I am going to veer off topic for a moment and rhapsodize about just how happy this summer's weather has made me; indeed, continues to make me! For the first time since I returned to the Triangle (9 years ago) I haven't been eager for summer to end. It has been gorgeous. These past two days, with their crispy nights and breezy afternoons have been nice slices of heaven-pie. I hate heat, something Flipper has inherited as well. We like cool, clear fall days and snow. She and I are relatively unbothered by cold weather, but find hot, humid days (like last week) pretty agonizing. I wish every summer could be like this one was! I can't even remember the last summer that passed without a few triple-digit days; instead we had day after beautiful day of "daytime highs, upper 80's". Even pool water remained blissfully refreshing! See, I told you I could rhapsodize!! But enough about the weather.

Let's have a brief wrap-up of Flipper's foray into first grade. She...doesn't seem that thrilled, actually. German is too hard and boring; she already knows how to finger-knit, so her handwork class isn't exciting either. She genuinely seemed to think that she would go for a day or two, and then walk out in the afternoon reading and writing and completing long calculus equations. Reality was-as it so often is-a total let-down. I think that perhaps we make too much of first grade, and then some kids are inevitably disappointed. Plus, it is a long day for her: 8:30-3:15.

Where are Flipper's strengths? Well, not in the academic realm (yet), that's for sure. She is physically a genius, very, very coordinated, active, basically a short 46 pound jock. She usually plays with the boys because she can easily keep up with them on the playground, and she never walks when she can run, or run when she can engage in her current passion, jump rope. Forwards, backwards, skipping, she will go outside and jump rope every day, like a super-super bantamweight boxer. But repeating German and Spanish words after a teacher? Not so exciting. Maybe this will change. Maybe some sort of academic gene has skipped a generation and she will love "the process of studying" like my sister did in college, instead of seeing it as a necessary evil that interfered with my partying and whichever boyfriend I was enraptured with at the moment. But maybe she won't. Maybe she'll be a little jock forever, taking jump roping to the Olympics and living off her Wheaties box endorsements. Maybe she'll go to college for ten years and get a PhD, like both her grandfathers did.

Isn't this one of the funnest, most interesting things about having children? The speculation, the guessing, and the very impossibility of predicting our own future, let alone that of our children? It is for me.

Leigh appears Fridays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Leigh on her blog Flipper and Me.