puedo hablar espanol?

Julia has a habit of surprising us.

It's usually just little things.

For example, she hides stuff - from lolly wrappers to half eaten bread rolls to socks and underpants. Anything she can't be bothered to put in a washing basket or rubbish bin she just stuffs somewhere out of sight and forgets it.

She can make a Dresden-after-the-firestorm type of mess in the blink of an eye of and genuinely not appear to notice it.

She NEVER flushes the toilet unless she's specifically ordered to.

Seen positively, these could all be evidence of a carefree spirit reluctant to be fettered by bourgeois conventions.

I however tend to see it as laziness - probably because I recognize it as inherited from her father. 

So imagine our surprise when she started working hard at school.

Esther and Julia's school works on a system of giving pupils responsibility for their own work. They get a bunch of tasks on Monday and have to finish them by Friday. 

I had Julia picked as the type of student who does nothing for four days and then has to rush to get it all done on day five.

It seems I underestimated her. 

She came home today and said she'd finished all but one of her assignments and - honestly - wanted to start learning Spanish.

I suggested her English might benefit from a bit of polishing, but no Spanish it has to be.

Her teacher will probably tell us next week that Julia's been copying all her work from her neighbor and still getting it wrong in her haste to finish.

But for now we'll bask in the fact that Julia seems to have gotten competitive about matching Esther's good marks at school.

La vide es buena.