Me: Ugh. I feel sick...

Alice: Did you take a Secretariat? You should really take a Secretariat. Or maybe 1/2 a Secretariat.

(I'm taking zofran and phenergan for nausea. They are definitely not horse pills...)

____________


Me: Did you know the baby is getting fingerprints this week?

A: Really? Wow..... What if it doesn't get fingerprints?

Me: Um. I guess it wouldn't be able to pick things up very easily.

A: Well, Daddy has arches on his fingerprints but you and I have whorls on ours. I wonder what Speck of Dust will have..... What if it has ALIEN fingerprints?!?!

Me: (trying to figure out how the heck she knows what kinds of fingerprints we all have) Huh?

A: You know, aliens??? Like, from outer space??? I'm going to be really mad if Speck of Dust has alien fingerprints.

Me: okay... Why?

A: (looking at me like I'm an idiot) Because I want alien fingerprints.

Pleasant Purple

So, things are going well at Wondergirl's school. About a month ago she won the Good Citizen award for her class. It was a big deal and involved walking across the stage in front of the whole school to get a certificate, ribbon and pencil from the principal. Wondergirl's class operates on a color system for behavior. Every day the kids start out on "Pleasant Purple." Then, if they make bad choices, they move to Oops Orange, Yucky Yellow, and, finally, Ghastly Green. (It's not really ghastly green, it's some other "g" adjective that I can never remember. We call it ghastly green here.) When a child lands on Ghastly Green, their parents are called. Kids can also move up to Beautiful Blue if they do something exceptionally good.

Most of WG's class winds up in the orange to yellow range by the end of the day with several hitting the dreaded green. Her teacher has her hands full. The class is rowdy, and it is also her first.

WG is coming up on 50 consecutive days of being pleasantly purple. Tim and I think that's a pretty big deal, so I think she will be getting some sort of surprise reward when we visit Granny Julie and Friend John for Thanksgiving.

Tim's Revenge

Wondergirl is constantly asking questions that I have no answer for like, "If God drove a car, what kind would it be? Would it be a rental car?" or, "You don't work when you get dead, so what do you do all day?" or, "We can't see God, so does that make him an imaginary friend?" More often than not I take the easy way out and tell her that would be an excellent question to ask her father. I justify it by telling myself that Tim is the family expert in all things philosophical since he has a degree in ministry, even though he has never really used it.

Last week, Tim got revenge. Wondergirl and I were in the car when she said, "Mom, how EXACTLY do babies get out of your body? I asked Dad and he told me to ask you." Touche, Tim, touche. I suppose I am the family expert on childbirth.

So I explained the basic mechanics of childbirth. When I was done I glanced in the rear-view mirror to see WG looking at me, horrified. She asked me if I was joking. I assured her I was as serious as could be and then, thinking maybe it would make her feel better, I told her about C-sections. Bad move. WG started shrieking that she didn't want to hear anymore. Then she started sobbing that she was NEVER EVER EVER going to have babies but she was really sad because she wanted to have a husband someday and when you have a husband, you HAVE to have babies. (from what I could gather, this was information she picked up on the playground. Oy.) I explained to her that simply was not true and then gave her some examples of couples we know who don't have children.

Then she said, "But how do you not have a baby when you have a husband?"

I told her I would tell her when she's 10.

Wondergirl -vs- The Garden

Remember this?


That was taken last summer when WG ventured into the "jungle" at the back of our yard, picked some poison ivy and smeared it all over her face.

I took these today:



No, it's not poison ivy. She learned that lesson. (And, can I say that I cannot believe how much more grown up WG looks compared to last summer?!?!)

WG and the neighbor girls often play together through the fence. I thought things had been peaceful for too long and when I glanced out the window I saw elder neighbor girl slamming a cucumber over and over into the fence. WG and the elder neighbor child decided it would be a good idea to make slop stew in WG's wagon. WG picked 1/2 our garden, including every single one of our peppers, and both girls smashed it all up in her wagon.

Needless to say that was the end of playing outside for WG that day. She came in, sobbing. She was in her room and all of a sudden started screaming that her face hurt. All of our peppers were hot peppers. Even the bell peppers cross bred with something and became mutant gigantic hot peppers. She must have had pepper juice on her hands because she BURNED her face. It is actually a lot better now. Right after it happened on Monday her entire eye was purplish red and puffy.

Next summer we will laugh about this. Maybe.

Oh Boy...

I don't know what the discussion was about, but it went something like this:

Tim: "You don't have a choice."

WG: "I think I do have a choice."


We're in for it....

Parent teacher conference

It's been a long time.

WG is doing well. I went for my first parent-teacher conference a few weeks back. WG is at the top of her class academically and the bottom socially. That's about what we expected. WG is much more comfortable around adults than she is around her peers. It's the catch-22 of RSV lockdown: it keeps them well while they are small, but they lose out on social development. She'll catch up. She's not an outcast, she just doesn't exactly know how to play with her peers and is happy playing by herself.

Academically she's a knockout. On color identification they had her look at colored paper cutouts of bears. The gray bear was a bit faded and was kind of a bluish purplish gray. Miss Kim said she looked at it and said, "That bear is lavender." The faded red was magenta and pink was light pink. No lack of vocabulary here! She's tracking letters from left to right which is, apparently, pretty unusual for her age. She can count to 29 and turn over to 30, 40, 50, etc with prompts. Otherwise it's, "twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, etc." Her scissor use is improving with the adaptive scissors. I actually kind of miss the worksheets that look like they've been attacked by someone with garden shears. They will work with her on transitioning to regular scissors by the end of the year. She's still writing backwards, but her teacher is chalking that up to her left handedness. WG does very well with the routines at school. Her teacher has no reservations about sending her on to Kindergarten next year. Her only recommendation is to keep up her socialization over the summer.

No pictures today, but if you pop over to my sewing blog you can see pics of my latest projects as well as a pic of WG in the coat that Tim made for her.

Letter of the week

Preschool is going well. WG now enters the building of her own free will and today, for the first time, she did not have a meltdown when I picked her up. She has friends and seems to be settling into the routine. Her main beef is that they make her use the bathroom. WG has a tremendous bladder capacity which combined with her tremendous pain tollerance makes pottying an annoyance. If she had it her way she would use the bathroom once a week or so.

She has homework. Granted, it's preschool, so it's not hard homework. Last Friday she had to wear something green because green is the school's color. (Their mascot is the dragon.) Today she came home with her sheet about what they were learning this week as well as homework. They are learning all about the letter R this week. Her assignment for tomorrow is to bring something that starts with the letter R for Millie the Letter Muncher to eat.

I have never met Millie, I'm thinking they want WG to bring a picture of something that starts with R. A picture of a rainbow is much easier to send than the real thing. WG spent dinner going through a laundry list of words. "ruh-ruh-refridgerator. Does refridgerator start with R? Ruh-ruh-pisghetti. Does pisghetti start with R? HAHAHAHA!!!" She gets it.

We forgot to find pictures so I was looking for some to cut out for her to choose from in the morning. I found an old Rachel Ray magazine. I cut her out. She is a double R, which in my opinion should mean extra credit. And besides, don't you just want to feed Rachel Ray to Millie the letter muncher? I think I might send her along anyway even if WG chooses the Roadkill Racoon.

The 5 minute pity party

Welcome to Holland by Emily Kingsley

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

Months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

I first read this shortly after WG was born. I looked it up tonight because I am throwing myself a 5 minute pity party. I'm sad that we are still in Holland. I thought for sure we would have hopped a plane to Italy by now. I'm very excited about pre-school and I think it will be an amazing thing for WG. I'm happy she qualified, but at the same time, I WISH she hadn't. When we were first married and Tim was working at the school, we never dreamed we would have a child enrolled there. No one does, I guess. I think the reason I'm needing my 5 minute pity party is because when I explain the pre-K situation to people, no one expresses disbelief that WG qualified. It's a really stupid thing to be wallowing over: we are very confident that this is the right place for her... I guess it's along the lines of a woman complaining about a dress making her look fat and then getting mad when her husband agrees. Silly? Very. Which is why my pity party was limited to 5 minutes only.

It's not a tragedy. Life goes on, we adjust and adapt. I really like tulips, anyway.