Summer

Looks like Summer is pretty well planned at this point! Tinkerbelle (for the uninitiated - my much younger half sister, lives in Chicago, I never met her until she was 7 and I was 24) has secured herself a full-time job as a camp counselor, which means that she is coming to live with us when she gets out of school!

It all came together really quickly because she really dove into it. She called and emails a bunch of places from home, lined up three different meetings for last Friday afternoon, and came out here to go to those and then visit for a couple days. I picked her up at the airport at about 10:00, she had her interviews at 12:30, 2:30 and 4:00, and she got a call from her first choice at about 8:00 offering her the job!

She is going to be a camp counselor for kids ages 8-12, although the exact specifics will be determined later on. Most likely she will rotate between a couple of different facilities in the city, all of which are easily accessible from the T. She's going to be working from 7:30-3:30, Monday to Friday, making $9/hr...pretty awesome first job, if you ask me.

This will be a big deal for her. Living in a new place, away from her Mom, with a lot more freedom than she is used to. She's gonna have a boss and responsibilities and she is going to have to get herself to work on time and handle all of that by herself. I am not her Mom, and I'm not going to do that for her. But, I think she will do well with the extra leash, I think she will benefit from meeting a bunch of co-workers her own age, and she will certainly enjoy earning some money on her own (right now, it seems like a veritable fortune to her...it will seem less so when she finds out how taxes work:-)).

I think she will benefit from the break from home, too. She's not really a "troubled" kid in the normal sense, but she's had some social issues at school this year that have impacted her grades and her behavior. Kids at that age, especially girls, can be really tough...and she naturally kinda marches to the beat of her own drummer, so I think that leads to some tension with other kids. The good news is that two months is a lifetime when you are 15, so simply going away for a while might create something of a reset. I hope, at least.

It will diminish my own ability to take too many three day weekends at the beach, but that's ok...I can manage for one summer:-). I'll gladly trade that for some uninterrupted sister time!

In other sister news - there is a new tattoo in the works. I'll give you the details some other time when we finalize it:-)