Archive for the ‘Everyday Stuff’ Category
“A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference.”
“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”
All quotes courtesy of A.A. Milne.
We were sorting out her closet in a futile attempt to make room for all the clothes we knew were coming for Christmas when it somehow turned into a mini fashion show.
Although I’m still not quite sure what look she was going for.
Pimp? Heroin chic? Homeless?
Oh heck, what do I know? I’d live in jeans, sweaters, and long sleeve t-shirts (all black, of course) if I could. She could be the next hot thing in Haute Couture what with the leopard pattern (faux, as to not offend PETA), asian inspired silk pants and shoe, and the fleece robe complete with Mickey Mouse ears.
She designed it. My job was to photograph it.
“Take peek-tures, Mama.” So, I did. With my phone because the camera wasn’t handy.
I think this was the fashion model with attitude pose:
Then we got a close up of the hat and a slightly sweeter and more innocent face:
Wait – there were more models to photograph. She set up the shot just so and commanded me to hurry up.
Then a group shot designed solely, in my opinion, to show that she is clearly the most beautiful supermodel in the whole, wide world.
And then a tiny bit of goofing off with friends to end the long day of hard work.
We started out the morning like this:
Then came a quick trip to Home Depot to agonize (once again) over kitchen floor tile.
Well, not so quick – we had to detour due to yet another big rainstorm.
Which apparently tuckered her out:
(She bought the hat – well, WE bought the hat after she found it on sale for 50% off – at Home Depot of all places.)
The tiling arguments, errr – discussions, wore us out, too. So we bought none and headed home.
Where we discovered that the 30 minute catnap was plenty long enough for her but not nearly long enough for us.
She finally wound down hours and hours later and kicked back for a leisurely evening in with a comfy pillow and a favorite (and super loud) toy strategically placed just close enough to Mama to drive her nearly batty after she was forced to hear animal sounds interspersed with an electronic rendition of “Old McDonald” at least ninetythousandmillion times…in a row.
I love these days.
Who knew that daycare had homework?
Oh wait, J knew. He knew because he picked up the sheet with the assignment, that one that he left in his truck over the weekend, leaving Ava (well, me) only a short time to to complete her project. And since I’m a professional procrastinator when it comes to schoolwork anyway, J and I were frantically cutting and gluing and stealing images from the internet at the last minute in order to make sure she didn’t go in empty handed on the day the class was learning about winter holidays important to each student’s ethnic heritage.
Oh yeah, and we had to make a flag. Thank heavens she’s from China because that made the flag ever so much easier. J handled this part – gluing yellow construction paper stars to a piece of red construction paper.
Once the flag was complete I was tasked with illustratatng the Lunar New Year on the flip side of the flag. This was not as easy as it sounds since it’s kind of hard to compress the (arguably) most important holiday of the year onto a 9×12 canvas. Not to mention, my printer was almost dead so the image quality was crap AND we didn’t have even one non-dried up glue stick in the house so we had to use regular old Elmer’s glue which was a mess. I didn’t figure out either of these things until almost midnight, by the way.
Ava did help paste a couple of the items on but she lost interest rather quickly since there was an Eggo waffle calling her name for breakfast. I finished it up, blew it dry with a hair dryer, and only then figured out it wouldn’t fit in the laminator. No time to do anything else so off we went with my apologies for being so disorganized and bearing a crumpled piece of paper with approximately 14 cups of damp glue holding everything together.
Except we were one of a very few who even bothered to complete the project so her flag was featured very prominently on the classroom bulletin board. She was pleased as punch…especially since her picture was on there for everyone to see.
However. It did raise one stupid/negative question from one of the staff members at her daycare since they took this as an opportunity to ask me questions about her adoption which annoyed me because #1 it’s happening during the most chaotic time of the morning when everyone is dropping their kids off and I’m running late as always and #2 she was asking somewhat personal questions about Ava’s birthparents and abandonment (using somewhat unpolitically correct terminology) in front of Ava’s whole class, kids and parents alike. I was pretty proud of myself for answering calmly instead of snarkily and telling her that I would be happy to discuss the relevant parts of Ava’s adoption if she would like to step outside of the classroom to do so. It was about this time that she realized she’d overstepped a bit and backed off straightaway.
Please forgive the photo quality (iPhone) and the amateurish first attempt at sharing a bit of Chinese culture. All in all, I was pretty proud of us since we’re still really new at this helping kid with homework thing. I’m sure we’ll get better with time. Or that Ava can do her own homework – I like that solution much better anyway.
Let me go on record saying that I knew, I knew, visiting Bus.ch Gardens newest attraction would be a mistake. Let’s see…Saturday night on the opening weekend for an as yet untested seasonal event. And yes, it was pretty much exactly like I envisioned it would be.
For some reason, my family descended en masse on Williams.burg for Thanksgiving weekend this year. They opted for shopping on Black Friday, which I absolutely will not do – no way, no how, not ever – so the plan was for all of us to meet up at Christmas Town on Saturday afternoon. I also want to go on record saying that was absolutely NOT my idea.
We got to the park early and headed in just in time to catch the live Sesame Street show. Not all of us went – some of the older kids (and adults) opted out so we were able to grab pretty decent seats close to the stage. The premise of the show was that Abby Cadaby, being a young fairy, had to be taught what Christmas was all about. There were lots of Christmas carols, much singing and dancing, and a pretty good message on the meaning of Christmas. It was entertaining enough for the adults but Ava was absolutely entranced. She insisted on sitting on my sister most of the show but I finally coaxed her onto my lap once the dancing (hers) was becoming perilously close to being out of control (from excitement – not misbehavior). She not only danced, she sang along, applauded when appropriate, whoo-hoo’d and responded when audience interaction was called for, and screamed “Merry Christmas” and “Bye-bye” to Big Bird once the show was over. All in all, it was a great way to start the evening.
Except that was the high point of the whole night. It pretty much went downhill from there. Well, except J and I did get to actually ride a roller coaster together for the first time since 2007. Too bad that experience was somewhat ruined by the horrific thoughts that I kept having about both of us dying in a freak roller coaster accident and leaving Ava without parents once again.
The crowds were massive, the lines for everything were long, and the flow of traffic was horrible. Only part of the park was open meaning there were many, many people (more than they projected/expected) packed into a smaller space and less than half of the rides were running so you had fewer attractions open for all those folks. Several of the much hyped features of the event, such as the live penguin exhibit, were laughable (seriously – it was a 2+ hour wait to see 2 penguins in an acrylic box) and we couldn’t get in to see any of the other shows at all. The waits were just too long to be able to do it with little kids. Heck, there were even hour long waits to buy food from any of the open restaurants so J waited 30 minutes to buy a $7 sausage from a cart because Ava had already munched through all the snacks we’d bought and was absolutely starving. And the worst part? The whole Sesame Street part of the amusement park was closed leaving virtually no kid rides open. That was disappointing and I’m still not sure what they were thinking to not open that relatively small but important part of the park.
Santa? Good thing she hates him anyway because that was a 3-4 hour wait. I hear he was pretty amazing. We didn’t wait to find out.
On top of everything else, it was freezing. Ava was pretty much toasty warm since, in Chinese bundling fashion, I had about 13 layers of clothes and a snowsuit on her – well, warm except her frozen little fingers because I forgot to grab her mittens from the car. Mad parenting skillz, I know. But since it was my fault and I wasn’t about to let her lose fingers to frostbite, I made her wear my gloves.
I should also mention that we had Ava in her stroller but had the Ergo with us, just in case. I get a little freaky about having her in a stroller in really busy places because people don’t pay attention and either run into it OR they have backpacks/bags/purses that they swing around without looking. Ava can also get a little panicky in crowds jostling her about so I like to be able to carry her if necessary and a carrier just makes it a little more secure and much more comfortable. Ergo, the Ergo. It’s easy to roll up and carry in the stroller, simple to adjust to a variety of sizes or ways to wear it, and it’s the most comfortable one for J to wear if needed. Because it was so crowded and getting so cold as the evening passed we ended up chucking everything except her into the stroller and J tossed her into the Ergo on his back.
Back to the gloves…
After a bit of convincing (which involved lots of me giving her the stink-eye every time she tried to remove them) she finally decided it might be okay to wear Mama’s gloves. She got into it pretty quickly – flapping her fingers about like Edward Scissorhands and gently whacking J about the head and ears with the mostly empty fingers of the too-big gloves while waggling them flirtatiously at every single person who passed by. This provided endless amusement to me, to my sister, not so much to J, and to everyone else around. I, of course, have no pictures or video of this because we were all way too busy laughing like hyenas at her while J merely tolerated both our idiocy and her abuse of him. It was made even funnier by her shouting “Giddy-Up, Horsey” to him every time he slowed down.
What can I say? We were hard up for entertainment by then.
The night ended soon thereafter. I was ever so grateful to get into a car with heat and away from the maddening crowds. While it was good to spend the time with my family I’m not sure any of us had a great time – mainly because we’re all fairly antisocial and there were simply way too many people crowded into the park for us (or me, at least) to really enjoy it.
We’ll go again next year – but not on a Saturday, nor on opening weekend. I’m hoping it was successful enough this year that they’re comfortable expanding it a bit and that they learned from the issues they encountered this time and will make it a little better next year.
And family, please come on a non-holiday weekend next time. I promise it’s way more fun with fewer people around. And you can actually find a parking space at the outlet malls.