Sunday afternoon post

As promised, more water.

Mercer seems to do ok in swimming pools outdoors. At a pool a couple of weekends ago / after about 10 minutes of clutching onto me, he lightened up... maybe because of the kids who were playing with him? These are 2 of Tana's children - Phoebe and Pierce. (I went to high school with Tana -- and she is one of a very few people I keep in touch with.)

But, unfortunately, he's still not that thrilled about his swim lessons. He went to his first official one a couple of days ago. He was the only child in the class (woo hoo - private lessons for the price of group lessons!). I thought that the noise level of the other kids playing and screaming / the acoustics bothered him during his trial lesson. But, there was no noise. There were no other kids around. He cried and clung to me and/or the instructor for much of the lesson. There were times when he seemed comfortable, but then would become afraid again. The teacher kept getting him to "high five" which he liked. We're hoping that he'll be more comfortable with each lesson. One of her goals (and ours) is to get him to the point to know how to float on his back -- face up in the water.

My mom was in town over the weekend. She snapped the pics at the swim lesson. We hung out at the house a lot, we went to the square for breakfast, to the farmer's market, and to a children's consignment sale. Most importantly, she got to spend a lot of time with the little guy. Here, they're playing with trains.

She also let us have a night out. Todd & I ended up scoring some last-minute (bargain-priced) tickets to the Paul McCartney show here in Atlanta Saturday night, so we went to see "a beetle" sing, got rained on, stayed out real late, and had a great time overall. We needed it. Thanks!

Todd's been working a lot this past week, as he has a deadline next week. I've been working a lot over the past few weeks as well because of some presentations and travelling. I've been doing my 2 days of work from home still, but am a little sad. Soon, I'm going back to work full-time. I'll be adding 8 more hours per week - 40 hours, but I don't think that I can do any of it teleworking from home, unfortunately. 8 more hours a week doesn't sound like that much, but I'm already trying to figure out how to make everything work... how to manage "life." Tons of people do it, though.

Maybe the sadness comes more so from the realization that he's growing up? Today, he pulled himself up onto our dining room chair... pulled himself close to the empty plate that was on the table. Grabbed the (adult-sized) fork and started stabbing at the plate with it. I put some pieces of blackberry pancake down for him to stab and he was able to hook it on the fork and get it into his mouth a number of times. He ate from a real chair on a real plate with a real fork.