Spring approaches

Yesterday was kind of a crazy day at my house. It was a Friday and we didn't have school, since we had just completed parent/teacher conferences the day before. Typically, this would be a day of much jubilation for L and I - we try to have "girl days" on days off, and go to the pottery-making shop, or the art museum, or some other museum, or picnicking at the nature center, etc. However, when I got home from conferences at 9:15 on Thursday, my hubby was laying on the couch, and the house was quiet - the flu had struck. I went to pick L up from my in-laws', took her to my mom's house, and went home to get our things...our little house simply does not have enough space for a person with the flu AND two other people. So I gathered our stuff, plus all of the ingredients for 2 batches of muffins and the supplies to make a diaper cake, since I was helping hostess a baby shower for my partner teacher yesterday morning. Bless L's little heart, she helped my mom and me make a batch of spiced pear molasses muffins AND roll 72 diapers AND create the diaper cake. She mentioned at one point that she had been running a little fever at Grandpa & Grandma's house, but nothing seemed wrong, until the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. By the morning, she had a 101.4 fever, a serious cough, and not much sleep. So I made a batch of chocolate muffins with coconut almond filling for the shower, called the doctor's office, stopped by my house to check on my husband, took all of the muffins & the diaper cake to the shower, and took L to the doctor. She has strep.

That brings out grand total for this winter to:
*h1n1
*bronchitis
*pneumonia
*numerous respiratory bouts of crud
*strep

I will be SO HAPPY when spring officially arrives, and we can spend some time outside in fresh air.

So after going to the doctor's office, picking up her prescription, and giving her a dose, we got some Subway for lunch and went to a park. It was about 45 degrees, and I was wearing a long-underwear shirt and a sweatshirt. We stopped at Target to buy a short sleeved shirt for me (L had one on under her sweatshirt) and sunglasses for L, and then luxuriated in the sunshine for the next couple of hours. It's amazing how a little sunshine can improve my mood and attitude, even though the ditches and sides of the street and anyplace in the shade is still covered in snow.

Conference Week Reading

This week is school conference week - also known as teacher torture. It's the seemingly never-ending week of late nights that are added on top of my already full as-we-prepare-for-state-testing days. Anyhow, in a random twist of fate, three books that I've been waiting for have all become available at the library in the past couple of days, so they are all sitting beside me. Actually, I've already finished one, so it is on the return-to-the-library pile. So, while I KNOW in my rational mind that I should be doing additional conference prep work, the books are calling my name. I've begun the second book - "U is for Undertow" by Sue Grafton - and now I don't want to put it down. I meant to be asleep by 9:30 tonight, so that I would be perky and well-rested for conferences, but instead I am blogging and reading. Shows my true priorities, eh?
I realize that none of these books are deep by any means, and sometimes I feel guilty about how much fluff I read, rather than trying to expand my horizons or increase my understanding of undoubtedly crucial issues. Instead I choose to immerse myself in fictional escapism - novels by James Patterson ("Witch & Wizard", his newest teen novel, is on my pile), Sue Grafton, and Ted Dekker. I'm sure I could be a much more organized and productive person if I could wean myself a bit from this habit, but I don't have the willpower to do it.

Rock Star

Today L had a friend over after school. I love when this happens, because my life is always so productive when L is occupied for hours with putting on makeup, or creating miniature zoos or Lego cities, or writing plays about dragons and goddesses of the seasons. So today, I made lasagna and biscuits while she played, and I was washing dishes when L and her friend started calling for me from her room - "Mom! Come watch this!" For the past 15 minutes or so, they had closed the bedroom door and I could hear Taylor Swift music blaring. As it turns out, they had put on "rock star" dress up clothes, inflated a pink plastic blow-up guitar, unearthed a (non-functioning) microphone, and they had practiced a karaoke version of a Taylor Swift song, including dance moves at certain points. I, of course, felt that this necessitated getting out the video camera, so I am now the proud owner of footage of 1/2 of a Taylor Swift song, as performed by 2 third grade girls. It was so fun to watch them laugh and dance around and giggle so hard they couldn't sing - I have clear memories of times like that with my friend Melissa when I was little, and I know that L will keep these memories for her whole life. Especially since I have them on tape.

Valentines Day

L is snuggled in bed, cuddled up with Kit, her newest Skelanimals stuffed animals, which we gave her today for Valentines Day. Skelanimals are her latest obsession, following on the heels of dinosaurs, Webkinz, Build-a-Bears, and mythological creatures, particularly dragons,unicorns, pegasi and gargoyles. She is now slowly building up a collection of these skeleton-adorned small stuffed animals - Jack the purple jackrabbit, Dax the black puppy, and now Kit the pink fox kit. Their bones glow in the dark for a while, which is an even bigger incentive to sleep with them, of course. At least they don't make noise.
Stuart and L got me a box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers for Valentines Day - my kiddo is picking up on cultural expectations for what is romantic - and an electronic picture frame for me to keep on my desk at school with pictures of them, which is one of the most incredibly thoughtful gifts ever.
L and I got Stuart a KU shirt and a Chiefs shirt - we were looking for a Royals shirt, but couldn't find one. We also got him some gadgetry for his shelving units for our future car trailer, and I made a Raspberry Swirl for him. It's one of those concoctions that his mother made for him growing up and he adores it, but it is a huge pain in the neck to make, so he gets it about once every three years. It's what he had for dinner tonight - yep, just that.

Cheapskate?

This morning L and I were headed over to the high school to watch my brother play in a state Special Olympics basketball tournament. We went out our back door, near the dog pen, and proceeded to the car, at which point I realized that our female Weimaraner was being visited by a large brown male dog. So I shut my kid in the car and told her to stay and went out to scare the dog away. Apparently, I am not scary enough (although my class might not agree with that sentiment after this last week), since the dog decided to come and hang out beside me. I called Stuart, who came home and then called our local police department. Anyhow, long story short, our police chief came to pick up the dog and we were talking about what type of dog it was. L had long since escaped from the car, since the dog was friendly and relatively slow-moving. L had guessed it was a fat chocolate lab, but the police chief was guessing a Chesapeake Bay retriever.

So later in the day, we were home and L was telling me a story with a large cast of imaginary characters. She was telling me that one of them was a dog, and it was a cheap-sape dog. I couldn't figure out what in the world she was talking about? A figment of her imagination? A cheapskate? Finally, it hit me - while my kiddo is a fluent reader, she had never made the connection between "chesapeake" and it's pronunciation, but she HAD heard the word "cheapskate" and thought they were the same thing. I love language connections like that.

Also, tonight L was telling me about a joke she had read in Readers' Digest today. It was about a woman who somehow acquired a bottle with a genie in it, polished it, the genie came out, and the woman was granted one wish. So she wished that her cat would be turned into a handsome man. L explained that the woman "threw herself on him" and then the man said to her "I bet you wish that you hadn't neutered me last week!" As she laughed, I was trying to decide exactly how much of that joke she really understood. "Don't you get it, Mom? His brain is still a cat brain, but it is stuck inside a human body! Isn't that funny?" Yep, I'm willing to go with that for an explanation, and yes, I'll happily act like that is funny, if I don't have to explain to you why she would be upset that he was neutered.

Oklahoma City, 2/10

Last weekend we went to Oklahoma City to sell a car part. L and I went along so that we could explore fun bigger-city things for the day. We went to the A.P. Murrah Building bombing memorial in OKC. Stuart and I went there not too long after it happened, and so it was interesting to go and see how it has changed and read the signs and have the experience. L, on the other hand, was just cold. Too cold to really care about the history or story behind it. She just wanted to be back in the truck with the heater on, and I just wanted to read the story of the "survivor tree". Needless to say, my photos of the memorial do not include a smiling child. It was stinkin' cold.

We then went to the Omniplex Science Museum, which was SO MUCH fun. We have gone to Exploration Place in Wichita fairly often, but this place in OKC was amazing. We spent three hours there and could easily have spent another 3, if we weren't so hungry by that time. We got to explore a giant tree house that focused on simple machines, solve a crime using forensic science, browse through optical illusion art, use a periscope, navigate through a house of mirrors, walk through several enormous body systems (think teeth bigger than my kid) and many other things. L wanted to buy a gift for one of her cousins, J#3, so we went to the gift shop, where she found an obsidian arrowhead for him, and a small overpriced bag of shiny rocks for herself.

It was a fun day - we left around 6 in the morning and got home around 6 at night, and spent 7 hours of that time in the truck. Before Stuart and I were married, this was the kind of weekend work/fun jaunt we sometimes ventured on during a weekend day - I was surprised at how well L handled it.

Oobleck, 2/11/10

Yesterday L went to her 1st "Seminar" day as part of the county gifted program. She was able to choose 2 topic sessions from a list, one for the morning and one for the afternoon. Her first choice for the morning was rescheduled once she was there, and she wound up attending a session called "Food Science". As part of this session, they made oobleck (goo from corn starch, water and food coloring). She was very excited about attending the session and I was working hard to keep her pumped up about it, since she has a tendency to be somewhat reserved about new situations. In the morning, once we were at school in my classroom, she suddenly became worried and emotional about the day, nervous about the bus ride and not knowing what to do in this new kind of situation. Luckily, there is another child in our school that is part of the gifted program and he is older than her, so he took her under his wing and guided her through the day. What a blessing! Anyhow, after L was back in the afternoon, she was telling me all about her day in the car on the way to Hutch to buy supplies to make Valentines Day treats for her classroom. She said that on a scale of 1-10, her day was an 11! She was especially excited about making oobleck, and I could tell that she was really smitten with the word "oobleck", that she was enjoying hearing herself say it. It was so fun for me to listen to her, to be able to tell that she was enjoying learning about new things and feeling the power of that cool new word.