Happy Mother's Day

Nana and the kids, a photo by Teckelcar on Flickr.

I know I have posted this picture before, but it is one of my favorites. It's fitting for today since the picture has both my mother and the people that made me a mother.

I hope all the moms out there had a nice a day as I did, no deadlines or rushing off to be somewhere else. I got up when I wanted, went out for lunch when we were ready, and saw a movie when we arrived at the movie theater. It helps that we had a late lunch at our favorite Mexican restaurant which rarely has a line and saw Iron Man 3 which has eleventy billion show times, so again no line.

Happy Mother's Day

teal toes, a photo by Teckelcar on Flickr.

I hope all you hard working mamas out there got to put up your feet, at least for a little bit. We elected to celebrate Thursday with dinner ans a movie. We all went to our favorite restaurant, Weezie's Kitchen, and then on to the theatrical re-release of the "Yellow Submarine."

I've long maintained that Mother's Day is the worst night to go out, all the good places get booked out early and the remainder are almost zoos. Thursday was ever so much more civilized.

As for the teal toes, well they are in honor of my sister-in-law. Teal is the color of ovarian cancer and she has been fighting a good fight. We all love her and her family and simply put she is a terrific mom and a wonderful person.

Full Speed Ahead

Today was one of those crazy "you have four kids that do sports and music" kind of days.

Between waiting for piano to end, dropping off kids for practice, rounding up boy from marching band (took two tries and I'm eternally thankful for the fact he goes to the high school 8 minutes away as opposed to one 45 minutes away) I had to feed said children, sternly remind them to do homework while I was out (I disabled the TV to prevent "accidental" viewings) and go to a Marching Band Boosters meeting.

My life is full of the crazy.

The amazing thing was that we all got to where we needed to be when we needed to be there. Well except for picking up Jake the second time, but then again he was off schedule and I had to shoe horn him in after sports drop off.

Thus is the life of a marching band, soccer, and baseball mom. Now with drums, piano, trumpet, and starting this weekend-guitar.

I'm So Looking Forward to Tuesday

I think I'll spend the whole day in bed.

Today I had to:

• Take Nate north to the orthodontist and then walk him over to his father's office building.
• Wash Dell and do his nails (he's going to some dog shows this weekend).
• Pick up the rest of the kids and drive south to Jake's school for his open house.
• Where we discovered his schedule was all out of whack and had to get it reconfigured.
• Then back home to pick up Dell, school supplies and soccer gear.
• Drive east to hand Dell off to his co-owner as she passed by on the highway en route to the aforementioned show.
• Then head back west to drop Jake off at soccer practice.
• Go to Max and Rebecca's school to drop off school supplies and hopefully meet their respective teachers (sadly both of their teachers had left before we got there).
• Drive north again to Nate's school and drop off his supplies and meet his teachers (we did better there and got to meet one).
• Head back on down to Jake's soccer practice (We were actually early!) and pick him up.
• Grab some dinner and head back home.
• And as a special bonus I went out one more time to get some caulk to reseal the shower.

And all of this started at 1:30 pm. I'm so glad I could hand Nate off to Larry because, get this, Nate had an official scrimmage today while I was driving all over creation.

I can't wait for school to start.

Too Much To Do

Most school days are pretty quiet after the initial chaos of getting everyone out to the bus ends. I walk the dogs, mess about on the computer and, if needed, do a bit of food shopping. We have had a fairly good winter health wise so I haven't had too many days with someone staying home.

Then there are days like yesterday.

In the morning Max had a CF clinic check-up, he has them roughly every three months. It was his big annual appointment- blood draw, x-ray, the whole schmear. As an added bonus Jake also an orthodontist appointment in the afternoon. Both of these were in downtown Richmond.

Then to make it really fun we had a half-day at school (some sort of stupid staff development).

So I had to worry about either getting home in time to meet Rebecca at the bus or make sure Jake (who comes home a hour half earlier) was there to greet her. It got a bit hairy when Jake wasn't picking up the phone and I ended up calling Meryl. But he eventually did pick up when I was able to use my cell (I was at first calling from a hospital line and he did not recognize the caller ID) and all was well.

Then it was a sprint home with a hurried lunch and I then got to haul everyone back up to Richmond. Max had soccer practice at 5:30, so I tossed in cleats, shin guards, a pair of shorts, and a bottle of water. I'm glad I did that, because we were just able to make his practice.

Today was much nicer. All I had to do was go to the library and then I get to swap out some baseball uniforms. Just for fun I had lunch with the dynamic duo at school.

Blanket Statements

I really can't stand blanket statements and I find myself battling them all the time.

In health class the kids are all told that they should be drinking only 1% or 2% milk. They come home and breathlessly announce to me that they can't have whole milk anymore.

Well that's not true.

Jake has moved onto 2%, mostly because he is concentrating on his Hebrew studies and will not be doing any extra curricular sports until next summer. Nate and Max however need all the extra calories they can pack in.

Nate is a very active boy. He practically vibrates with energy. School days without recess are a very bad thing, he'll be literally bouncing off the walls. He doesn't eat very much and as a result he is extremely lean. The boy has minimal body fat. Whole milk is very much called for.

Max, courtesy of CF, has nutritional needs that run counter to most dietary advice. He needs to take in significantly more calories, 2,900 to 4,500 calories versus active teenage boys who require about 2800 calories. He also needs far more salt, especially during hot weather. I literally had a dietitian tell me that it would be great if Max could eat a half a stick of butter a day. So in a way MacDonalds is health food for Max.

I guess the good thing is that I'm teaching our children to think for themselves.

Odd Moments in Parenting

Today I found myself saying one of the oddest things. Maybe not as weird as the no sniffing armpits rule, but it's up there.

I told my six year old son to go do his Chinese homework.

Yes, that's right our public school is now teaching Chinese once a week.

I get the whole teach them a foreign language when they are young, but Mandarin Chinese?

Spanish would be far more useful around here and it would be a nice boost for the kids who come from Spanish speaking families. There is not a whole lot of Chinese spoken around here and it's hard to learn a language without some sort of reinforcement outside of the classroom.

Also, I know precious little Chinese. So Max and Rebecca will be getting no help from home. At least with Jake and his upcoming Bar Mitzvah we have Grandma helping him out with his Hebrew. If it was Latin I could really do a lot with them. I could even help a bit with French (admittedly I bailed on French when I learned about regular vs irregular verbs and that there 16 different conjugations). But Chinese... well they are on their own.

So tonight during Rebecca's soccer practice Max got to practice writing Chinese with me looking on and having absolutely no idea what he was doing.

Open Letter To My Children

I love all of you very much. I would do almost anything for you to keep you safe. But some days I don't like you very much.

It's very hard to love someone when they spend 25 minutes pitching a fit, instead of getting dressed and eating breakfast. Especially when the fit was first brought on when they were told to put on a long sleeve shirt and long pants (oh the horror) and extended when it was decided that the shirt *I was wearing* (purple with a teeny tiny geometric pattern) was not acceptable.

I was told that it was not fair that I was wearing that shirt and that any thing I did while wearing that shirt was no good.

Well, life is not fair.

I was, in the end, able to spoon the reluctantly fully dressed child onto the bus. I then sent an email out to give the teacher a heads up.

I'm not, however, changing my shirt.