flea

Not financial; rather the reverse of financial enrichment.

With Casper about to be 7, I'm thinking about activities. She's asked about dance classes; there are two studios (at least) in town, and they enroll for the school year. Prices are by number of hours a week she attends class, and seem reasonable ($50-100 a month for 1-2 classes a week). There are a few classes on weekends or late enough in the evenings that we could make it work. If she did the classic ballet/tap, we'd have to buy the clothes. There's also a hip-hop class for 5-7 year olds at 6pm one evening that looks cool, though.

I'd really like to get her into a musical instrument, though. I was made to take piano lessons at 6, and hated them, and stubborned my parents into letting me quit within about a month. I also had a slightly longer experience with Suzuki violin at the same age (my main memory being how much it hurt to hold the violin under my chin). I don't think my sister did any instrument, and my brother did trumpet through school for a couple of years and practiced approximately once every 6 months. mr. flea was in the drum corps in school; I'm not sure when he started. But my cousins had music lessons and were pretty serious (my oldest cousin still plays bassoon in an orchestra), and I think a) it's a good skill for a kid, and a kid who is somewhat mathematically-minded and artsy like Casper is likely to have a good experience with music and b) even basic-level lessons as a kid are great if it means you can sit down and play sing-along songs on a piano or guitar for the rest of your life, right? I sort of regret not having that skill, myself.

The Uggaversity has a community music school; they have a piano program for kids that starts at 5 and they have violin and cello starting at 4. It's $800 for the year, payable in installments, with one 30-minute private lesson and one 45-minute group lesson a week. The group lesson is held ebtween 4-6pm on Thursdays, which is kind of a problem, potentially, and I can't find anything on the web site about scheduling the private lesson (maybe more flexible?) The big deal here is, of course, the need for a piano. You can use a keyboard, but it has to be a fancy one, or of course we could obtain an actual piano. Either of these has the potential to be quite a bit costlier than a leotard and ballet slippers.

I dunno, and I should totally be worried about Dillo's birthday, in 10 days and completely unplanned, and not wasting brain cells on this, when sign-ups don't close for another month.

Harvest:
6 more pole beans (running tally: 22!)
2 zucchini (running tally: 5)
1 4-inch carrot from carrots 1 (the first official one that didn't count as weeding)

In a day or two I will have red zebra tomatoes. All others are still green.

In celebration of the fact that it was 96 degrees yesterday, we didn't leave the house. (Well, mr. flea went to the library and worked for 4 hours, and also did a grocery run to fulfill a hot dog craving - his, not mine.) Casper and I watched a lot of children's TV and played a lot of games and baked a cake and frosted it. The cake was a flag cake, with blueberry and strawberry decorations. Recipe for the cake was Joy of Cooking's "blitztorte" which came out just like a pound cake baked in a sheet cake pan (not that this was a bad thing, just not what I was expecting.) Frosting a basic buttercream. During lunch Casper scraped the frosting bowl with her carrot sticks and enjoyed the results.

In the evening as it was still hot we did not venture down to the ballpark to see fireworks but instead watched "A Capitol Fouth" on PBS. Elmo was featured, much to Casper's joy. After he left she kept asking when he was coming back, and cried when I explained that it was probably his bedtime. She was not mollified by Stevie Wonder. We did a lot of dancing to the other music, though - Casper's interpretive dance to "The Star Spangled Banner" as sung by popette Jo Jo was something to be seen. It involved slow bending over and sticking out her butt, hopping on one leg, and spinning around. (Okay, all her interpretive dance looks much like this, but it's so much funnier when it's slow and done to the national anthem.)