Happy 80th Birthday, Mom!

Eighty years ago, on a stormy Thanksgiving night, Orville drove to town to fetch the doctor so that he could help Helen deliver her baby girl, Dolores.

Dear Mom,

I wish I could be with you in person today, but since I'm not, I'm sending you my love through the computer. Mom, thank you over and over for everything you do and everything you are. Thank you for always having a homemade dinner on the table when we were growing up except for the tuna casserole and brussel sprouts because those were gross. Thank you for helping me get A's on every school report I ever did. Thank you for all the dresses you sewed for me and for always dressing me so much better than Danny. Thank you for taking the time to put all of our family photos into chronological albums with captions because I now totally appreciate what a huge job that is. Thank you for being my biggest supporter since… forever. Thank you for every sacrifice you’ve made on my behalf. Thank you for loving me through every tantrum (even though I don’t believe I ever misbehaved!), every mood swing (what!?) and anything I ever did that caused you worry or concern or heartache.

I love you so much, Mom. Happy Birthday!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Justice for all

Last week Alyssa told me that they learned the Pledge of Allegiance at school. She recited it for me and did a pretty good job. But when she was done she asked, "Mommy, why do they say Justin is for all?"

Me: Ohhh, actually the word is justice. It's justice for all. Don't worry, Justin is all yours.

I was repeating this story to Amanda later that night and she told me that Alyssa had asked her why it says "Justice for all". She said, "Justice is a store. And I thought it was just for girls!"

Kindergarten is so confusing.

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Quiet?

The other day, Alyssa's teacher asked how she was doing, how she was liking school. I must have looked at her quizzically because she followed up by saying that she's doing great. She's just quiet, so she was checking in.

"QUIET?!?" was my shocked response. Alyssa? Quiet?

I told Ms. Plencner that from all the stories Alyssa tells me, she certainly seems to be having lots of fun. She loves school.

The quiet comment stumped me though. So of course I over-analyzed all the way home from school.

At home, Alyssa rarely stops chattering. Or singing. Or making some kind of noise. She puts on how-to shows complete with commercials. She tells me about her dreams and her nightmares. She asks billions of questions. She talks to her dolls and her dolls talk back. She tells long long long stories. It's constant.

Quiet?

Is everything okay? I see her teacher every day and we chat often. Was there a reason she mentioned this now? Did something happen? It's not that I can't imagine Alyssa being quiet. Amanda is the same way. Much quieter at school than at home. In fact, I remember having the same conversation with the same teacher about Amanda when she was in Kindergarten. And it took me by surprise then too.
I think it's just that I spend so much time with them and I feel like I know them so well that it's jarring to hear a report that doesn't fit in with the picture I've drawn in my head.

I understand that people act differently in different situations. I totally get that. I was more surprised by the quiet comment because every day Alyssa gives me long detailed reports about her school days and in her stories, she's not quiet. She raises her hand often and speaks up a lot... But not just a lot. In some of her stories she raises her hand more often than anyone else. More than once I've heard the line, "I was the only one who raised my hand." And I'm always happy to hear these reports. Relieved, actually. Because speaking up in class was something I struggled with.

It occurred to me then that I just have issues with the whole quiet thing. I decided it would have bothered me less if the teacher had said Alyssa had been disturbing the class by chatting too much. Now that's pretty screwed up. You'd think I'd know that quiet can be a good thing considering how often I wish I had more of it. But instead my quiet self freaks out and starts SCREAMING inside when one of my children gets labeled "quiet."

See, quiet was a label that followed me through all of my school years and even into my work years. It was the thing, that thing, that would show up on report cards and even on performance reviews. And perfectionist that I was, that was what I focused on. It didn't matter how much the rest of the report glowed with gold stars, hard work, successes or A+'s... It made me crazy that I never could conquer that quiet thing. Even when I tortured myself on a regular basis by forcing myself to speak up, the label stuck. And speaking up in large groups or even relatively small ones has never really gotten easier for me.

I've made peace with it now for the most part thanks in part to a wise friend who explained that trying to turn myself from an introvert to an extrovert was like trying to turn my brown eyes blue. Studies have shown that introverts are actually wired differently than extroverts. So quiet is just part of who I am. And that's not a bad thing.

Of course one casual comment from her teacher doesn't mean anything. But I did make a mental note to listen extra carefully to Alyssa after school that day. And when she pronounced it "the worst day ever" (totally different than her normally happy reports) I figured I was in for a good story.

Instead, she told me that the day had started like it always does with a few songs, like the Good Morning song... and then there was math. She slowly walked me through all of the math problems. Told me who raised their hand and if they'd gotten the answers right or wrong. We stopped to pick up a roly-poly (See photo above.) Then the teacher asked them if they knew any words in Spanish. Alyssa said she was the first to raise her hand and volunteer, "Hola!" (Completely due to our intense home-schooling efforts or whatever you call the hours she's spent watching Dora the Explorer) and then she told me what every other kid had said. (No actual Spanish was spoken after this point, but she put on a heavy Spanish accent and created a whole lot of interesting words and meanings to go along with them.) No amount of prompting got her to tell the story any faster.

We had a brief musical interlude when she explained and demonstrated, complete with snapping motions, how they'd learned a new song about the days of the week, sung to the tune of "the Adamms Family." (snap, snap.) She told me there was a girl in the other Kindergarten class wearing the exact same jeans as her. She told me she and a bunch of others got awards for getting happy faces every single day of school. She told me that Emma and Gabby are the tallest girls in the class and that Anthony is the oldest. She told me that Nicolas washes his eyeballs and that Luke's tooth fell out.

Twenty-eight minutes into the story, Alyssa finally explained why it was the worst day ever. It seems that "other Alyssa" was driving her around on a bike and they crashed into the fence. No, she didn't get hurt and neither did "other Alyssa". I asked if that was really enough to qualify it as the Worst.Day.Ever. And she said, "Well it was cold outside too."

Seems to me that if that was her worst day ever that her life must be pretty good, quiet or not.

And her story wasn't over. She went on to tell me that she'd exchanged phone numbers with Madeline (strangely, Madeline's phone number has only 5 digits.) She told me Brianna had a tummy ache and that Jake spilled his milk on her backpack. She told me about the upcoming field trip to the pumpkin patch and that Eric can speak Chinese. She counted to 100, more or less. She told me why she wrote her name in orange and that if she tilts her head a certain way and squints her eyes that things look funny. By this point my eyes had glazed over and I may have been drooling slightly. And that's when I officially decided I'm not worried about Alyssa being quiet at school. But I am a little jealous.

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Random Photo Tuesday (on Wednesday)

Here are my beautiful little darlings along with Beth's little darling, Emily, and they are coated from head to toe in Hidden Valley Lake dirt. Red dirt. We were visiting my mom's house and they went outside under the guise of searching for Lake County diamonds... but instead, apparently they were turning themselves and each other into mud pies.

You wanna know the most shocking part about this? My mom didn't even blink an eye when she saw the girls looking like this. MY mother who, when I was little and we went to visit my grandparents in Auburn, would spend half of our trip warning us about the dangers of RED DIRT. You know the kind that will never come out of anything. It will stain your clothes and mess up your brand new white tennis shoes and ruin your carpet and destroy your entire life if you're not careful. My mother stressed out a LOT about red dirt in those days. If you came in from playing in the yard with so much as a trace of red dirt on you then LOOK OUT.

I'm pretty sure I started shaking a little when I saw my children covered in the stuff with my mother standing behind me. I braced myself for lightening to strike. But all she did was laugh. She said, "You better take pictures." Umm. Okay. Who are you and what did you do with my mother?

This is Alyssa with Boo. Alyssa can't sleep without Boo. Or won't sleep without Boo. This is one of several Boos that we have. For a while we numbered them. There was original Boo. Then Boo 2. I think the one above is Boo 3 but I can't be sure. Now they're all just Boos and she'll sleep with any or all of them, lucky for me.


Here's one of Amanda with her best friend in the whole wide world, Rilie. She used to live next door, then sadly moved away, then moved nearby again... but now... far away again. Wah! We still get to have sleepovers now and then though.

Last weekend we went to my adorable niece, Tia's, 14th birthday party.

Here are the girls with my super cute niece, Katie.

And here's my handsome nephew, Giovanni, with some Swedish Fish. Long ago when Gio was new to the family, my sister and nieces were trying to Nelson-ify him and among other things, they gave him some Swedish fish. He sat in the backseat happily eating them for about 20 minutes when he finally said, "Wait a second! This candy is NASTY!"


Here's my mom at the bottom of the best slide ever. At the Chevron Rod & Gun club in Richmond. Stepping onto that playground was like stepping back into my childhood. I LOVED that slide as a kid. Thought I was pretty brave going down it again until my nearly 80-yr-old mother went down it a while later. She's posing at the bottom for this picture because we had Giovanni catch her at the bottom. As my sister Darin says, "It's all fun and games until someone breaks a hip!" I nearly landed on my butt when I went down but managed to catch myself in the least graceful way possible. (Thanks for not posting that video on Facebook, Katie! She posted an awesome one of my mom going down.) See below for Kate's photo of Alyssa in mid-air... about to fall on her butt. Only to get right back up and climb the stairs again. Because it is the funnest slide in the whole wide world. (And no, I don't care if "funnest" isn't a real word.)



And here are the the girls on the teeter-totter at Rod and Gun. Alyssa is obviously practicing to be an old lady who yells at small children for walking on her lawn.

A few pics of Alyssa playing on the monkey bars. She began perfecting her technique last spring when we would walk over to the school and wait to pick up Amanda. Now she's going for the record in speed.

Clearly, doing the monkey bars is EXHAUSTING!

Grandma-Daddy's-Mom got this outfit for Amanda. How cute is she? She never would have worn this for me. Yesterday she asked if she could try on the outfit she's going to wear when she goes to tea with Aunt Darin. She came out wearing this.




And then she posed.



And posed.



And posed some more.

And then it was Alyssa's turn to pose.





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Alyssa started Kindergarten, Amanda started 4th Grade

So yes, I'm working backwards in time here. A few weeks ago that much anticipated day finally arrived. At last, it was time to start Kindergarten! And 4th grade too, of course. Our morning went very smoothly. Except that we were ready way too early, which was a bit torturous for Alyssa who had waited long enough. (Years, people.) And didn't feel like waiting any longer.


My major worry was that Amanda would have to fend for herself when she was used to having me and my camera tagging along for her first day of school action, snapping photos right up until they have to ask me to leave. I knew she'd be nervous and I didn't want her to think that she suddenly didn't matter as much any more now that her sister had arrived on the scene. Of course she fed right into my guilt by announcing rather over-dramatically that she would probably be the only "parentless child in the whole class."

Oh, the tragedy! Orphaned at such a tender age by her annoying younger sister starting Kindergarten.

Alyssa and I walked her to her classroom, made sure she had some friends to wait with, and even snapped a photo or two before making our way to Kindergarten. Finally! My little orphan, Amanda did just fine, by the way. Most of her closest friends are in her class and she loves her teacher, who won the award for California's Outstanding First Year Teacher a couple of years ago. At the end of her first day, her teacher told me that what she'd learned about Amanda so far was that she's quiet and likes her own space. In an email she sent me last week, her teacher said this about Amanda: "She's doing very well. I enjoy her quiet, calm, insightful way!"


Now back to the first day of Kindergarten, Alyssa or "Alyssa T." as she'll be known this year (since some other parents had the nerve to give their child our child's name) did great. She marched right into that classroom like she's been there a million times before (possibly because she has been). She found her name tag and the teacher took our picture for her memory book. (Yes, they're going to make memory books! And yes, that's me, bringing cleavage to Kindergarten.)


Alyssa did get a tiny bit nervous once she was surrounded by all those new faces, but mostly she was just really excited. The parents were allowed to stay a while before the principal came to herd us into the Boo Hoo breakfast. Alyssa gave me hugs and kisses and then it was time for me to be a big girl and say good-bye.

Luckily I had plenty to do that morning so I didn't have time to fret about the fact that Alyssa was probably having so much fun that she didn't miss me a bit. One of the things I was working on was a "My Life in Five" project for Shutterfly. The idea was to choose five photos (actually 6 with a cover photo) and captions to represent your life. This was for a new hub on the Shutterfly website and the idea behind "My Life in Five" is to show others how easy it is to tell your story in photo books. A few photos and a few words and voila!

Normally I don't have a hard time telling my story but I was struggling with this assignment. Later I made this one about Alyssa starting Kindergarten just to help get myself in the groove. She helped me with the captions.

Alyssa's Life in Five


My name is Alyssa. I'm 5 years old and guess what? I just started Kindergarten!


The night before school started I was so excited! My mommy read me stories but I had a hard time going to sleep.


In the morning I ate my breakfast, brushed my teeth and got dressed as fast as I could. I couldn't wait to go to school but Mommy said it was too early so she wasted time by taking a million pictures.


Finally we got to go to school. I got to take my new lunchbox and backpack! This is my teacher, Ms. Plencner. She was Amanda's teacher too. She's really nice. Do you want to know what we did at school? Everything fun! And not just kinda fun. REALLY FUN!


My teacher gave me this smiley face. It means I followed all the rules and had a good day. Do you want to know my favorite part of Kindergarten? Lunch.


At Kindergarten we played and sang songs. I made a new friend named Katie and had so much fun! I wish I could go to Kindergarten every day!


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Amanda turned NINE last week!

Dear Amanda,

It's pretty hard to imagine that you could actually be nine years old. Nine years seems like such a long time but it went by so insanely fast. It's scary to me that the next nine years could fly by just as quickly. Before you know it, you might have some crazy idea about moving out. I hope we're still sticking with the plan you came up with when you were three or four, which was that you'd either live with me forever or maybe move next door.


For some reason, the fact that you're getting older always gets to me on the day before your birthday instead of on your actual birthday. If you think about it, the idea that it's your first day of being nine is pretty cool and exciting... full of possibilities and all that. But the idea that it's your last day of being eight is just sad. And I guess I don't like saying good-bye.

Eight was fun. And extremely agonizing. And completely wonderful. Eight was full of anxiety. Worrying about math class and wearing the wrong jeans and getting kidnapped and what will people think ifs.... Worrying about so much stuff that shouldn't be worried about at eight. Eight was about making up songs and choreographing dance routines. Eight was always putting on plays and talent shows in our living room or backyard with your sister and friends. Eight was full of singing like some diva pop star at the top of your lungs when umm... weren't you supposed to be doing your homework? Eight was still playing with Barbies with your friends (I won't tell if you don't) and creating the most intricately detailed life stories that make me sure you have a future in writing novels or for TV. Eight had quite a flair for the dramatic and an ability to embellish details in a way that always made a story more interesting.


Eight was incredibly excited about the idea of being a teacher one day, and even more-so being a teacher now. Eight loved nothing more than playing school with your sister, your cousins or your friends' little brothers and sisters. Teaching them the alphabet, shapes, math, drawing or whatever you could think of. And eight was GREAT at this. Eight tirelessly made "lesson plans" and wrote out worksheets. When it came to teaching, eight was calm, patient, tolerant and unruffled. No, eight was not always like this at other times but something about teaching brought out the best in you.


Eight was inquisitive and curious. Eight was downright nosy sometimes. Eight was careful, cautious and responsible. Yes, eight was extremely conscientious about most things. Eight was a good student, always got her homework done on time and would have rather eaten worms than be late for school. On the other hand, eight hated to clean her room, hated to take baths and avoided eating vegetables if at all possible.


Eight loved to write stories and draw. Eight taught herself how to ride a bike and how to hula-hoop. Eight loved to invent complicated desserts, drinks and snacks. Eight was unbelievably goofy. Silly like you wouldn't believe. Eight was laughing until your sides hurt on a pretty regular basis. Eight could also be moody. And picky. SO PICKY. Over food, as always, and clothes too. Even socks. Really picky. But then how cool was it that eight absolutely knew your own mind? Knew what you loved and what you couldn't possibly tolerate. Eight truly hated to pick up after herself but somehow loved to organize things. Even loved to clean out my car or purse. Eight didn't like boys yet. Thank goodness. Eight loved her friends though. Eight was loyal and caring and trustworthy.


Though I've loved eight more than I can explain, I have no doubt I'm going to love nine just as much... maybe even more.

There's a page in one of your scrapbooks about your last day of being two. On that day I took pictures of you at the top of the slide and then got all weepy when I saw them because you looked so grown up.


So on your last day of being eight I briefly had some crazy notion about making you get back up on that slide so I could take some new pictures. But then I came to my senses. You were too busy doing your own thing anyway. You were on a play-date with Holly when I thought about it. (I forget... am I still allowed to call them "play-dates" or is that not cool anymore?) Anyway, fast forward to last night when we were killing time while Alyssa was at soccer practice and when I spotted you on the playground at the top of the slide, I ran for my camera like a crazy lady and you kindly allowed me to take a bunch of pictures. Actually, when I stopped, you asked me to take more, so for the record, it's not like I was forcing you.


And just like when you were two, the pictures kind of stunned me. Not so much because you're looking grown up exactly... oh trust me, you are... but that part has been stunning me for quite some time. But just the way you seem to glow. You have such a great smile and you're gorgeous! I know, you think I HAVE to say that because I'm your mom, but it's true. You're beautiful inside and out and I love you like crazy. Happy birthday, Sweetie!

Love,
Mommy

P.S. Here you are on your last day of being two:










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