Balanced

Just in case you missed it on facebook.....here is our perfectly balanced group!!!

The Perfect Day

Lately I've noticed a lot of lists of "things you don't know about me" on Facebook. Many of those lists have included the person's dream job. I'm currently "employed" in mine right now, and I've got enough of a self-esteem issue to be pretty sure no one wants to read a list that long about me (although I secretly wish everyone else would just keep posting more and more of things I don't know about them - I love glimpses into others' personal lives....it's why I get so excited at Christmas when we drive to see lights, and some people leave their curtains open....yep, I'm that creepy lady!). Tonight, though, I began thinking about my "dream day" or my "perfect day", and I do believe that I lived it today. Of course, I thought that the day I graduated from high school and celebrated with my family and friends and felt so very loved; and I thought that the day Mike proposed, and I remained in a delirious state for months, hardly able to comprehend that he so seriously wanted to spend his life with me (when both members of a couple feel that way, it seems to work really well!); and I felt that way the day we got married with all our family and friends around us - the list of "perfect days" goes on and on, I suppose, but today really....today was a rather ordinary day that just could not have been better.

Mighty Mouse had yet another rough night last night, but the minute Daddy got up with him (after I'd tried for over an hour to settle the little chap), he settled like a charm, allowing us both a few more minutes of sleep before an overly-excited Sunny came bounding onto our bed (at 6:50 a.m.). Today was her first "Mommy date", and she went to bed last night saying, "I just can't hardly imagine what tomorrow will be like!!!!". She and I were on tap for a 4:30 date to pet the cats at a local shelter. We're a glamorous pair, she and I!

Although the day started early, it was just so nice. Miss Mouse and I had our second "Mommy date". We went downtown to a vendor market, for lack of better term, where I had registered her for a bath bomb making class. An extra treat was that her friend was along with his mom, as well! He and she had attended a preschool mommy/tot class together several years ago, so it was really fun to see them together again in a class. He's a sweetie, and when she told him her news about a new brother or sister, he responded with an adorable, "Well! That's really exciting!". Anyway, the last class she and I attended there had turned out to be a child-only class, so I ended up shopping the store for an hour while she learned to make felted hair ties. It was cool, and I was impressed that the minute we got to the car, she was telling me which one of the hair ties she had made was going to be for her sister. Still, we didn't get to really spend any time together, which had been the whole point of the deal in the first place. So, I was very pleased to read in the class description this time that it was a class where parents were needed to help out. Yay! Basically, all I was needed to do was look on and watch her make the bath bombs, as it turned out. I did try to help with the molding of the spherical bombs, but I pretty much "helped" the same way a two year old "helps" with cooking or dishes. I think she'd have done just as well if I'd have kept my paws off, but she's patient with her mama!  The class went quickly, so she and I spent some time shopping around the store before we headed home. Just to have uninterrupted, focused, one-on-one time with her was really special. She's already cooking up ideas for our "December Mommy Date". It involves Mexican food and shopping at the same vendor market! I think she was particularly intrigued by some knitted tree ornaments that had been made by a 12-year old little girl and were for sale at the market.

Mike had Mighty Mouse down for a nap by the time we got home, and he and Sunny had just been sitting visiting about what her "cat petting date" might be like. She spent most of the day wondering if there would be "fLuffy ones" (emphasis on the "L" because she CAN say it now but makes a concerted effort to emphasize it when she does!) or if there would be orange ones or black ones ("Like Jeeves"....my parents'/sister's cat who disappeared awhile back). I'm not sure whether Miss Mouse was more excited to show Sunny the bath bomb she made her (again with the "this one is for my sister" - so sweet - and fun to see that her friend was saying the same thing about one of his being for his four-year-old brother!) or whether Sunny was more excited to see the thing!  I made lunch while they "caught up" on all they had missed being apart for two hours. This included lots of sniffing of the bath bombs, of course. Miss Mouse had picked "Sugar Plum Fairy" scent for hers; the other choices were "Elf Sweat", which I couldn't really describe,  and "Reindeer Poo", which was definitely minty.

This afternoon both girls happily took their quiet time - in different areas of the house! Usually this is a struggle because one would prefer to never have me out of her sight (Miss Mouse) and one would prefer to never have her sister farther than arm's reach away (Sunny). They spent an hour, though, with Sunny dancing to a cd she hadn't listened to in awhile (so she told me as she sang a list of states from a "sing to learn" cd that I'd forgotten we had) and Miss Mouse working on a lego project at the craft table in the basement. They joined together after that to do more dancing, but it was just fun to see them enjoying themselves separately for the moment!  One of the great things about homeschooling is doing everything together; one of the struggles of homeschooling is doing everything together. So, this afternoon was smooth and really enjoyable!

The sun disappeared early tonight as clouds rolled in, and Sunny seemed to resemble more and more a tiny, charged ball of electricity. She had decided that the cats probably knew she was coming because, no doubt, they had been given baths and brushed especially for her arrival. I loved it! She so often is unsure of herself and terrified to make a mistake or say something wrong; it was so nice to see her so confident that these cats were just sitting WAITING for her!

All the way to the shelter I prayed that they would not suddenly turn us away for some reason - suddenly changing to age requirements or something. Sunny had three false starts with the mommy/tot preschool program last year before we finally just gave up on the management ever getting their act together, and I just didn't know how we would deal with another "you-get-to-do-this-fun-thing-so-let's-get-all-excited-oops-I-guess-you-don't-let's-just-go-home" situation. Thankfully, this time things worked out for her!!!!!  We were welcomed into the shelter and told to pick any of their eight rooms and just see which kitties seemed to want petting. While in our first room choice, we heard that room seven had some extremely cuddly, sweet cats, so we headed over there. Wow. Yep. Sunny made some fast friends with Malcolm, Maizee, Marissa, and Chuck. Chuck needed a nap, so he didn't spend much time with us. Malcolm, though, could not get enough of little Sunny and wanted her to keep petting him and playing with him even as he curled up for his own nap. Maizee stuck her nose close to Sunny's and sniffed, decided she liked this little girl, and promptly crawled onto my lap into order to position herself for petting by Sunny. All Sunny had to do was LOOK at Maizee, and the cat would start purring!  (*Yes, Grammy, there was sanitizer in each room, and Mike made her take her boots off immediately when she came home because "You wore them on the cat floor, so you don't wear them on our floor!*)  This one-on-one time was also very special. More often than not, Sunny would choose to have Miss Mouse along with her rather than having alone time with one of her parents. When we got home, though, I bent down and thanked her for our date, and she threw her little four-year-old arms around me and squeezed me as tightly as she could. It's been good for her this year to be in Sunday School; I teach her class, and, although a little girl she made immediate friends with got moved to a different small group, she feels very sure that she is "a helper" for the children who do attend our class. It's just another way that she can start to see herself as a person in her own right in addition to being "Miss Mouse's little sister", and it has been fun to see.  There was much discussion about which cats where which, what colors they were, what sizes they were, and which one we would pick if we could get a cat (*Calm down, Grammy, we aren't!).

I had left out all the supper preparations and hoped that Mike would have time to throw everything together during Mighty's nap.....which he never took. Mike still got everything done, though, and we sat down shortly after coming home (and washing our hands with real soap and water) to a delicious supper.  As a final highlight of the day, the girls each took baths with their bath bomb. These bath bombs are such super cool little things; I just can't say enough good about them! The girls came out so smooth and soft that there was totally no point for lotioning; plus, they make this awesome "fizz" sound when you drop them in the water; PLUS, if you color them, as she had the kids do at the workshop, they turn your water a cool color, not to mention the delicious scent they give off! Miss Mouse chose purple coloring for hers. Currently the tub needs a little scrub (it doesn't stain; it just needs a little rinse-off similar to chalk-ring in the summer), and the bathroom smells almost overpoweringly of this grapey-sweet-spicy yummyness.

Isn't it good that no one has "tagged" me to list off ten things about myself? This is only the description of one, very good, very-nearly-perfect day, and it turned into a novel.

Writer and Illustrator

It has taken me a long time to get around to posting about this. When I say a long time, I'm talking a long time as in six months.  Finally, after a six month period to sit on it and think, I've decided to go ahead and brag up my six year old.  What I did NOT want this to come across as was a "look at my child and how great she is and how much smarter she is than everyone else and she's going to win everything and go to an Ivy League school and get straight A's and that's why we love her and why your child is inferior" type post. So, given that - deep breath - I'll go ahead and brag a bit about this girl's hard work.

Back in April, Miss Mouse and I agreed it would be fun for her to enter the PBSKids Go! Young Writers and Illustrators contest. At that time we were still able to pull in PBS with our antenna (we are PBS-less and sad now!), and she and I had noticed some info about the contest.

Miss Mouse worked all week on developing her story line and plot. She painstakingly - and I mean p.a.i.n.s.t.a.k.i.n.g.l.y wrote out each word herself, sounding most of them out herself (part of the rules said that children were allowed to use their own grammatical sounding out of words). Handwriting is not easy for this lefty; she works very hard at it with our "official" handwriting program now in first grade, and she had to work exceptionally hard to write neatly on Kindergarten-level lined paper last spring. 

She also illustrated her story. Illustrating also has been a challenge for her. I've never - never, ever, once in her whole entire life - said anything to indicate that she is not good at drawing or coloring. The truth is that she may end up being an excellent artist, and I am determined to not let my opinion on her preschool or early-early-early elementary drawings color her potential for the future. That said, she drew a bicycle about ten times before she and I finally agreed it looked like a bicycle. We went through a lot of construction paper that week!  In hindsight, if we had started earlier, she would have been feasibly allowed, by contest rules, to submit pictures she had taken as illustrations. She really is already a quite decent photographer (for a six year old!!!), and she would have enjoyed that immensely. The fun thing about doing it the way we did, though, was seeing her work so hard and finally produce a product that she was happy with. Life will be full of hard work on things that she won't necessarily be natural at, and it is such a privilege to see her developing the determination she will need to confront challenges later on!

We all trooped down to the local PBS office (Miss Mouse will quickly point out that she was the one who spotted the building as I was planning to turn the opposite direction.....) to drop off her submission the second week of April.  Then we waited. And we waited. And we waited. And eventually, we sort of forgot about it, and from time to time when Miss Mouse would mention it, she would say, "I must not have won, but I really had a lot of fun coming up with my story and drawing all the pictures! I worked really hard on that, and I didn't know I could write the words so nicely on that lined paper! That was really hard work.". I would tell her how proud I was of her having worked so hard, and then the subject would be dropped for another week or so.

And then.....

The second week of May - the week of her Kindergarten graduation, which came complete with a cake and party with Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Dick, - a packet came in the mail. It was a really, really BIG packet, and it was from PBS. The problem? Mike brought in the mail at 9 p.m., and it was specifically addressed to Miss Mouse. I thought I might go insane waiting until morning.

And then.....

I looked at the back of the giant manilla envelope, and saw a list of names with one name highlighted for us. It was a list of winners, and they had highlighted Miss Mouse's name as the Kindergarten Red Ribbon Favorite winner!!!!!!  Hold onto your hats - I went crazy!  I was jumping around the living room, just going nutso!!!!  Mike stared at me awhile and then informed me that I was "worse" than any hockey mom he'd ever seen.  I just smiled wider.

Out of over 300 entrants, spanning the entire Prairie Public viewing audience (think MN, ND, Manitoba, SD), including some submissions from classrooms in the Twin Cities (I know because some of the winners were from there), she was a Red Ribbon Favorite! What that meant is that she did not win the "Grand Prize" for Kindergarten entries, but she was one of the three runners up for the Kindergarten category.  The greatest part was how she had totally and completely made peace with not winning or placing. I think that was what had me so incredibly excited. She had let it go and found the positive in her work - and we got to surprise her in the morning with this huge packet of prizes and the knowledge that she was chosen as one of the best entries after all!

Phew. So, there. There's my bragging. Here's the one I'm bragging about. I hope it is clear that what I am most proud of is her character, her resilience, and her determination. The "win" was a cherry-on-top, and one that we won't always get to taste. Still, it was something I don't think either she or I will ever forget!

Oh, and for anyone who would like to read Miss Mouse's story, which is about a tent and a horse who go travelling together, you can find it here:  http://www.prairiepublic.org/events/kids/pbs-kids-go-writers-contest

I just read through it again online and have decided that my favorite illustration, hands down, is of the tent and the horse playing Go Fish!

Halloween 2013

I thought we were doing really great lining up Egyptian mummification with Halloween this school year. Yep, I was pretty proud of myself. One of the most talked-about projects from our history curriculum is the chicken mummy. In my plans, the girls were going to experience the full mummification process, taking over a month, with their Daddy working on a chicken (or perhaps a techni-colored ditch chicken....pheasant). Apparently, though, neither girl fell in love with mummies; both found the whole process, which was greatly (and appropriately so) simplified in our book's explanation, sort of disgusting; and neither one was at all interested in mummifying a chicken.

Hot dogs, on the other hand? Absolutely! *Sigh* Notice the "mummy" sausage-dog on the left has raisin eyes? That student does not care for mustard. Notice the "mummy" sausage dog on the right has mustard eyes? And then - *another sigh* - the "mummy" in the middle was a bit overly-mummified with my homemade biscuit dough, making it sort of difficult to eat. I should have really just bought the premade Pillsbury stuff that everyone else uses, but at least I knew exactly what ingredients were in these overly-puffy biscuits......Pillsbury next time, I think.....

The girls decided this pumpkin was like a spider. We melted crayons on it with my stamping heat tool. It was sort of a wild pumpkin day. When I brought them in at 8:00 a.m. to wash them up (they were muddy when we picked them out of the field), I noticed that this big guy was mushy on the bottom. Oh well, thought I. It'll still work for the crayon project even if we don't carve it. Yeah, well, Sunny was the first to notice the bugs crawling out of the pumpkin and all over our stove. Eeek!!!  Miss Mouse was totally unimpressed by her sister's willingness to squish the bugs and show them to her. Sunny was totally unimpressed with her elder's squeamishness. They make me laugh, but those bugs made me cringe. Yish. It was quickly transported to and decorated in the garage!

The smaller pumpkins were all rotten, too, but they weren't oozing bugs and so got free passes to stay inside for painting. This one above is Sunny's. She painted angels on it - one blue, two white, and one pink.

These teeny, tiny ones "belonged" to Mighty Mouse and "the baby in Mom's tummy". They were also decorated by melting crayons.

Miss Mouse painted hers with a bunny. I was pretty impressed!

Sunny had chosen to be a cowgirl the weekend before Halloween. She could hardly wait, especially once I mentioned that I'd let her pick one of my decorative wheat stalks and then hold it in her mouth. She was quite the cowgirl! She even talked with the stalk in her mouth through clenched teeth!

She was so happy and excited!

Once Sunny mentioned the cowgirl idea, I knew what I wanted Mighty Mouse to be! He was a pretty sweet little cowboy in his Carthart overalls, plaid jacket, and cowboy hat. He pulled in a real haul of candy for our "parents' candy fund" from his stroller.

Our sweet Miss Deadline - er, Miss Mouse - chose her costume at 1:30 p.m. on Halloween. At 1:00, she came to me asking if I could maybe make her a Statue of Liberty costume that she'd seen in a costume idea book. Um, well, not at that point! For several weeks prior, she had thought of being a "fat mouse" from the same book, which would have been fine with a few days' notice. A few hours for the Statue of Liberty, though? Not really going to happen. She's such a sweetheart, though, and rolls with whatever comes her way, so without even blinking an eye, she mentioned that maybe she could be a bumblebee. I jumped on it and started looking up face painting ideas for bumblebees. In the excitement we forgot her wings, but I think she still looked pretty obviously like a bumblebee. This girl makes me laugh with how very, very much like her Daddy she is - I know it would drive some people nuts with how much they depend on deadlines and how many directions their brains run in at one time, but they are two of the most gracious, flexible, kind, and understanding people I have ever been around. Such a lucky Mommy (and wife!) I am!  With a few days' notice, I could have picked up some cream face paint for her whole face to be yellow, but since she was fine with the little bumblebee designs I found to paint, I was happy with them, too! Nothing seems to really get this kiddo down for very long; she's always looking on the "bright side".   I was so thankful for another nice, warmish Halloween evening! It really helped her costume out to be able to see the yellow shirt and to not have to wear the skirt over a pair of snowpants!

Just thought I'd include one more Cowgirl picture with the garage door as the background. Just for consistency's sake so that all three have the garage-door-background-photo-op! And also because I just can't hardly get enough of that grin with the wheat stalk clenched in her teeth.

Mighty Mouse - 13 months; Miss Mouse - 6.5 years; Sunny - 4.5 years

You can't see this as well as I'd hoped, but I included this because of the goofy expression on Sunny's face. I just thought it was too cute! Notice the other two have not changed from the first photo.

Now this one I included because of the expression on Mighty Mouse's face. His pumpkin rolled away. Notice that now the other two have the same expression as the first photo. I can't believe I got even one with all of them looking non-goofy! 

As it turned out, it was a great thing that Mighty collected as much candy as he did. I had bought 15 packs of gum out at Sam's Club the other day, thinking that would be plenty since we'd never had more than 11 trick-or-treaters here ever. On Halloween day, I decided at the last minute to grab a bag of peanut butter cups at the grocery store. My real plan was to turn them into a leftover-Halloween-candy-cheesecake. Yum. Ah, but it was not to be. We had over forty kids stop by! That was great, except that 15 packs of gum plus 14 peanut butter cups does not equal a number over forty. The girls, once they were out of our "planned" treats, started giving out Mighty's treats. Once they were out of Mighty's treats, they announced that they'd just have to start handing out their own. It was very matter-of-fact, but it made me a little sad, even though it was probably a fine way to get rid of candy that will more than likely still be squirreled away somewhere in the house next Halloween (because I'm like that; I can only handle a few days of "two treats a day" before I squirrel them away and tell them they'll just have to be happy looking forward to my birthday cake; it's very convenient having a birthday so close to this holiday!). When the girls handed out a piece of candy each to two teenagers, I commented upon closing the door that if the next ones were teens, I was going to tell them whose candy they were really getting and ask if they REALLY wanted it. Well, when three teenaged girls showed up at the door, Miss Mouse looked at me with really wide eyes!  I quickly and quietly said, "I was teasing. I'm not going to say anything", but we turned our light off as soon as that group left.

For his part, Mighty decided it would be good to sample a candy wrapper from the floor, probably during a treat hand-out time since none of us noticed. Thankfully he did start gagging and puked it out.....all.over.me. That sort of thing terrifies me. Before he puked I had already started yelling for his Daddy who does the baby Heimlich manuever much better than I do. By the time Daddy arrived on the scene, though, he was in charge of puke cleanup.

Thank goodness for Daddy being home on Halloween this year! After the mummy sausages at lunch, take-and-bake pizzas for supper, a couple samples of the girls' candy, and just pregnancy in general, it would have been difficult for me to handle that episode by myself! I didn't mind cleaning up the little guy in the tub, but I was beyond thankful to have a partner to run the laundry down to the machine!

All-in-all we had another great Halloween. We mostly enjoy it as a day where we get to run around and visit neighbors who we otherwise hardly ever see. Maybe next summer we won't have had a yard fire and won't be building a shed and will perhaps be able to have a neighborhood picnic or something because it really is fun to stop and chat a bit with everyone!