The summer surely seems to be flying by. Only six more weeks left of it, or something like that. It feels rather short. And yet, at the same time, I'm ready to move on to the new structure that comes with fall.

This summer has been far more structured in terms of how our days are spent than any previous summer. In fact, it looked suspiciously like our school year in that regard. Except that we were doing entirely different activities. Sometimes I think I just never learn!



Swim and dive teams both ended this week. They were great seasons. Frances missed practice for the last three or more weeks of both, but she continued to compete in all of the meets for both sports, and she had a decent showing despite her lack of time on the board or in the lap lanes. None of the kids is going to champs for swim, and I'm not entirely sure that for most of them that their times didn't even go down a little this year. But our real focus is on dive. I was so very proud that all three of them made it to Champs this year and did very well there. Frances won 3rd place in the Mini-Mite division, Walter won 7th place in the Midget division, and Ollie won 2nd place in Midgets. This was a huge accomplishment for everyone. Ollie now has a repertoire of about 9 dives, not all of which he can do on any given day, depending on his anxiety level and whether he has had a recent close encounter with the board, and Frances has five dives, which is more than most girls her age. Walter went from not having four dives and therefore not being able to compete in the first few meets this seasons to having five solid dives and having cumulative scores over the course of only three meets to get himself to Champs. We are so pleased with the effort he has put in and how much he has grown. At our dive team's awards ceremony, all three kids got trophies, and both Frances and Ollie won an award for highest points of anyone in their division in the club, so they have really big trophies as well. We think Walter should have won the award for most improved!



Rutledge has become a little fish in his own right. He has been taking swimming lessons with the legendary Miss Erline, who has been teaching swim lessons for the past 65 years. She has an amazing rapport with the children and brings out their best. Rutledge went from having panic attacks on the side of the pool and refusing to even wear a bathing suit or dip his feet in the baby pool to swimming underwater and paddling about 30 feet across the pool to the lap lanes! He is still very nervous on his back and flips over as soon as he realizes that no one is holding on to him. But now he has become the biggest pool rat. We're there several times a day many days, and he jumps in from the side over and over and in so many different ways--cannonballs and corkscrews and supermans. He wears his doofy clear white goggles that do him no favors, and he picks up things off the bottom of the pool. This past week he even stood under the mushroom that pours water down on his head, something he never would have done even two weeks ago. We're just so proud of him. I'm actually kind of proud of myself for sticking with his 8 a.m. swim lessons, when this used to be a time of day that I was not even up!



Walter is a little more than halfway through his program at Learning RX. I wish that I could say that we're seeing a massive and unmissable change in him, but I'm not sure that is happening yet. I wouldn't say it's not happening, but I think the proof will be in his schoolwork when we start again in a few weeks. It's hard to show academic progress and faster processing when you are spending most of your days in the pool, playing with friends, and moving up levels in video games. That said, he is finding many of the procedures of the program easier and easier to handle, and it's neat to see how he has mastered the earlier levels of most tasks and can now do them on command without a lot of fuss. What I am hoping to see happen is for his auditory processing to improve and for his executive processing to become more rapid and reliable. I can definitely see changes in his memory, especially as it relates to the tasks where he has to recall strings of numbers, words, ideas, or connected material. His spelling also seems to have taken a leap forward. One of his tasks is to take a list of spelling words of gradually increasing length and be able to spell them forward and backward at the same rate. For someone who last year couldn't consistently spell words like "were" and "begin," it's very nice to see him last night tackle a word like "modulate" forward and backward in under a minute. I have determined that I need to up my commitment to the training during the week, though, for the last few weeks remaining. We have always done at least the minimum expected and typically a bit more, but my goal would be for us to do the training at least 5 days a week at home, adding 5 hours to his 3 hours he does in the office. I'd like him to conquer most of the levels on most of the activities by the end and to have felt like we gave it the best we could for the short period it lasted.

In addition to this, we have found a downloadable program called Brainware Safari that makes similar claims about raising cognitive skills by over four years with 5 day a week use for 11 weeks. The program has 168 levels, and Walter has been doing it for 8 days now and is on level 126, which I think is pretty impressive. He really enjoys it, and though he cries sometimes through the games, he is dedicated to having his character grow up (they choose an animal character for the program and it matures and grows as they progress through the levels of the game). Now he is at a point where it takes much more concentration and thought to complete a level, so I suspect his meteoric rise is going to be a little more sedate. Ollie is on level 85, and he devotes a lot less time to the program than Walter, but has been staying consistent with 30-60 minutes a day. Since he is not yet doing Learning Rx, I'd like for him to stick with this program and we'll see where he is before commiting to something with a lot of driving involved. Frances will start it as soon as she gets her password and login.

But here we are with the school year's warm breath on the backs of our necks, and I'm wondering where the bulk of the summer has gone. School, sports, some playdates and travel, some trips to Busch Gardens, and the lazy days are not quite so lazy and not so numerous now!