End of the School Year Craziness

                It has been insanely busy around here the past couple of weeks. My oldest daughter is apparently preparing for a lifetime in the spotlight. On the 19^th, she had a performance with the acting class she was in on Saturday mornings. It was her first experience with theatre, and she received about four lines in a sweet and short show, and she rocked every single one of them! (Not biased at all, of course). Then her and her best friend decided to try out for the talent show, in which she played piano and they both sang. Surprise, surprise, they made it! So we went to that last week, and then were back again today for the 2^nd grade music program. Oh yes, and she had her piano recital on Wednesday!

                Ah, but don’t forget my other sweet little girl! She just finished her last week of preschool, and today was the last day, which involved a very special visit to the fire station. She was thrilled because she had been wondering if there were any girl firefighters, and what do you know, the firefighter leading our tour was a girl! I think Mr. Hubby and I enjoyed the tour just as much as she did, and our little guy was completely content looking at all the bright red trucks.

                The past week was also spent winding down our Girl Scout year. Last week, we took them (all 13 of them!) to the local bounce center, as was their request with their cookie earnings. You don’t often think of girls being sweaty creatures, but I was certainly proven otherwise that day. And today was the final meeting of the year. I have really enjoyed this year, and am going to miss them all over the summer. I think I am actually looking forward to next year! Hopefully I can hang on to some of that enthusiasm…

                Oh yeah, and on top of all that, my summer semester classes started up a couple of days ago. I am taking two three-credit courses, condensed into one month. It is a brutal schedule, but it gets me ahead so much faster, and when they’re over I will still have a whole month to truly enjoy the summer. I can’t wait!

PANIC

Okay….so now that I have gotten past the initial thrill of getting this wonderful position, and being accepted not only by the Minnesota Reading Corps, but from the public school staff as well, panic has officially begun to set in. How am I going to handle working full-time, taking classes part-time, be a good mom, take care of the house, keep everyone fed and clothed and fairly clean, but most of all….how am I going to leave my baby?!?!?

When I agreed to this it somehow seemed so far away; next school year. We always refer to it as “next year,” and this school year hasn’t even ended yet. But next year doesn’t seem so far away when you realize that preparation for it begins in less than three months! My little guy is still breastfeeding exclusively (thanks to a formula allergy) and is heavily dependent on Mama….as he should be. I can’t help but have this conflicting feeling of doubt nagging me about whether or not I am doing the right thing.

Yet I know that I not only want to do this, but essentially I need it as well. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s more than I’m making now (nothing), and I could really use a confidence booster. This is something I can feel really proud of and it is certainly worthwhile. I also know that my husband and I cannot do the opposite shift thing again; it’s so hard on our relationship! I just hope that I can come to terms with the guilt before too long. I just need to figure out our daycare situation and have everything set up to the utmost degree of certainty before my start date looms much closer. Hopefully then I will feel prepared.

But even despite all this heavy guilt (and fear), I still feel twinges of excitement when I think of the year to come….wish me luck!

Exciting News

 I am very excited to announce that I will be working, or rather volunteering, as a literacy tutor for the Minnesota Reading Corps this coming school year! This is such an amazing opportunity that I just kind of stumbled upon…apparently that is how I find my best positions. I will be working one-on-one with Kindergarten through third-graders on their reading skills to help get them up to grade level. It is called a volunteer position, but there are so many great benefits; a living stipend to help with bills, tuition reimbursement at the end of the term, which is 11 months, and I also qualify for daycare assistance so I don’t have to worry about that! On top of all these wonderful bonuses, I will be at the same school my daughters are at!  So every day when I go to work, my girls and I will all be going to the same place. I have been very anxious about my little girl starting Kindergarten this year, and knowing I will be in the same building has really helped to alleviate some of that.

I begin in August and will attend a four day training program in St. Paul; they bus me there, pay for a hotel room and all my meals, and then bus me home when it’s over. Then I will begin working at my “site,” which is the school I am assigned to, by getting to know the teachers; I am so grateful they let me choose to be at my daughters’ school because I already have a relationship with several of the teachers already, which should really help. When school is back in session, I will tutor fifteen to twenty kids each day, five days a week until they “graduate” the program. I am really looking forward to this position and all that I am going to learn.

I strongly encourage anyone looking for a rewarding experience working with young children to check out the Minnesota Reading Corps. They need to fill over a thousand positions before August, and there are still many spots open.

I am going to miss being at home with my little boy, but I am at the point right now where I feel like I need to do something outside the home for awhile. I have essentially been a stay-at-home mom for about eight years now, and I think a change of pace will help me be a better mom right now. It's also a huge bonus that this will greatly help me in my ambitions towards becoming a teacher. Eleven months seems like the perfect amount of time; it's long enough that I will feel like I am out in the world, but not so long that I feel I can't handle it. I like to I know that I will be home again after that time.

Thanks for sharing in my excitement J

Cookies........to......Veggies!

Cookie season is finally over and passed, and between the kids and my husband, our cookie tally ended up at $70….that’s TWENTY boxes of cookies!! (I will not take too much blame here, except for the simple fact of storing them in my house…bad idea!) Albeit, that is $70 of delicious, only once-a-year goodness, but I think we’ve had our fill of sweets for the remainder of the year.

Thankfully, it seems that everyone’s sweet tooth is wearing out; perhaps I’ve discovered the secret to cutting back on junk….let them eat all of it until they get sick of it. (!)


Despite this great observation, I have noticed an increasing trend of junk food around our house and it is driving me CRAZY. I have made a conscious effort to not buy as much junky snacks because if it’s in the house, that is all, and I mean ALL that my four year old can think about. Last time we were at the store together, I even went out of my way to tell her that we wouldn’t be having chips and fruit snacks in the house so often and I wouldn’t be buying them this time. Of course, later that evening when my husband made a quick run to the store for a missing dinner ingredient and she tagged along, he bought her a bag of chips and a box of fruit snacks at her request…….ARRGH!

 I am extremely thrilled that we signed up for a CSA share this year! CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and you pay up front for a growing season’s worth of vegetables. Once a week for twenty weeks starting in June, we will receive a big “mystery box” of veggies; that’s how we’ve been selling it to the girls anyway and so far they are very excited about what might be in there and all the new ones we’ll get to try. A great thing about the farm we chose is the strawberry social, where CSA members can come and check out the farm, see where their food comes from, and pick their own strawberries. It should be good for the kids to see that our food doesn’t just magically appear at the grocery store for us to put into our carts and then our cupboards. Living in a townhome in a city hasn’t given them too much exposure to gardening in general, so I am ecstatic about this experience. Especially since we’ll have so many vegetables we’ll HAVE to start eating better. I suppose we could really start now, but it looks like we’re waiting until June.

A REAL, LIVE, GROWN-UP DATE!

Believe it or not, my husband and I were able to enjoy a wonderful night out on Saturday! We got to dress up, drink wine, eat good food, and support a great cause all at the same time, while our little ones were in the loving hands of Grandma.

After many months of near destitution, we were saved by the graces of Uncle Sam’s lovely little tax return; able to catch up on bills, pay off some debt, and treat ourselves to a date. You know you badly need some time alone together when your four year old daughter furrows her brow, sweetly looks into your eyes and tells you, “Mom….you and Daddy need to go on a date!” Well, okay, sweetie, we certainly will!

We recently performed some calculations, and after careful considerations, discovered we average a date every six months. When your numbers are this desperate, you need to make good use of that date night time frame, squeezing in as much relationship-building, couple bonding as you can; as if that doesn’t put the pressure on. So this time we wanted to do something really fun and indulge ourselves a bit. Several years ago, my mom had given us tickets to a wine-tasting fundraiser event for a local organization that houses adults with disabilities. It was so much fun, that we decided we would go again this year, except this time we bought tickets for the formal reserve wines night.

Though of course that formal word caused a little bit of outfit panic on my part; I became determined to find the perfect dress to wear, resulting in many late-night online searches that only left me knowing what I did NOT want to wear. The date finally loomed very near (that night!), and I found myself desperately scouring the clothing section at Target on the family run to the store for odds and ends. I ended up buying a dress and a little black sweater to wear over it.

Flash forward to later that evening; I’m getting ready, curling my hair, trying to occupy the kids, when I realize my new dress is not only not formal enough, but it doesn’t even look good on me! So I pull out a dress from a summer wedding a couple of years ago and put my new sweater over it, and surprise-surprise, it looks pretty dang good. Except…..for shoes. I have a gorgeous pair of peep-toe shoes for summer, but it is February, and I have to wear nylons with my winter-white skin and the cold air outside. So I try cutting out the toes on one pair of nylons, but the stark contrast between my nylon-clad “tan” legs and my un-pedicured, uber-white toes makes for a bad combination. My churchy closed-toed shoes are hardly the answer to my outfit, so we have to hurry out the door when my mom shows up so I can run to the shoe store and find something appropriate to wear.

We walk into Famous Footwear, where the saleslady looks down at my terribly mismatched flats, and points us in the direction of the dress-shoes. Amazingly, my husband picks out the perfect pair, and they even have my size. We pay for them (29.99 on SALE…what luck!) and are back on our way when I realize I didn’t print off the tickets for the event! We retrace our route back home, print the tickets, and finally make our way to the wine tasting. It is moments like these when I remember why we only go out twice a year…..it is exhausting!

Despite the rocky preparations for the evening, we had such a great time. I’m pretty sure we were one of the youngest couples in the room, and certainly the poorest, as we were surrounded by doctors and other various moneybags, but I dare say that we enjoyed ourselves more than anyone else there that night. My very own Mr. Romantic was on a mission to taste as much of the food, and try as many of the wines as possible, so our evening involved a lot of beelines to the buffet tables, and weaving in and out between the sampling stations. Good food, great wine, and lots of laughter….it was an incredible night!

COOKIES!!

I am one of the leaders of my second grader's Girl Scout troop, and by default I am once again the "cookie mom" this year; a title given much prominence in the scouting world in an attempt to cover up the less glamorous side of the position. They even make cookie mom badges for the daughters to proudly display on their vests for everyone to see; but surely it is the moms buying these for their daughters, and not the daughters begging to have one.

So this afternoon we (I dragged my husband into this mess with me) contemplated on whether to take the van or his truck to pick up the cookies; you need two adults for this duty, one to drive and one to count the cases as they're loaded in. We had 50 cases to pack in (in case you're wondering, that's 600 boxes total!) and five of us, so with lack of a babysitter we chose to crowd into the truck, leaving the back open for the cookies. Of course this meant we needed to clean all the crap out of the truck first.

An hour later, we were finally on our way to the warehouse. We pulled into this truck lot where we gave them our troop number and verified how many cases we were picking up; we were then told to follow the cones which led to eight different loading stations, one for each type of cookie. At each station we had to approve that we had the right amount of cases, they’d load them in, and we’d drive on to the next one. In a matter of minutes we had all our cookies, and after verifying once again, and signing over my life to claim responsibility for said cookies, we were on our way back home.

            Upon arriving, we decided the cookies would be safe in the locked topper until I could get them distributed to all the girls during the week. But after careful consideration; realizing how popular those cookies are and that they just might melt on this unusually warm February day, I decided we probably better bring them in the house. So, all the able bodies of the family (everyone except the baby) spent about fifteen minutes marching in and out, stacking all the boxes along the kitchen wall.
            So here I sit, gazing at the atrocity across the room, dreading the work I got myself into. I have two months of this yet to go, and it’s only just begun.

Fine Art

Stretch marks - shallow grooves upon my flesh;
body image - different version of myself;
strong, capable, complete.

Balancing worlds - lives dependent;
obscure art form - moulding, shaping, soothing, caressing;
all lies at my feet.

Not mere duties to fulfill- uplifted to privileges
that I get to meet.

Dreams, wishes, hopes - every day realized.