Yes, my kid sings too.

I can't really explain why this post is here. It just seems like it ought to be done. Look! My kid performed with the rest of the kindergarten in his school's K-3 concert! My kid? Oh, he's kinda in the middle...second row..about four in from the left. See him? That's my boy!Now that I'm done with that, I'll say that last Thursday we had the relatively painless experience (relative to, say, childbirth) of going to Smunch's concert, which was held at the local junior high school auditorium. There was no parking. The crowd was standing room only. The kids were cute. It was over in an hour. Mam was thrilled.

Another Birthday?

Well, yes. Actually, it was five days ago and I forgot to note its significance. There were no parties, no photos, no celebration at all. How sad. Happy belated birthday, little blog. Who knew you'd make it this far?

Happy St. Paddy's Day!

So, the shirt is a size too small and the skirt is probably a size too big. It just doesn't cover it all, but this is the outfit she insisted on. What a little leprechaun she is!

Letterboxing Rocks

You tired of hearing about our letterboxing exploits yet? You know, I wouldn't keep writing about it if we weren't having such a grand time! And this weekend, we had a particularly long and rather cold outing to a really neat place, so it seemed like it deserved mention, even if I left the letterboxing out of it entirely.

Late morning yesterday, I packed the kids in the van for a trip to Castle Rock State Park. Daddy ended up joining us at the last minute, so that was a bonus. I packed a few snacks and extra sweaters for the kids. Good thing too. It was COLD up there! Daddy, naturally, brought no sweater and had to put up with wearing my long, flowing cardigan for much of the trip. I have no pictures. You'll have to envision that for yourself.

The best part of Castle Rock, as you might expect, are the rocks! They're huge and riddled with holes and caves. We probably could have (and maybe should have) spent our entire time climbing around on the rocks and hanging out in little caves.
But it was cold up by the park's namesake rock. We found one letterbox up there with a disappointingly lame stamp that we added to our logbook. And I ran around like an idiot trying to find another one. I never found it. The first part of the clue was to "Find David's Trees". I didn't find them either. We decided to head back to the parking lot and potentially take another trail.

Naturally, we saw "David's Trees" on the way back, right next to the parking lot. Ugh. Turned out to be a pretty easy box to find.

Leaving my flowing sweater and our better judgement behind in the parking lot, we headed down a new trail to find the third and last of the boxes up there. It was much warmer, thankfully. And it was beautiful.
Of course, it turned out to be a monumental hike to the last box. It was fun, but challenging, with a lot of lifting the kids over stuff. We found it and immediately headed back. The kids were getting whiney. Daddy carried one kid on his shoulders much of the time.
As a quick detour on our way back, we went to see the waterfall. It's hardly spectacular compared to say, Yosemite, but it's pretty tall and the view downward is completely dizzying. I had a strong urge to hold onto the kids very tightly. And I took Mam's glasses off for fear they'd go over the edge.
You can't even see the depths of the waterfall in this picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.
From the waterfall, we zoomed back to the parking lot as fast as we could muster. Everyone was tired and everyone had tired legs, although you might've though Mam would never make it judging by all the complaining. She did though. Both the kids did great. And maybe Daddy did best of all, since he ended up carrying the weight of a child much of the time.

I always thought this was the kind of parent I'd be...regularly getting the kids out to learn about nature and get a little exercise. Why did it take me so long to get here? I think this was one of my favorite family days out ever!

Sproing!!

No, it's not even spring yet, although the weather here might have you thinking differently. And the fact that daylight savings time and Easter both somehow got put in some preposterously early spot on the calendar. But I assure you. It's still winter. Really.

As if to completely disprove me, the merchants association in our town put on an Easter egg hunt over the weekend. Both Main and State streets (Yes, those are really the names of our two main street. That's how quaint we are.) were lined with little plastic eggs.

We've been to several types of egg hunts. Our town even has a second one this weekend. Although the kids are very cute. Often dressed up in their little Easter outfits, all of the other egg hunts I've been to have been horror shows, especially for us. My kids are still kinda small, they're not really aggressive or overly competitive. At one hunt we went to last year, I think one of them actually got an egg. It's sad and it's the most incredible show of greed I've ever seen. There are always instructions to take no more than 3 or 5 eggs. What accounts for all the 8-year-olds with baskets brimming over? I hate it. I'm boycotting from now on.

The hunt downtown is way more fun. The streets are long enough that you can sort of find a place to hang out until the siren goes at 10am. You only get 5 eggs, if you play by the rules. Mam even voluntarily put one of hers back when she counted at there were six. Those are the kind of kids I have. It makes me happy. But what's even happier is that no kid who's there at the start of the hunt goes away without the maximum number of eggs. There are plenty and even the little kids get their share.
My kids aren't so little anymore, not compared to the first time I took Mam to this hunt.
It's funny to think about other parents feeling intimidated by my sweet little things, but I try to remember what a kindergartener looked like to me when I had a 2-year-old. Life is crazy that way. My kindergartener still looks like a sweet little kid to me. Just two years ago, I might've thought he was Goliath! Fortunately, he's still a sweetie...at least when it comes to littler kids who aren't Mam.

Runaway Peas

During a particularly crabby dinner.

Mam: I can't eat all these peas.

Me: You will, or you won't get any cake and Daddy and I will finish it.

Mam: They keep escaping! (As she throws a pea over her shoulder.)

The Princess Party

Have you noticed that I've yakked and yakked around the topic of Mam's party, but not bothered to post anything about the main event? Oh, sorry. You were sleeping already?

For those of you who are still with me here, let's party! Or at least relive Mam's "Dress-Up Princess Party".

For the second time in a month, we were lucky to have a beautiful day. Our plum trees around the front door had burst into fluffy pink blossoms for the occasion.

My logic was that if we did a lunchtime party, I would have to come up with fewer games for 3- and 4-year-olds. Not particularly true, it turns out.

It's something of a tradition for me to be up 'til at least midnight before the kids' birthday parties, hands coated in frosting and food coloring, decorating a cake. Smunch's cake worked out great. I was done by 10:30. Mam's wasn't done until 12:30 and if you've seen the post about this cake you already understand why. And why I was up even though I'd started work on her cake about a week and a half earlier.

By 10:45 the next morning, Mam was dressed in the princess dress of her choice and was busily posing for photos in front of "the frog."

I had Gram take both kids to the back of the house, so we could capture Mam's reaction to the fantastic birthday cake. Daddy and I brought it in from the garage and arranged it in the dining room.

As if she knew something big was expected of her, when we called Mam out to the dining room, she had a funny smirk on her face. She smiled a tiny little smile, shrugged and declared..."Whatever!" (Hear that tinkling noise? That's my fragile ego breaking into a million sleep-deprived pieces.)

I was putting the final touches on the cake (writing "Happy 4th Birthday") when the first guest princess arrived. I was done not a moment too soon. I still had to run back to the bedroom and change into my own dress-up clothes.

I'd put out strings and beads for making necklaces and princess coloring pages printed from the web. The cake was displayed in the center of the dining room table. There were streamers and balloons (white, pink, lavendar and baby blue).

Sequined tiaras lined the entry hall table. Each of the guests got a tiara and were shown where they could do beads or color. Turned out they needed more direction and help to do any beading, really. A few of them tried. The coloring sheets were more popular.

Once all the princesses had arrived, I started the party with storytime, so that all the princesses would understand the first game and one of their party favors. So, I sat on the sofa, in my regal gown, and read "The Frog Prince" to 10 little kids (including Smunch) who were very attentive to the whole thing. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a version of this story where the princess actually kisses the frog. In the more authentic version, she throws him against the wall to turn him into a prince. That didn't work so well with my game, Pin-the-Kiss-on-the-Frog.

Daddy drew a super cute frog and printed it out really large. I bought some lipstick-print stickers to create this Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey variation. The girls really enjoyed it. Even those who didn't want to be blindfolded at the beginning were in on it at the end. I gave each one a bracelet as a prize for participating. It made for a cute super-kissed frog at the end!

After the game, we had lunch. I'd made finger sandwiches with white bread without crusts. Sandwich choices were cucumber with cream cheese (least favorite), cheese (Colby jack) and cream cheese with strawberry jam (the favorite). I put out some cheese cubes and Daddy made a killer fruit salad, which at least one guest ate, while insisting that she doesn't like salad.


When they were done eating, the princesses drifted away, only to be found in various states of undress, having something resembling a pajama party (using princess dresses instead of pajamas) in Mam's room. Several opted for dresses out of Mam's collection rather than the dresses they came in. There was giggling and tickling and general hilarious mayhem. Here's a photo, but I'll need to upload some video if you truly want to appreciate this sight. It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen.

I rounded up the royal contingent and distributed one small, silky purse (either pink or lavender) to each of them. We talked about what kinds of things princesses have in their purses and I let them loose on the back patio to search for rings, necklaces, bracelets and plastic coins. Smunch, who is a very good hunter, was miffed when I tried to get him to stop taking all the jewelry, but it turned out that all he needed was to feel like he was helping princesses in distress find their belongings. Then he was great. They had a great time and each of them came away with a purse-full of loot.

Naturally, none of this took long enough. There was still almost an hour of the party left when they were done. So, I did what I did with Smunch's party and let the princesses play in the back yard for a while. They had a great time running all over, hiding behind trees, sliding down the slide and swinging in their fancy dresses. As the end of the party neared, I enticed them all to pose for a photo with promises of cake.

You might not be surprised to know that I wasn't overly eager to cut the cake. I mean, I knew I wouldn't get away with presenting the cake, but not letting them eat it, but I wasn't anxious to chop up my masterpiece of a birthday cake. We sang happy birthday, each princess got her choice of white or chocolate cake. They scarfed it down.

Each princess was presented with her own frog and a balloon before she left and just like that, the party was over. And I turned back into a pumpkin...or somethng.

Queen for a Day

Many, many years ago, I went to my high school boyfriend's junior prom with him. See? Yeah. That's me at 16. I hadn't even gotten braces yet. I think I've aged well...or is it just that the 80s was one of the most ridiculous decades in history? 

If you click on that ancient photo, you'll be able to fully appreciate my goofy hairstyle (which wasn't fashionable, even in the 80s) and the lovely metallic(!) bodice. There's a single, wide silver shoulder strap. I didn't like that, even then. I think I tucked it into the top. You can't really miss the marked lack of wrinkles and grey hair.

In a thousand years, could you ever imagine a reason for me to put this dress back on? Skip forward a couple of years. Nope. A few more. Further still. Now I've got my own little girl. Is she gonna want to wear it? NOT ON YOUR LIFE! But she's just four, so that's not a consideration. On the other hand, she's having a dress-up princess party for her birthday. Gram has generously saved the aforementioned dress in a toy box in the attic. And it miraculously reappears in time for me to look radiant in my princess dress-up outfit. Or maybe I just look old?

I'm sure I looked pretty radiant when I put the ol' thing on and it zipped up the back. And I could still breathe...at least enough to keep myself alive. 

The older version of me can't really handle baring all that skin at the top. I'm white and the dress does nothing to make you think otherwise. Nothing a sparkly little navy-colored jacket, a big red pendant and a tiara couldn't handle though, huh? I think I'm thankful this is the most detailed photo Daddy got of me.

Mommy Overboard!

Those of you who know me are probably familiar with my propensity for getting a little carried away when it comes to making cakes...especially when it comes to the kids. Smunch's soccer cake was a pretty good example, but it doesn't hold a birthday candle to the insanity visited upon me when considering what to make for a dress-up princess party. I found this great kit at Michael's. It seemed simple enough. After all, its a kit, right?

Right. The instructions start out with something like "make 286 fondant flowers". But did that make me flinch? Hardly. It made me make a container full of little pink flowers...cutting each out of rolled fondant, giving it a natural-looking curve and piping in a little white center. That was about a week and a half ago.

Then there was frosting all the towers in lavender frosting and sprinkling them with "cake sparkles" and doing the same to outline each of the window on the 12 turrets to this fantastical castle.

I made two cakes... a 10" cake and a 6" cake, each two layers. The bottom was chocolate with chocolate pudding filling. The top, white cake with vanilla pudding for filling. All dowelled and supported and frosted. I attached the flowers and piped in leaves. Added towers and turrets.

It looked something like this, as I worked:


All told, I'm sure I didn't save any money and I certainly didn't save any time. It looked so phenomenal that I was actually sort of embarrassed that I'd made it for my 4-year-old's birthday. I was tempted to say I bought it at Costco instead of admitting that I was capable of going quite this overboard.

No hiding from Goocha

So, could the day after Mam's birthday do better than the day itself? It looked likely.

Much like last year, I made Mam cookies to take to her classmates at school. I was fully prepared to make cupcakes this year, now that she's at a school that doesn't discourage frosting, but she wanted cookies, so cookies it was.

Mam's school has a funny little tradition of having a marionette named Goocha come out and locate the birthday child. This particular incarnation of Goocha listened to the kids ears to see if he could hear the birthday song and looked in their mouths for traces of cake. Very cute.


And Mam got the requisite birthday crown. The class sang happy birthday and ate cookies.

All in all, I think Mam was more excited just to have me hang out at school with her than she was to have cookies or a crown or special attention. Her friend, Kaitlyn, on the other hand, didn't seem pleased to see me at all. It just meant less of Mam's attention for her!

The Other Birthday

Mam turned four on the 6th. She was very excited about it...I think. On the 5th, she seemed to have trouble figuring out if her birthday was "tomorrow" or "next week". She started the big day with a trip to her ophthalmologist. I couched this as a fun appointment where she'd get to pick out a new pair of glasses for her birthday. It didn't turn out so great. The office is kind of a long drive, it was really busy and we had to do a lot of waiting before we picked out new glasses. So, by the time we got to the optic shop, Mam was tired, bored and hungry. We ordered some new glasses, but whatever fun she had there was tempered by the new eye patch she got for her birthday. One of her eyes is still significantly stronger than the other. *sigh*

Mam got to spend the afternoon with her favorite babysitter, so that went over well. Her afternoon playdate was canceled, but Daddy came home early and we went out to her favorite restaurant for dinner...Fresh Choice. Go figure. She ate dessert there, so no cake or cupcakes at home. She got to open a few family presents and that was it. The following video was one of the best bits of the day. Fortunately, there was the party at school the next day and her birthday party on Saturday to make up for a pretty lackluster birthday!

The history of the blue car...in Hieroglyphics

A few of you are familiar with my off-blog angst over Daddy making a rather "independent" decision to order a car that I did not approve of. Every fiber of my granola-ish being pulsating with irritation and every one of my penny-pinching Scottish ancestors rolling over in their graves.

And although Daddy replaced my car, the aging but trustworthy Honda Accord (known as "the green car") that I bought with my very own hard-earned money, in the days when I actually earned the kind of money that would pay for a car, I finally realized that this decision was completely out of my hands.

I no longer earn the kind of money that pays for a car and apparently my "wife salary" (equal to every penny my husband makes) hasn't kept up with...uh...let's just call it inflation, inasmuch as Daddy's perception of his own ability to spend money without consulting me has become inflated.

But I digress. Smunch recently decided to chronicle the journey of said new car. It was described, in detail, on our driveway. It went something like this:

Translation: First the blue car was loaded on a ship to cross the sea. Note the residual outline of what appears to be a blue vehicle in the image that is clearly a ship on the sea.

Translation: Then it was loaded on a train to cross the land.

Translation: Many cars were unloaded from the train onto a truck for delivery to the dealership. Note there appears to be a yellow car being unloaded, suggesting that there was probably more than one car in the delivery.

Translation: The blue car was loaded on a truck for further transportation across land.

Translation: The blue car was parked in the parking garage of the dealership. Note the multiple levels of the structure, indicating a parking garage where many cars might have been stored.

Translation: The designated parking spot for the Red Van. Note the primitive lettering and the pink color indicating a vehicle other than the blue car.

Translation: Mommy, you clearly lost all your power over Daddy. This space reserved for the new car which is far more exciting than anything you'll ever drive, even though you couldn't care less. Note the grin on the artist's face. Doesn't that say it all?

Ice Skating

A number of my mommy friends have been taking their three- or four-year-olds to ice skating classes, so it seems at least fairly anticlimactic for me to post about my kindergartener going ice skating for his friend's birthday party. Truth be told, ice skating is not Smunch's thing. He loves the idea of it. I even took him once on a whim, to a local rink at lunchtime one day. The place was empty. We each rented skates and paid for entry. That $20 paid for him to skate around the rink once, clinging to the side the whole time.

This time was a little different. He's a little older and he really wanted to go. In addition, a number of his classmates were there. Unfortunately (for me!) a party like this really necessitates the parents coming along. Smunch couldn't skate on his own and it's not like they close down the rink for the birthday party. It was crowded and as quaint as this particular place is, it's small. So, I went and shelled out the money to get myself into the party. (Oh, wait, I forgot to pay, didn't I? Ooops.)

Here was the rough sequence of events for Smunch:













A brave smile and then it's the best time of all...

Zamboni time! (Thank goodness!)

Oh, and hot chocolate time, which ranks a close second to the Zamboni.

One more fall on his butt...
...and off he goes!
Hmm. Could learning to ice skate be a good metaphor for raising children? It's beginning to feel that way. It's all about the gradual process of letting go and being willing to fall and get up again, isn't it?