Swinger

My daughter has learned to use monkey bars by herself, with no parental involvement beyond hands-off hovering to make sure she doesn't plummet to her death from way up there in the air. O. M. G.

Today at a friend's house Liza nonchalantly climbed up the ladder, grabbed onto the first bar, and before I was even over there to help her she was halfway across the set of bars, swinging hand-to-hand like a freaking monkey. To say I was surprised would be the understatement of the week. As far as I know, she hasn't even tried the monkey bars anywhere this summer other than at the friend's house, and there it's always been this big angst-filled whiny entreaty to helllllllppppp meeeeeeeeee moooooommmmmmmyyyyyy.

I believe I may have said, "Holy crap! Tabitha, get out here, you've got to see this!"

And then today Liza went back and did the bars on her own two more times, followed by a complicated trapeze/ring routine that involved her winding the trapeze around and around and then letting it spin her in circles, then flipping upside down on the trapeze, sticking her feet through the rings, and hanging by her knees from the rings, then managing to extricate both legs and her giant feet before all the blood rushes to her head and she has an anurysim. Truly, it was awe-inspiring. And more than a little scary, especially when she was hanging by one ankle and a couple fingers ... but she didn't panic, and she didn't fall, and she didn't even act like she had done anything particularly impressive.

I am totally sending her to circus camp next summer.

And I am totally retrofitting our swing set so that the rings are separate from the trapeze - the way they were when I was a kid - because it's a hell of a lot harder to do skin-the-cats when the rings are attached to a trapeze that doesn't twist when you flip over and keeps trying to grab your feet when you flip through. Ask me how I know this (I say, brushing mulch out of my hair)... And since she's already got shoulders and arms so defined she looks like she's flexing most of the day, and she loved tumbling classes mainly because she got to go on the uneven parallel bars, we might as well assume she's going to be like I was and spend half of the next ten years flipping upside down on the swingset.