asleep on her own. I sometimes asked her if she wanted me to lay with her and she said no and told me to please leave her alone haha. When I mentioned letting her fall asleep alone to my sister on the phone on day 2 or 3, my sister's response was "Aw, she's getting so independent". Either way, I'm glad I could help, whether I intended to or not, with that transition for my niece.

Throughout the days I was there, I passed my time catching up on most of all 4 seasons of Dexter or juggling. In the past month, I've managed to improve my juggling by 7fold. When I was in 3rd grade (give or take a year), a couple of classes in my school gathered in the lunchroom (with all the tables folded and shoved against the wall), they gave us little scarves, and taught us how to juggle. I've remembered how to ever since, but never got very good. Over the years, I'd try every so often. I would almost always hesitate on the first toss and manage maybe 20 tosses at most on a really good try. About a month ago, I found 3 medium sized wiffle balls in the room of the little girl I watch and tried to see how good I could do while she and the other little boy (who joined us 3 days/wk in Jan) played together. I managed to get 28 tosses with those awkwardly large, hole-filled, balls. A few days later I stopped by the climbing gym to say to people since I'm still not climbing and one of the guys happened to have little mini juggling balls and let me play with them while he climbed. That totally started it... I went and bought some balls a few days later and have been practicing a ton ever since. Last I counted, on Friday, my new personal record is 170 tosses. I've also been practicing juggling against the wall, which I tried a few times before years ago, but it's much harder and I haven't really counted, but I would guess the best I've managed is around 40 tosses. It's made me curious about trying partner juggling, but I'm not sure I know anyone else who can juggle well. And I've been working on transitioning from normal juggling to against the wall, and back again, and also mixing up the normal juggling by holding 1 ball and tossing 2 balls in one hand, and then reintroducing the 3rd all in one fell swoop. It's been fun and my roommate has even asked me to teach her. I might be a little obsessed with this little hobby of mine, but mostly it's a fun challenge and it's done wonders for my hand-eye coordination

I was talking about languages to someone the other night and they mentioned Livemocha as a good, free, Rosetta-Stone style, language learning website. Let's just say that I'm getting ahead of myself by adding too many languages. Mostly, I want to learn Swedish and Italian so I "enrolled" in courses for those. But then I added Spanish because it'd probably come in handy and it'd be nice to be able to speak and understand a little more with my friend in Argentina. And now I've added French out of curiosity, but it's much more on the back burner. I also looked into Icelandic, for which they only had beginner's 101 level, and holy crap is it difficult. Nevermind.

Turned out the weekday course at my Massage School that I was going to sit in on for Fridays got bumped back a month, which I was warned of in case the class didn't fill up enough in time. So now I start my Friday class on June 11th, and my weekend course the next day. It's kind of nice to have an extra month to prepare myself, and it kind of feels more fitting that the my classes start at the same time now.

Hope all is well for everyone