End days

These really are the dog-tired, paddy-last, knock-down, drag-out, final days of summer. And dragging out is what they're doing, especially with this hot weather that just goes on and on and on: a high of 96 today and I felt every degree of it just now. The mosquitoes are big and vicious and biting with purpose, and poor Monkey just got eaten up last night when he went outside with his dad for ten minutes before bedtime to move some stones around the garden - his very favourite occupation. I forgot to tell them to put some bug spray on him, and the result is mottled red arms and legs today. (His father doesn't get bitten. I think the 'skeeters can't get through the thickets of limb hair. Or maybe he's just not as delicious as the rest of us.) Poor boy, I feel pretty bad about that.

Weather watch for Saturday is still looking good, though. If we're lucky, it'll be perfect weather for Monkey to be spun around and hung upside down and whatever else happens to little kids at fairgrounds. I even sprang for the bracelet this year, which means unlimited rides for one entire afternoon. I think he's old enough to get the value out of it.

A friend's daughter here started kindergarden yesterday. Her gap-toothed photos on Facebook keep coming back to haunt me in ways I didn't expect: I can't believe this time next year it'll be Monkey all dressed up for real school. We're so sheltered with our lovely co-operative nursery school experience, where parents are not just welcome but required, and everything is transparent to the trepidatious unsure beginners in this whole venture - the parents, I mean. But I can't imagine putting my little guy on a bus and waving him off to the unknown for six long hours every day. That the American school system is a blank page to me at this point doesn't help - we didn't have school buses in suburban Dublin, so I fall at the first hurdle of visualization.

I suppose by then I'll be more familiar with it all; we'll have visited the school and met the teacher, and so on, so I shouldn't borrow trouble and get myself into knots about something a year away. But still. My baby. Et cetera et cetera. If we were in Ireland he'd be starting this year - but then the system is more familiar to me and the day isn't as long for the little ones: for the first two years of school my day went from nine till twenty-to-two (that's 1.40pm, if you're vernacularly challenged). Maybe part of me is still in denial that my kids will be going to school in America, when they were always meant to be going in Ireland. Where will they learn to ask "An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?" now?