Snowflake Soiree

Lucy's dance school hosts an informal recital every December at the end of the Fall/Winter semester. It's held onstage at a local theater, but there's no fancy costumes or all-out stage make up. It was held yesterday afternoon and, like last year, Lucy's class gave a ridiculously cute performance. They may not have  known all (any) of the steps, but they looked so happy to be there, faces full of smiles. Even the girl who kept yawning.

Check it out:



Not to get all braggy or anything (said to denote that bragging will now follow), but I'm just blown away by what a performer Lucy is. She clearly had no idea what she was doing. She absolutely did not know the steps of the dance. Yet she stood there, smiling and serene and graceful, completely capturing the mood of the song and the ability to look good doing absolutely nothing. Between that and her flair for dramatics (every stubbed toe is a cause for transfemoral amputation), I think we may have a born actress on our hands.

Some stills from before and after her performance:

Backstage beforehand

The rest of our weekend was filled with tantrums (from both kids) and lots and lots of cookie baking. I think I went through 12 sticks of butter. I'm waiting for a few gifts to arrive at our house so I can package up a couple of boxes to mail out to family members, and I have a few more gifts to wrap and put under out tree. But I think I'm done actually BUYING gifts, as of today. That, my friends, is a nice feeling. Bring it, Christmas.

Birthday #37. And Pasta. But Not Much Snow.

Though I always (always!) complain about the inconvenient timing of M's birthday (still burned out from the Christmas shopping season), I must say that I managed to pull off a pretty good celebration this year. Admittedly, I probably couldn't have pulled it off if it weren't for some excellent shipping services, but I'll take credit where I can get it.

I was a wee bit worried about the "significant snow" we were slated to receive on Friday, as that was the estimated date of the arrival of M.'s birthday present (and also the date of M.'s birthday itself). Fanning the flames of this worry, I started receiving e-mails and phone calls by around 10 in the morning letting me know that pretty much all of Maryland would be shutting down by mid-afternoon, including the schools. Even though nary a snowflake had been spotted yet.

Luckily, I was already working from home, so it was not a problem to pick Finn up early. Also luckily, the "significant snow" was really more of a dusting. But the warning was enough to get M. home from D.C. early, which meant that we had a little extra family time. There was (barely) enough snow for a little late afternoon sledding, but not enough to hinder the delivery of M.'s present or the delicious Thai food we ordered for the birthday dinner (we've had a bit of an obsession with Tom Yum soup lately).

While we waited for dinner to arrive, the kids helped M. open his presents.

 In keeping with his new hobby, I got him a glass carboy secondary fermentor, and a new beer kit to brew, Northern Brewer's La Petite Orange Limited Edition kit (sounds so good!!). He seemed pretty happy with his present, and we are both plotting when the next brew will occur (maybe tomorrow!).

After stuffing ourselves with Thai food, we moved on to cake. The kids requested a repeat of the Wisconsin "W" cake I made last year, but I did change it up a little by going with a vanilla cake instead of a chocolate cake this time. I used this recipe for the cake (I cannot rave enough about this cake - even though it's from scratch, it is so moist and SO GOOD), and the buttercream frosting recipe on the box of the Dominos confectioner's sugar box. I ended up having to make a second batch of frosting for a second layer, because the first layer had a lot of crumbs showing. Does this make me anal? Maybe. Also, the cake recipe makes a three-layer cake, so 3 layers + 2 coatings of frosting = a ridiculous amount of powdered sugar. But let's not think about that, right? :-)

The rest of the night was less thrilling, as once the kids were in bed I discovered I was exhausted, and not good for much but bed. This morning started off with our usual busy Saturday schedule - swim lessons for Finn, ballet/tap class for Lucy, and then a trip to Wegman's for grocery shopping (a bit out of our way, but we were scoping out food options for the "beer party" we are hosting next weekend). We were home by 1 o'clock - plenty of time with nothing to do and nowhere to be, so I? Took a nap. It was great. And while I napped, M. creatively found a purpose for the 6 egg yolks I had leftover from making his cake (it called for 6 egg whites). He dug out our pasta maker, a wedding gift that was used several times just after we were married, and has been gathering dust since ever since kids came on the scene. And he and his helpers turned those egg yolks into a fabulous pasta dough (and made me think of the wonderful friends who gifted us with the pasta maker, and how we invited them over to try out the results with us not long after the wedding, and I served them pasta with LOTS of GRITTY parsely that I decided "didn't really need to be washed" before I chopped it. Oh how wrong I was!) :

The result? Well, Lucy ate two helpings of the pasta WITH SAUCE (jarred, not homemade - what? you didn't think I was THAT Martha Stewart-y, did you?), which is a miracle, as Lucy typically eats her pasta plain. Finn was a bit weirded out by how it was "different" than the usual boxed pasta, though we did manage to get him to eat a few bites. It was a fun dinner and a nice way to involve the kids in cooking. Here is the yummy result:

This girl kills me with her expressions

Finally, I leave you with a couple of impromptu post-dinner videos, where Finn explains what "legs" are for wine, and then does his best to imitate them. I will also note that I didn't know about wine "legs" until I was in my mid-twenties.

Video Killed the Radio Star

M. is out of town for the next few days, living it up in Vancouver. If a work trip can be called "living it up," of course. Never mind that I might be a little jealous about the whole Vancouver thing (seriously, his job takes him to WAY cooler places than my job takes me), or that I'm parenting solo over a long weekend. I'm determined to have a fun with the kids, and make M. jealous of what he's missing. My goal is to try to post SOMETHING here every day over the next few days - a photo of the kids, a little blurb about our day, anything, really.

Tonight I give him (and all of you)... videos! And not just any videos - music videos!

First up is the warm-up practice, where Finn is practicing some old school la-la-la's to loosen up his vocal cords:



Then we have both kids singing Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain," the latest family fav. Finn takes a lead roll here:



And finally, I present... Lucy, the Angry Emo Singer:



She kills all of us every time she sings this song. She has this much anger and force EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. It's like she's channeling all the break up rage straight from Adele. God, she's going to be a super fun teenager.

And just for fun and posterity's sake, a bonus video. Last week Finn's class at daycare focused on African American inventors as part of their unit on Black History Month. The kids were asked to "invent" something at home with the help of their parents, and bring their invention in that Friday for Show and Tell. We all struggled a bit with what, exactly, to invent. Five year olds don't have the clearest idea of what it means to "invent" something - for example, we had to gently explain to Finn that we couldn't invent a jet plane because, well, someone else already did (aside from other, slighly more practical reasons not to pursue it, like a jet plane's enormous size and complexity). What we settled on eventually was a "Marshmallow Catapult," a neat little machine to launch marshmallows directly into a cup of hot cocoa (totally novel, I'm sure). Here is a photo (hot cocoa not pictured, and indeed, not actually tested with said contraption, due to it's hot nature):

And here it is in action. You'll see at the end that the natives turn hostile and start firing on their poor, hapless camera-woman:



Alright, time for me to resume catching up on old Glee episodes and other such "only when M. is out of town" indulgences. I will probably be in a Pinterest coma by morning - send help if I don't answer my phone :-).

The Upswing

YOU GUYS.

Things have been good. Very good. Is this a taste of what FIVE is like? Because Finn? Is being a rock star at school lately. And an adorable, can't-hug-him-enough, hysterical cutie pie at home.

OK, so it's not perfect. He doesn't listen ALL the time, he still cries and has emotional little fits every now and then, and he still takes FOREVER to get into his pajamas at night.

But it has been so, so much better. So much better. This summer, M. and I were really at our wits end with Finn. He was causing trouble at school, making us feel like miserable parents, and basically sucking most of the joy out of all aspects of life. Not to be dramatic or anything. I was worried we were doing him a huge disservice by having him in daycare, by parenting him (if what we were doing could be called parenting), by in general, frankly, failing him.

In the last few weeks, though, things have magically turned around. Finn is listening well at school, he's getting those coveted "green cards" (all five days last week!), and he's been much more engaging at home. And the thing is, we're not doing ANYTHING differently.

Which really just hits home that the crappiness that is age 3 and 4 has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether you are a good parent or a bad parent, and EVERYTHING to do with the natural course of development. My take home message is that when kids are 3-4 years old, parents should just focus on providing basic necessities (food, clothes, a place to sleep, a routine) and trying (TRYING) not to lose their shit every day. Anything more is apparently not going to matter anyway, so don't beat yourself up if/when the "more" just doesn't happen.

Now that I've written this, I'm going to go hide somewhere and take cover for the shit storm of parenting woes that will now, karmalike, befall me. But I felt like I had to put this out there, karma be damned, because I have written about the negative, and I want to document the positive, too.

I think a big part of Finn's improved behavior recently has been the return of the "school" curriculum to daycare. This past summer, his main teacher (the one that does the lesson planning) was out of the country helping family. There was no homework, a parade of teachers, and very little structure. Lots of playtime, but not much learning and routine. An unstructured environment for the summer is GREAT if you're 10, but I think not so awesome for a 4-year-old. Finn's teacher is now back, though, and lessons are in full swing. Last week was dinosaur week, something Finn knows a LOT about - he was completely in his element telling his classmates everything he knew, and it made for a really great week, likely because he was very interested in all the lessons.

I just hope that interest continues. My biggest concern with Finn was that, as an October baby, he'd be bored out of his mind spending another year in the same classroom, going through the same themes, and learning the same lessons from last year. So far, though, his teachers have been pushing him - he's learning lots of sight words, working on addition, and practicing writing short sentences. They've been great about working two curricula - one for the kids who recently started in the classroom (reviewing their upper and lower case letters), and a more advanced one for kids like Finn that are on their second time through. He's even napping most days, which might be the best indication of how challenged he is - it's exhausting him.

Now I can switch my worry to whether Finn will be bored once he gets to Kindergarten, instead. During our parent-teacher conference last week, the school director made some comments to us about how she couldn't believe that we didn't try to get Finn into Kindergarten this year. It's not the first time she has said this to me. She thinks he would have had no problem testing into Kindergarten despite the fact the he missed the cutoff date by almost 2 months - in terms of academic ability/knowledge, she feels that he was ready to go. It's a little hard to take, because, a) it makes me feel like we slacked on our job of doing our best for our kids, since we didn't even CONSIDER sending Finn to Kindergarten early. Maybe it would have been better to send him this year! And now it's too late; and b) my entire life I've heard that boys mature slower than girls. EVERYONE has always said that boys benefit from a little more time before starting school. And the way Finn was behaving over the last several months, I saw no reason to disagree with that. My son, spend 6 hours in a classroom doing schoolwork every day? No way. But now it kind of feels like he could have handled it, and I've read a little bit of research that shows that putting kids in school early can actually benefit them. Not a lot of research, but still a bit of a sucker punch to the gut, since it's all new information to me.

I think it probably would suck to put Finn in a situation where he is destined to always be the youngest kid in his class, and I don't really regret not trying to send him to Kindergarten. I guess I'm just pissed that this is one more way where parents can be made to feel like failures. Is it REALLY so awful that we just simply followed the rules, the rules that said that if your kid isn't 5 by September 1st, he can't go to Kindergarten? Isn't it a rule for a REASON?

OK, vent over, this post is about WONDERFUL FINN. Who is celebrating a birthday this very week. And I love him VERY, ACHINGLY, MUCH. He is charming.

Here are a couple of videos of the kids having a dance party. Lucy has made up her own strange dance that involves swinging her arms one at a time over her head. We all imitate it, it is adorable and fun. But you don't get videos of M. and I imitating it, just the kids. Enjoy!

Lucy's funny dance (and Finn's seizure-like take on it):



Coming to a discoteque near you:



Some inappropriate butt-drumming:



Bonus video - Finn cracking himself up with some rogue Humpty Dumpty lyrics:

Look! Pictures! So Many Pictures!

I have been remiss, not just in blogging (I've noticed over the years that I struggle to blog in September for some reason), but in posting photos of the kids. It's been all home improvement, all the time, the last few posts I've managed to eke out.

That's allll gonna be rectified right here. You've been warned. Let's just jump right in, shall we?

On Tuesday, Lucy was sent home sick late in the day from daycare. It was "picture day." She did not take good pictures (so I've been told). I'm sure the illness didn't help (fever, sore throat). But she was wearing this:

A plaid skirt/jumper (there are attachable suspender-type straps I had to take off because they kept falling down) that was mine when I was little. And an Aerosmith shirt.

This is what she does when we ask her to pose for the camera. I think we are in trouble.

This is what Finn does. Less trouble expected there.

Blue eyes

Sick, but still happy.

I pulled the "stay home from work with sick child" straw for Wednesday, and spent some quality time with Lucy. This is my attempt to turn the TV off and try something enriching - painting. A budding artist at work. I tried not to get upset at her total disregard of my instructions to wash her brush in between each color. Big of me, no? I painted, too. I made a rainbow-striped whale. It was headed toward "legendary" status as far as construction paper paintings go. Lucy insisted on painting in the tail for me, and, well... not exactly the stuff of legends anymore. I'm not upset about that or anything.

This is our self portrait. I'm happier than she is, as you can see. Also healthier.

Now we move in to the weekend, with a brief stop on Friday. A day where M. was invited to go see President Obama give a speech. Here is the proof:

I swear on the Bible that the blurry figure at the podium is Obama, and that M. took this photo. I swear that if I was the one taking the photo, it would have been in focus.

Saturday was a busy, fun day. We started the morning with a photo shoot with a friend of ours, Julie Blum. She is setting up shop as a photographer, and was kind enough to "practice" on us (if you ask me, Julie clearly needs no more practice!). We all traipsed around a county park, Brookside Gardens, saw lots of beautiful flowers and ponds and bridges and wildlife, and Julie effortlessly took some excellent photos. She has a blog post on her website up about it, and I'm sharing a few of my favorites below:








Just awesome, right? I'm still pinching myself that we had such opportunity. Thanks, Julie! And beware, family, if you are looking at these photos, you are probably looking at your Christmas presents.

The middle part of the day was filled with house stuff (more attempts to whip the dining room to shape, an effort I'll blog about more fully later), struggles to get Lucy to take a nap, and some outside play time with scooters and bikes:






Done with scooting, time for a lift inside.

A bonus video of Finn on his bike:



And one of Lucy on her scooter - she's scooting like a pro, now!:



Saturday was finished with a wonderful fly-by visit from my friend Jen, her mom Cathy, and Jen's adorable baby girl, Carmen. Carmen is just 8 weeks old, and one of the cutest babies I have ever seen. See for yourself (next two photos courtesy of Jen):

All the hair! The bright eyes! She is perfect!

I realize it looks like I am quite possessive of Carmen here. In truth, I thought about staging some sort of coup to keep her forever. But I'm done with all that, remember? The baby stuff? Plus, and most importantly, Jen is just GLOWING with all this motherhood business. I love how happy it seems to be making her - she deserves it.

By the end of the visit, it was way past bedtime, and the kids were acting like total goofballs in an attempt to show off:


Bedtime may have been a bit of a struggle, but the busy day was worth it, both in photos and memories. And early Christmas shopping :-).