Happy Birthday Emma!

Four years ago Emma rocked our world with her dramatic entrance 3 weeks early and she's kept us on our toes ever since! What a blessing to be mothering such a vivacious girl with a personality and imagination that never ceases to amaze me. I can't wait to see what the next year brings us because I've been seeing little glimpses these last few weeks. From asking all of her teachers to call her Tinkerbell (including labeling her art Tinkerbell instead of Emma) to reading site words and sounding out other words, to being the most helpful older sister any little brother could ask for, it's been so much fun to watch the 4 year old Emma start to appear.

For tonight, we've started a tradition both Hubs and I had in our family of the birthday kid picking dinner for the night. Emma's chosen grilled pizza and she'll be dining on the Celebrate plate I got last year for special occasions. I baked a cake last night and I need to cut it into individual stars and frost them. Hubs is getting her birthday bike from his mom's on his way home from work and I need to wrap up the Disney Princess placemat and Little Mermaid placemat I got at the dollar store. Emma's already gotten two phone calls and two cards in the mail and was over the moon excited about both of them. She got a pink crown with her name in gold glitter at preschool and we brought muffins for snack time.

It's been quite a delightful 4th birthday I'd say.

My Buddies

I'm trying to make an effort to hang with each kid individually more often. They are both so energetic, and dare I say demanding, when we go out that I'm doing crowd control and herding cats most of the time. I feel like I don't have many opportunities to hang with just one kid for any length of time and hear just their little voice, or follow a conversation without interrupting to say something to the other, or just see the world through just their little eyes.

Now that Emma is in school three days a week, Grant and I have all kinds of buddy time. He's a pretty funny guy. And obsessed with airplanes. He can hear them in the sky when they are just a faint buzz, and he'll track them in the sky until they are gone. He loves to carry our reusable grocery bags on his shoulder as we walk through the parking lot. He sings while he sits in the shopping cart. He's getting really good at digging sand and getting it into buckets. He can hold on tight and swing on the big kid swings, although he prefers the little kids swings because he can swing higher.

Carving out alone time with Emma is trickier. I've shortened her resting time and we spend the time until Grant wakes up either reading or playing games. She's reading now. I mean noticing sight words and sounding out other words. She's getting awesome at Memory too. We play with three stacks now (36 cards) instead of 2 stacks (24) and she holds her own. We went to her preschool visit day alone on Monday and it was so awesome to be able to sit with her while she painted and moved around the room, meeting new friends. It was wonderful to be able to catch her eye across the room and share a smile. After her visit, we went and got our hair cut together, and again, it was so nice to be able to have shared, calm time. She's sooooo much calmer when we're out and she has my undivided attention.

The buddy time with each kid has been really settling for my heart. It has strengthened the bonds between each of us, and I need to keep doing this to help maintain those bonds and keep my kid time bank account full.

Emma's Nursery Rhyme Day

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good,
She was very very good.
But when she was bad,
She was horrid.

That pretty much sums up our morning. She was either fire on wheels, attitude seeping from her pores, listening ears buried under her bed, ugly voice coming from her throat or she was total sweetness, offering to help Grant with his buckles in his booster chair, pushing him on the swing, quietly sitting at the park munching apples. No warning when the drama would appear, and no indication it was ending. She could turn it on and off in a second.

I know it's because she's back at school and having to adjust to getting ready and going in the morning after a fairly lazy summer. She's working hard at making new friends, learning a new classroom routing, figuring out her teachers. Hub's has been working hard lately so hasn't been home as much, fall activities are getting started again, alot is changing from our summer time routines.

I know all that but that doesn't make nursery rhyme days any easier.

Oh great

So I cleaned off the kitchen counter this weekend. I mean REALLY cleaned it off. Cleanest it's been in a long time. It was partially because of the continuing ant drama, and partially because we were having people from Hub's work over and he didn't want the "clutter" out. So off the counter went my notepads and stickie notes, my calendar, my corresponding colored pens for my calendar and various things (or "clutter). And by cleaning I mean I stuck some things in the laundry room, some things got "filed" in various drawers and my huge desk calendar is laying on top of my shoes in my closet.

Now the ants are finally, probably gone, and Hub's friends are gone, and I can't find a thing. My calendar hasn't made it back out onto the counter so I'm floundering and hoping I'm not missing something crucial. My RSVP list for Emma's party is buried in some drawer somewhere, and people are RSVPing. My orange pen doesn't work anymore, I'm scrawling things on random scraps of paper with Emma's pencils. It's stressing me out.

This is why I don't clean off counters regularly. I'm chaotically organized, and without the counter chaos I'm hopelessly disorganized.

Living in a salad bowl

I read earlier this morning that vinegar is a good ant deterrent. And I also read that vinegar is a good economical, all natural cleaner.

So I combined the two ideas, mopped (for the third time in 24 hours) all the ants on the dining room floor with vinegar and water, and then marched outside and sprayed all the ant trails around the dining room.

And now my house smells like Italian salad dressing.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be here

The ants appear to be taking over the house, room by room. It may not be much longer before the take over the living room and carry the computer out with them.

It's still bothering me

So Monday night I created the opportunity to go grocery shopping by myself. Sweet, blissful, aloneness. Well as alone as one can be in a major grocery store. I rejoiced in pushing a regular cart, in lingering to make decisions, in not having to negotiate a flavor of pudding away from pistachio or lemon.

Anyhow, as I was pushing my cart to the car I was approached by a clean, regularly dressed woman who looked tired. She apologized for bothering me, explained she and her children, who were waiting in the car, were trying to get to a small town nearby (she told me the name of it) to a woman's shelter, and did I have anything that I could give her to help out.

I stood there, with my grocery cart full of food, next to my nice car, with my purse with a wallet with a few bucks in it, and told her no.

She thanked me for my time, and walked off into the parking lot. With a heavy heart, I loaded my car and drove home, praying that if she was for real and in need, that God would bless her with what she needed.

It's still bothering me.