Meagan's "Wedding Dress"

For quite some time now (maybe a year?), Meagan has been asking me to make her a wedding dress. It mostly started the first time she saw Enchanted. She loves Giselle's big poofy wedding dress. So this year I finally decided to make her one for Christmas. Here it is:

It was a lot of fun to make. I got really tired of having to zip up Meagan's other dress-ups, so there are no zippers or velcro or anything in back. Instead, he bodice is made of swimwear material, so it's stretchy, and she can take it on or off herself.

I put a butterfly on the top of the bodice, because Giselle has one there. :)

There are matching butterflys on the gathers of the lace overskirt. You can see them if you look hard. I made a matching veil out of the same lace. I can't wait to see her face as she opens it. I'm fully expecting her to wear it a good part of Christmas day. She'd probably wear it to church if I let her. Hmmm...maybe I will?

Ahoy, Matey!

For the past couple of weeks, Bethany has been asking me to draw her a picture of a pirate. I really don't know why. I told her that I would, but she'd almost always ask me when we were driving in the car. I'd agree, get home, and promptly forget. Tonight, she finally asked again just as she was going to bed. I promised I'd get right on it as soon as she got in bed. Accordingly, as soon as her lights were off, and I left the room, I got out a piece of paper and a pencil, and got to work. This is the final product:

I clearly need to work on my proportions (and other things), but considering the fact that I haven't really sketched anything since high school--15+ years ago--it's not too bad. In fact, it was kind of fun. I did just the pirate first, in black and white, then decided he needed some color. That sash was just screaming out at me to be colored red. Then he looked like he was just standing in air, so I had to add some other details. It's still a bit plain, but it's better than before.

I'd forgotten how therapeutic sketching can be for me. I can remember working on projects for art class, and getting totally absorbed in them. I love when those creative juices start flowing, and you can see your mental picture taking shape right in front of your eyes. It's very enjoyable. I may have to do this some more. I wonder if Bethany will ask me to draw her another picture?

Absent

Bethay likes to try new things. She particulary wants to try things that she sees the kids at school doing (except for eating what they eat, more's the pity). Her latest obsession was that she wanted to be absent from school. She'd been pestering me for weeks to be absent.

I didn't really get the point. I mean, she's still at the age where school is a lot of fun. She'd get to go to school, and see her classmates and play games, and most importantly, have recess. I tried to tell her that kids who are absent miss class and have extra homework. She'd miss out on whatever was going on that day. None of it made a dent. She still wanted to be absent.

Finally, I gave in and told her that she could be absent on Thursday, October 6th. Her whole face lit up, and she was content. I neglected to tell her that there was no school that day anyway because it was a Teacher Development Day. I figured that she wouldn't know the difference, and she'd be happy because she got to be "absent".

I underestimated my little girl. By the time the Wednesday before had rolled around, she'd figured it out. She became upset again, because all the kids were going to be absent that day, so it didn't really count. She decided that she was going to be absent on the "third Thursday". The Thursday following the teacher prep day was parent/teacher conferences, so she just decided she'd go for the Thursday following that. I tried to tell her that it wasn't going to work that way, but she was set on it.

As it turned out, it was a moot point. Meagan had been getting sick. Nothing serious, just a light cought and some congestion. It wasn't really enough to keep her home, but she and Bethany both had had a rough night, and were pretty tired. I went to get them up the Wednesday after parent/teacher conferences, and they were completely out. I was tired myself, so I decided to just let them sleep, and went back to bed myself. Meagan, Sean and I eventually got up around 8:45, but Bethany just kept sleeping. I'd thought about sending them to school late, after Bethany decided to grace us with her presence, but she didn't roll out of bed until 10:00. By that time, it wasn't really worth it to send Meagan to school, and Bethany was so excited to be "absent" that I just let it go. I decided that if she could sleep that late, then she needed a break. She came down and watched TV with Meagan and Sean, saying things like, "I'm sick. That means I get to be absent and stay home and watch TV." It was kind of cute and funny. The best thing of all, though, was that she got her turn to be absent, and hasn't bothered me about it again.

The Storm that Wasn't

I'd been hearing rumors of a big storm coming our way, but hadn't really paid it much mind. It was Tuesday morning, and I was on my way to the Commissary for my weekly grocery shopping trip. To my surprise (and annoyance), the place was packed. I couldn't figure it out. It wasn't payday, or the beginning of the month, or anything else that I could think of that normally draws large crowds there. I wove my way through the shopping carts and finally got my shopping done.

Later, I mentioned to Nate how busy the place had been. He said it was probably because of the predicted storm. People were stocking up so they wouldn't run out of anything and have to go out (or go without) during the big snowstorm. This peaked my curiosity, so I went to weather.com and the local news webpage to see what the fuss was about. There was a rather large, nasty storm predicted to come our way, starting that night. We were supposed to get 6-8 inches. There were parts of Colorado anticipating one-two feet of snow. Granted, that was up in the mountains, but still, that's a lot to dump all at once. One bad aspect of the storm was that it was pretty warm Tuesday, so it started off with rain that night. Nate was afraid the rain would freeze, then snow would come down on top of it. Not a good combination.

As I was looking at Facebook that night, I saw that many of my friends were making plans for the pretty-much-taken-for-granted snow day the next day. Plans involved sledding, curling up with a good book and hot chocolate. Me, I was looking forward to getting up with my alarm, checking the weather and confirming the snow day, then going right back to bed. Mmmm, bliss.

So imagine my disappointment the next morning when I got up, and there was only a light scattering of snow. The roads were wet, but not in the least bit icy or snowy. That equaled no snow day, not even a delay. Bummer.

Undaunted, many kids were still expecting an early release day, since the storm was predicted to last all day. Nate thought he'd be teaching his morning classes, but by noon all nonessential personnel would be sent home. Well, it did continue to snow all day, but it came down in teeny, tiny little flecks that melted on the roads, and only slowly accumulated on other surfaces. We did get a total of several inches, definitely enough for the kids to play in, which they gleefully did, but it was nothing like what was expected. There was no early release, either. The school kiddos were left disappointed, and I was left wondering what all the brouhaha had been about.

No self esteem problems here

Meagan was quite funny today. She brought home a piece of paper with handprints on it that said, "Hands are not for hitting. They are for....". Obviously, she was supposed to fill in the blank at school, but hadn't. So I asked, "What are your hands for?" She replied, "My hands are for making myself happy."

Later, she was watching Dumbo. We had to turn it off to leave right at the part where the little mouse was trying to convince the ringmaster in his dream that he needed Dumbo to be the climax of his new act. Meagan came up to me and said, "I'm a climax!" Surprised (because I hadn't been paying attention to the movie), I asked, "What?" She repeated, "I'm a climax!" I said, "Do you even know what that means?" She said, "Of course. A climax is something great, and I'm great, so I'm a climax!" I don't think we're going to be having self esteem problems with her.

After dinner, she was downstairs playing with Nate. He said she came up to him and said, "I'm mom, because I cook and bake and sew." What I found funniest is that she didn't mention cleaning anywhere in her list of what Mom does.

The reason we had to turn off the movie early was so we could take Bethany to speech therapy. After her therapy was done, I spoke with the therapist for a bit. She likes to tell me what they covered each time. She told me that she'd tried to get Bethany to talk about her birthday party. She asked if the kids got to take anything home with them. Bethany said, "They just brought things for me, and I got to keep them forever!" This girl knows where her priorities are, I guess.

Here I Go Again...

It's nearly one o'clock in the morning, and all sane people are in bed. I am not. I know that says something about my level of intelligence at this moment, but the truth is that I'm getting ready to go overboard again. Bethany's birthday is four weeks from tomorrow--I mean today. We stopped by Target this evening--I mean last night--I mean about five or six hours ago, and picked up a pinata and various sundries for her party. Now that I have a theme and an invite list (Bethany and I made it up over dinner), I'm getting ramped up for the party. I can feel the excitement building already. For me, this is the funnest part: the planning and dreaming and creating.

Bethany chose a monster pinata this year, so I'm themeing (is that a word?) her party around that. I don't have much in the way of games planned yet, but I'm having a lot of fun looking at pictures of monster cakes online. I'm saving my favorites, and am going to show them to Bethany and see which ones she likes. The beauty of a monster theme is that it's supposed to look weird. So if I screw something up in the decorating process, it won't be hard to make it look like I meant to do it that way. There's so much potential here. I think I need to stop looking at pictures here before I get too carried away.

Fear Factor

I am afraid. Very afraid. We're only on Day 6 of the school year (a Monday), and already I can see that this year is going to be challenging in ways we've never dealt with before.
I started the year out well. My planned morning routine is to get up at 6:30, shower and dress and make Bethany's lunch by 7:00. At that point I'd wake up the girls, and get them going, then start on breakfast and packing snacks. Ideally, we'd start eating at 7:30, so they can be finished and ready to head out the door by 8:00 to catch the bus. Sounds good, doesn't it?

I'm finding that life rarely runs according to plan, though. I did just fine for the first day or so, but by Wednesday, I was definitely dragging. It was much closer to 7:00 before I got up than 6:30, and I'm not even going to talk about the end of the week. By Saturday, I was so exhausted, that I slept a good portion of the afternoon away. I just couldn't make myself move. And that's just me. Just about everyone in the family is showing signs of wear. Everyone is cranky, and hard to get going in the morning. I have to fight to get the kids up and dressed. Today, it took Bethany half an hour to get dressed after she got up. Sean may just go back to having a daily nap. Meagan actually did pass out for an hour at church yesterday.

Poor Bethany is going to have it the roughest. Besides this being her first year of full-day school, she also has a lot going on extracurricularly. I signed all three kids up for gymnastics, starting this Thursday. Sean gets a 30-minute, Mommy & Me class in the morning while the girls are at school (I'm actually looking forward to that one), and the girls are in the same class in the evening, starting at 5:15. Their class goes for an hour. Aside from that, she has an hour-long Occupational Therapy appointment on Mondays, and starting next week, an hour-long Speech Therapy appointment on Tuesdays. The poor kid was going all day long in school, came home and had less than an hour of down time before we headed off to OT. We rushed home from that and she worked on homework while I finished up dinner (that I had actually started in a crock pot before we left). Directly after dinner was Family Home Evening, and then the kids went straight to bed. Except for Bethany, who stayed up a bit to finish up homework, have a snack and a bit of downtime. It was a pretty brutal day, and I don't see Mondays changing any time soon.

With Speech on Tuesdays (5:30-6:30) and gymnastics on Thursdays, I don't see the pattern changing much on those days, either (minus FHE). That at least will give Bethany a bit more of a break, but I honestly don't see how I'm going to manage dinnertime. I can only make so many crock pot meals. Domino's down the street has a great deal on pizzas M-W, but Bethany doesn't eat pizza, and I don't want to eat pizza that often, either. I can hope that Nate will get home early enough on some of those days that he can take Bethany to her therapy while I make dinner (it's too much to hope that he'll make dinner while I go to the appointment), but I'm not counting on it. He told me that he can guarantee to be home early on one day of the week, and the others are on a day-by-day basis.

Maybe I'm just being a pessimist. Maybe it's just my exhaustion talking here, and we'll eventually adjust to the crazy schedule. I sure hope so, because otherwise, this year will really stink.