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"How was school, honey?"
She tries to make the kids' favorite meals on their first day of school, but when she asked Iomedae's favorite meal the girl first stared at her blankly and then after some extended clarifications proposed that they could roast a pig, and she can't actually roast a pig, so dinner is pork chops, and potatoes, and salad from the farmer's market. Iomedae is not a picky eater.
(The girl is in fact clinically obese. The doctor suggested they talk with her about cutting back on junk food, but the social worker said that was a bad idea, with a kid new to care - don't restrict her food access at all, just get her more exercise. So Jenny signed her up for swim lessons at the YMCA and for track and field at school. Iomedae balked at the swimming lessons on the grounds that swimsuits were immodest, and they do actually make hijabi wetsuit things but apparently not in her size. Hopefully track and field she'll actually enjoy.)
"- look, how about we go to the park after dinner, toss a ball around, and if you don't wanna make any friends you don't have to, but if you do wanna, you'll have the advantage that you know the rules."
"Sorry, kiddo, but you're stuck with me and I barely know which end of a sword to hold, it'll have to be baseball."
"- even babies knowing which end of a sword hold. One end cut you. No hold that one."
"The school gived me....more school to be doing, bring back."
"- ah, fair enough. Well, if you get your homework done fast enough it won't be dark for another hour or so."
She is not optimistic about finishing the tasks on the stack of papers she's unable to read in a reasonable amount of time. She looks longingly out the window, and then pulls the stack of papers out.
Robert doesn't actually think of it until he sees Barry pouring himself a cup of coffee at work the next morning. Barry is into some kind of hobby swordfighting thing. Civil war reenactment? Except the civil war wasn't fought with swords - doesn't matter. It'd be something to suggest Jenny take Iomedae too, and then hopefully they can bond with the kid.
"Hey, Barry, uh, you do that swordfighting thing on weekends, right?"
"Weekends and a few evenings a week, yeah! I'm in the SCA."
Barry does several other things in the SCA besides swordfighting but he's learned that work colleagues generally respect a man with a swordfighting hobby more than a nalbinding one, so he's not going to mention that.
"Is there a junior league for kids? You know Jenny and I foster, and we've got this girl right now - terrible situation - who said she wanted to take up swordfighting."
"...sort of. So kids are always welcome to come and do the other medieval activities, arts and crafts type stuff, and in theory we've got a version of the swordfighting that is a bit safer for the kids - with foam swords rather than wooden ones - but there's not a lot of interest and, uh, funding and support for that, in this area, right now. She can try it but she might not get a lot of opponents... Is she sixteen? We'll let her fight adults, if so."
"Oh, not quite, she's fifteen. And honestly foam swords sounds lots safer than wooden ones and I wouldn't really want her fighting against adults anyway. But maybe we'll check it out...is there an organizer we'd need to speak to in advance? What would we want to bring?"
"Oh, no need to worry about doing things in advance! She can just show up. Preferably in comfortable clothes, loose, long sleeves. I can let folks know we have a newbie coming and to bring loaner gear for her, or honestly I could just bring her some loaner kit - hmm, roughly how tall is she?"
Barry is also aware that he cannot ask questions like 'what size cuirass does she need' in the workplace. People in his office will not consistently know that a cuirass isn't a kind of technobabble that they should get a PowerPoint about.
"Oh, she's, uh, pretty tall, five foot nine, five foot ten? But I don't know if loaner gear would work out - she's, uh, on the big side, if you get what I mean. That's why we're trying to get her more active."
That is taller than Barry was expecting for a fifteen-year-old girl! He rapidly revises his list of people he can ask for potential spare kit.
"There's plenty of people who have a little extra weight and fight - honestly it's one of the reasons I love it, we're super diverse, there's people in their sixties and people who are really out of shape and we all get along just fine. Medieval reenactors like to eat and drink!"
(Barry is five foot three and made of pure muscle. He gives off a sense of compactness, as though you took a much larger person and squeezed them down into a tight-fitting frame. But he grins genuinely as he says this, like he thinks this is a self-deprecating joke, because he privately knows about the nearly three bottles of mead he drank last weekend even if Robert doesn't.)
"We almost certainly can find enough kit that she has the bare minimum to legally fight, and then people will go easy on her until we've scrounged up the rest - though, I actually don't know the youth armour standards off the top of my head."
"Well, then I suppose I'll see you this weekend! Thanks, Barry. She's been through a lot and it'd be good for her to make some friends."
"People who fight with swords? Yes, I want to do that. Is they a holy order?"
"They're just into history, I think. But, you know, the Crusades and stuff were part of history, so you can probably pretend to be a knight from a holy order if you want to."