Born in the wrong decade

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Cindy

Catie has a lot of nerdy “gamer girl” tendencies. And honestly, I’m ok with that. For a while, I was concerned because it seemed like she didn’t have any other little girl friends at school. She says that the other girls “only want to play dumb princesses.” And while Catie will watch a Disney princess movie if it happens to be on TV, she has no other interest in princesses or fairies or Barbie dolls or anything like that.

Case in point: in the movie about Rapunzel, “Tangled”? Her favorite character is Maximus the horse. (I’m personally partial to Pascal the chameleon, but that’s just me.)

More for her Geek Street Cred: the past year, she’s seen all six Star Wars movies. It started off with the original trilogy, which I owned on DVD, because hi, I’m a nerd and that’s my childhood right there. Then she wanted to see the other three movies, and I kind of hemmed and hawed, because, frankly, those movies just aren’t very good. And Episode III (when Anakin becomes Darth Vader) is pretty violent and dark. But she begged and pleaded, and I found out you can buy episodes 1-3 on DVD for less than $30 on Amazon (which should be a good indicator of just how beloved those movies are by the general public, which is to say NOT AT ALL), and I caved. She loved all of them.

*ahem* Sorry. Needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, Catie now draws the characters whenever they have “free art” time at school. It’s pretty amazing.

But to continue on that whole “not wanting to play dumb princesses” thing – Catie doesn’t even want to pretend to be Princess Leia, who is actually kind of a bad-ass. (She shoots stormtroopers! She strangled Jabba the Hutt with a chain!) If she’s playing Star Wars, she wants to be… Chewbacca. Yeah, I don’t know.

And hey, I consider myself a nerdy type, and I think it’s awesome that she does her own thing. But I really did wring my hands and fret that she was going to be lonely and friend-less through school. Then, one of the other moms pointed out, “she’s going to grow up with a hundred big brothers, she’s going to be fine.” And it’s true, she plays really well with the other little boys. As long as they’re kind of nerdy little boys who don’t expect her to play sports.

(Chris’s take on this: “She is going to grow up to break a lot of geeks’ hearts.” Which is sweet, and he might just be right on that one, who knows.)

Anyway, for the past year or so, Catie’s other major passion has been the Skylanders video game. She got it last Christmas and she’s been in love with it ever since then. She has a ton of the action figures, she has dog tag necklaces with the different characters printed on them, she takes her Skylanders backpack to school every day, and she also sketches pictures of them (which are comparable to the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader picture above – she really makes them detailed and it’s pretty amazing work for a 6 year-old).

And really… it’s fine. At first I was a little concerned that maybe the game was too violent for her, but it’s really not, and there’s a decent amount of strategy that has to be applied in order to play the game successfully. I wouldn’t necessarily call it educational, but it’s not damaging either. I mean, it’s not like she’s playing Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto, you know?

Lately she’s been watching movies about the various Skylanders characters on YouTube, and sometimes she comes across mash-up videos like this:

So she’s now asking me to put some of these songs — like “Numb” by Linkin Park and “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence — on her iPad. And… I mean. I guess it’s fine? There’s nothing obscene about the songs, certainly. But DANG they’re a little dark for a 6 year-old, no?

I kind of can’t decide if it’s cute or disturbing when I hear my first grader singing lines like, “wake me up inside, call my name, and save me from the dark.” It’s just… odd.

(Also, too bad Catie wasn’t around in the 90s, since she’s apparently a big fan of that music era.)

I hope this doesn’t come off like me worrying (or worse, complaining) about her. I celebrate all of her little quirks and odd passions, because they are what makes her my Catie. Sort of like the fact that since she was three years old, she’s been saying she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up. It’s weird (why dinosaurs? Where did she even pick up on that?), but it’s also fantastic.

And I do fully realize that this is a fluke. Lucy, at two, is already gravitating toward pink EVERYTHING and talks about princesses already. I predict she’s going to be my girly-girl. Which is also totally fine! It’s just funny to me how each kid develops their own “thing” over time, and we really have no major influence on how they turn out. Just luck of the draw. But either way — tomboy-ish sci-fi loving video gamer chick or puffy pink tutu-wearing frilly girl — they’re still the most amazing little people I’ve ever met in my life.

my life without kids

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Cindy

Catie goes to a year-round school, so she just finished her first term of first grade, and is now on a three-week break. (That’s how it works, more or less – 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off.) Since it’s her track-out period (that’s what they call it, I don’t know why), Dave flew out for a visit. It’s easier on everyone if he comes to visit when she isn’t in school, since it doesn’t throw her routine off as much.

So, last Thursday morning, I dropped the kids off at daycare and kissed them goodbye, and I haven’t seen them since then. Dave stopped by to pick up my extra car seats (I keep a set in my garage so he doesn’t have to deal with adding them to his rental car every time), and all of the clothes and toys and other gear that they’d need for a few days with their dad. (Which, let me tell you, is a metric crap-ton of stuff.)

Dave flies out tomorrow, so I get the kids back tonight. He has a morning flight, so it’s easier to have the kids here, rather than wake them up at 4 a.m. or whatever.

So, basically, the last six days or so have been a little glimpse of what my life would be like if I didn’t have kids. It includes things like:

* Sleeping late on the weekends.
* Sleeping without a certain little girl (cough*Lucy*cough) climbing into bed between me and Chris in the middle of the night.
* No wiping butts and/or changing diapers and/or cleaning pee out of the carpet (again: cough*Lucy*cough).
* No breaking up fights.
* No cutting up someone else’s food.
* No negotiating at mealtimes.
* In fact, mealtimes can be whenever and whatever I want. Last night, we went out for dinner at 9:30 p.m. It was fantastic.
* Getting to watch whatever I want on TV, and it doesn’t have to be either animated OR child-appropriate.
* Shopping alone.
* Being able to leave the house without the need for a sherpa or a pack mule to haul all of the kids’ stuff along with me.
* No packing lunches or rushing to get everyone dressed and out the door in the morning.
* Working out whenever I feel like it.
* Sex in the morning.
* Sex in the afternoon.
* Sex pretty much whenever and wherever because there aren’t kids in the house so WOOHOO! NAKED TIME! (Side note: sorry, neighbors.)
* I know I said it before, but seriously: sleeeeeeeeeeep.

And it’s funny, because that all sounds pretty nice, right? And I won’t lie, I have really enjoyed having a break for the last few days.

But the thing about not having the kids around, is that it also means:

* No spontaneous hugs and kisses and “I love you, Mommy”s.
* No little voices singing along with the radio from the backseat.
* No big girl who cracks me up with her stories every day.
* No tiny girl who climbs up next to me and says, “Mama snuggle.”
* No watching my girls hang out with Chris (which seriously does make me melt; when Lucy pats her hands on his cheeks and says, “you MY Tiss,” it just gets me every time).
* No hanging out at my parents’ house and seeing how my girls adore their Mimi and Pop-Pop, and how they have them both wrapped around their tiny fingers.
* No listening to my two girls play and giggle together.

So, although the break has been great, and lord knows I needed the downtime, I pretty much can’t wait to pick them up from daycare this evening and cover them with hugs and kisses.

I guess the point is: being a single mom is really hard, no doubt about it, but I can’t imagine my life any other way. Because yes, my kids can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but man, I miss those little boogers like crazy when they’re not here.

anxious days

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Cindy

I have days where my anxiety will flare up for no apparent reason. I’ll be cruising along, job is going well, the kids are great, I’m eating well, working out, things are good with Chris, and then… boom. Suddenly my brain is spinning and I feel like I can’t catch my breath.

When this happens, and I tell Chris that my anxiety level has gone up to 11, he’ll very patiently say, “Ok, babe. And what does your phone have to say about that?”

That’s his gentle way of telling me to check my iPeriod app (because, yes, of course there’s an app for that). Nine times out of ten, my anxiety is related to my hormones (seems to happen both when I ovulate and when I have PMS, so I get hit twice a month – fun!). Knowing the source makes it a little easier to take. I can’t fix it, but at least I can remind myself that it’s temporary and that I’ll feel better in a couple of days.

Right now, though, I do have a justification in feeling anxious. I don’t feel like I have the freedom to tell this whole story, but there are about to be some major changes happening with Chris and the amount of time he has his kids. And it’s a good thing – he loves his kids and I know he’s missed them a lot over the past few months. But it also means a major shift in our little routine that we’ve fallen into, and it means we’ll be seeing each other less (or at least having a lot fewer sleepovers).

It’s ok. It will be ok. It’s just that I don’t know exactly what changes are going to occur. And although I’ll know more soon, I don’t deal well with uncertainty. I want to know what to expect in advance, and this isn’t something that I can predict in any way. And really, whatever happens, I know we’ll work through it and make it manageable. It’s just scary for me to not know.

To use sort of a clunky metaphor: the horizon is blurry and I don’t like it. But there’s nothing I can do about it except wait for it to get closer so I can see it more clearly.

———————————————————————————-

Last night I realized that Catie may have inherited some anxiety from me. Although I wasn’t very anxious as a kid, so who knows. But she was in this worry spiral and I couldn’t pull her out of it.

It started with the carbon monoxide detector. Its battery ran low and it beeped, so I put new batteries in it. Catie asked what the carbon monoxide detector does. I explained that there’s a kind of gas that can get in the air sometimes that’s very bad for people to breathe, and you can’t smell it, so if it’s in the air, the CO detector will beep so we know to get out of the house.

Catie: Can the gas kill you?
Me: (thinking: well technically, yeah…) Most likely it’d just make you really sick.
Catie: And you’d have to go to the hospital?
Me: Right. But that’s why we have the detector, so we know to get out of the house before it makes us sick.
Catie: But where do we go?
Me: Just to the driveway. And then I’ll call the fire department and they’ll fix it and make us safe.
Catie: What about Beaumont? Can the gas make cats sick too?
Me: We’d take him with us when we leave the house.
Catie: You mean you’d put him in his cat carrier?
Me: I’d probably just carry him.
Catie: But what if he scratched you, and you dropped him, and he ran away because he was scared, and then he got hit by a car, AND THEN HE DIED?

Oh. My. God.

When I was repeating this conversation to Chris later, he started to laugh, and said, “Yeah, that whole ‘coming up with the most extreme worst case scenario’ thing doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”

Ok, fine. So maybe I do the exact same thing to him on a semi-regular basis.

Later, when I was putting her in bed and I’d finally gotten her off the damn carbon monoxide kick, she went in a different direction.

Catie: When is Tracy’s wedding?
Me: In November.
Catie: How many days is that?
Me: Ummm… about 40 days, I guess.
Catie: Is that a long time?
Me: I don’t know, Catie. You know how long a day is. Think of 40 of those. Is that a long time to you?
Catie: But… but… I have to get a flu shot before then and I don’t want to get a shot! (starts to cry)

Seriously, kid?

I tried to talk her down for a while, and finally I just said, “Baby, you are determined to find something to worry about tonight, and it’s going to give you bad dreams. So let’s just stop, and think about nice things so you can have good dreams when you go to sleep, ok? Let’s think about unicorns and rainbows and kittens and cute little baby bunnies that poop cupcakes.”

Catie stopped and looked at me with big eyes and said, “bunnies that… poop?… cupcakes?!!” The fit of giggles that ensued pretty much killed the Worry Spiral. And ok, maybe it wasn’t my best joke, but if you say the word “poop” in front of a 6 year-old, it’s pretty much guaranteed to get a laugh. So, mission accomplished there.

I should tell Chris to try that on me sometime, except I don’t find poop jokes nearly as hilarious, so I’m not sure that it would work. Ah well.

I’m a better mom when I’m not sweating

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Cindy

One of my favorite things about summer is when it ends. I am not really an outdoors girl and I don’t do well with extremely hot weather. If it’s over 85, I’m probably going to be cranky. But now is the time of year when it starts cooling off in North Carolina, and it’s my favorite.

Funny thing is, when the weather is nicer, I’m a lot better about having spontaneous outings with the kids. When it’s hot, I’m more like, “Ugh, let’s just go home where it’s air-conditioned and I don’t have to sweat.” When it’s mild out, I’m all, “Hey, I know I just picked you up from daycare and it’s technically dinnertime, but LET’S GO TO THE PLAYGROUND!!”

(In a couple of months, I’ll go back to being the Lazy Mom again. “It’s too cold, we’re only going somewhere if it’s heated.” Yes, I am a big whiny crybaby, I know.)

Yesterday, after our normal weekend trip to IHOP, I suggested that we head up to the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. The kids hadn’t been there in a long time — I wasn’t sure if Lucy would even remember it, it had been so long — and it seemed like the perfect day for it.

I forgot the stroller (it’s been living at my parents’ house for ages, since my dad takes Lucy for walks in it fairly often, whereas I almost never use it because hey little girl: YOU HAVE LEGS), but it worked out fine. The museum is big and spread out, but Lucy is a kid that needs to burn a lot of energy anyway. And when she needed a break, or when she just wanted to get up high to see the dinosaur exhibit, she managed to find a pretty sweet ride.

By the end of the day, I was tempted to ask Chris to piggyback me around, but I was afraid that with his whole Southern Gentleman thing, he’d probably try it and end up injuring himself. I do weigh just a tad more than Lucy, after all.

(About the Southern Gentleman thing: Chris is the type of guy who still insists on opening car doors for me, and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even argue or tease him about it anymore, I just stand there and wait for him to do it.)

In case you wouldn’t have guessed it: yeah, the dinosaurs are pretty much Catie’s favorite thing about the museum. (Same as it was last year.)

The barnyard exhibit was probably Lucy’s favorite because they have real animals there (goats, pigs, a cow, etc). She was a little scared to get too close to them, but she pointed at each and told us what each animal says, and it was pretty cute.

Side note: Lucy was a little bit freaked by the butterfly house. Apparently butterflies are very pretty from a distance, not so much when they swoop down right in your face.

After we left at the museum, we stopped to get pizza for dinner, and then frozen yogurt for dessert.

At the fro-yo place, Lucy said, “Mama, I wear you sunglasses!” Oh, child.

My plan to wear them out actually worked pretty well. Lucy fell asleep on the couch immediately after her bath, and Catie didn’t last much longer. Chris and I were able to lay on the couch and watched Breaking Bad together without any interruptions.

It was a really good day.

Hopefully the nice weather will hold out for a while so we can have more of them.

a different new normal

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Cindy

Random side note: I started to just call this post “the new normal,” then realized I already had a post with that title, written a few months after my separation, and about a month after moving into the rental house I currently live in. Even though that was less than two years ago, it’s a bit surreal to go back and read blog posts from that point in my life.

It’s strange how quickly life can shift and you can fall into a new routine. Over the past few months, Chris has become such a part of my daily life, and the transition has felt completely natural.

On the evenings he comes over, he walks in the door and the girls run to give him hugs. Lucy is particularly attached to him. She can’t say his name quite right – she calls him Tiss instead of Chris – but she wants him to carry her everywhere, she’ll snuggle up to him with her face in his neck, and she’ll put her hands on his face and say, “You MY Tiss.” (She does the same with me – “you MY mama,” and my dad gets a, “you MY Pop-Pop,” etc. It’s basically her way of saying “I love you” in Lucy-speak.)

He keeps Lucy distracted for me while I help Catie with her homework, and he does the dishes and cleans up while I give the girls their bath. Lucy always wants me to snuggle with her at bedtime, so Catie will ask Chris to come snuggle with her, and I’ll hear them across the room in her bed, whispering about video games or dinosaurs or whatever as I get Lucy settled to sleep.

When he sleeps over, he helps me get the kids ready in the morning by getting Lucy dressed, brushing out her hair, and getting her shoes on.

A lot of times on the weekends (like this past Sunday), we take the girls to IHOP for breakfast.

We even have our little IHOP routine down: Catie gets her create-a-face pancake (no bananas, extra strawberries), Chris gets a chicken fajita omelet, and I order too much for myself and share with Lucy because she can’t eat a whole kid’s entree by herself. I take Lucy to use the potty before the food comes, because it keeps her distracted so she doesn’t get grumpy in the restaurant. It’s like a drill that we have down pat.

(No reason for this picture, I just think it’s funny – Catie was hiding from my iPhone camera, so Lucy decided she would hide from my camera too.)

And it’s totally easy and everything just sort of falls into place. People see us and just assume that we’re a normal couple with 2 kids. Unless they check our left ring fingers, I suppose.

Having Chris around so much makes my life easier in so many ways, and for that, I am so incredibly grateful.

It’s also incredibly scary, because it makes me feel so much more invested in our relationship. Before, my only concern was about my own heart getting broken if things didn’t work out with us. But now, I also have to worry about Catie and Lucy too. They really have gotten attached to Chris, and I love that they love him. But they’ve already lost one father figure (ok, Dave is still around, but he’s 3000 miles away, so… yeah), and while Chris is not their dad or even a step-dad (and won’t be, since I’m still firmly in the I-will-never-get-remarried** camp), I love that he’s a positive male influence in their lives, and I don’t want them to lose that.

But then, maybe it’s a good thing that it scares me. Maybe it’s a good motivator to do the work to make sure our relationship stays healthy and strong, to make sure we keep communicating well, and that we don’t take each other for granted.

Because honestly? I really love where we are right now, and I don’t want it to change.

Even when Lucy clocks me in the eye right as I take a picture.

—————————————————————————-

** About the not-getting-remarried-ever thing: a lot of people have mentioned this to me, because it seems like a lot of y’all want me to get remarried. And I kind of get that. But there are a couple of factors here: one, that my own personal experience with marriage is that it pretty much sucks. And two, I have to consider how something like that would affect my kids. My rule for now is that marriage is not for me, but I reserve the right to change my mind when I’m 53 years old. Which is how old I’ll be when Lucy turns 18. So for all of y’all who want to see me get married again: ask me about it in 2029. Until then, no thanks.

26 months and counting

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Cindy

Ok, that is quite enough time for those photos to hang out at the top of my blog. Moving on!

So. Two year-olds. Can we talk about how hilarious they are? Because my god.

My dad commented recently that Lucy seemed a lot grumpier and he didn’t know why. I said, “Well. She’s two.” I mean, that pretty much sums it up right there. She is agonizingly TWO about everything. The tantrums are epic, and the drama is high. But on the flip side, her good moods are so much more fun now that she has this huge (and I do mean HUGE) personality.

There are so many times I think, “Oh man, that’s adorable, I should write it down because she’s going to outgrow this soon and I know I’ll forget it.”

Case in point: the way she roars and says, “I monstah!” Yes, baby, you’re a monster.

When I tell Lucy that it’s time to do something she doesn’t want to do – like, say, take a bath or a nap – she’ll shake her head and say, “No nap! I happy!” Basically, “I happy” is her way of saying “I’m all good.” Although it has yet to work on me (sorry, kiddo, you still gotta take a nap), I love the way she says it.

And as terrible as this is, I have a hard time not laughing when she realizes it isn’t working and she starts to cry. “No naaaaaaap! I haaaaaaaappy!” Yes, you seem delighted. Now goodnight.

She also invented “the fall-down game,” in which someone counts to three and then she faceplants on purpose. Fortunately she only attempts this on soft surfaces like my bed. It could end badly on the hardwoods.

(I love the way her hair sort of fans out when she falls.)

Her imagination has exploded in the last couple of weeks and she now tells me the backstory on all of her toys and what they’re doing. She tells me how her panda bear is sleepy and needs to go night-night, then she tucks him in with a pillow and a blanket.

Unfortunately, sometimes her imaginary play acts out when I’m not paying attention. She’s been working on potty training at daycare (more on that subject some other time), so a lot of her playtime involves talk about poop and pee and potties and diapers. Last week, she decided that her Brobee (from Yo Gabba Gabba) doll needed to use the potty while I was unloading groceries. From what I can tell, she sat Brobee on the potty and then let go… yeah. She came running down the hall to the kitchen, screaming, “Oh no! Bwobee wet! Bwobee wet!” There was a trail of water from Brobee that led straight back to the toilet. Awesome. Brobee needed to take a “special bath” in the washing machine with some Oxy Clean after that. Yuck.

It’s a lot funnier when she holds up her Barbie doll and says, “Bahbie pooped! I change her diapuh!” And then she demands a folded kleenex for a makeshift Barbie diaper. That’s pretty awesome. Although poor Barbie has a history of having bathroom-related incidents at our house.

Barbie’s having a rough time, man.

She still remains one of the easiest children to feed I’ve ever encountered. Catie is such an insanely picky eater and always has been. (Catie refuses to eat sandwiches, y’all. Sandwiches. WTF?) Lucy, on the other hand, will eat most anything that you put in front of her. The other day when we got up, I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. She went to the pantry and pulled out a can of green peas.

Me: “You want peas for breakfast?”
Her: “YAH!”

Whatever, man, she ate them. No complaints here.

Chris and I took the kids to see “Despicable Me 2” a few weeks ago, and we’ve had a running joke since then that Lucy talks a lot like a minion. There’s a decipherable word here and there, but mostly a lot of gibberish. It seems like most toddlers have their own unique dialect, and it just takes a while to tune your ear to understand them. But either way, Lucy is pretty good at getting her point across, even when we don’t pick up on every word she’s saying.

She still doesn’t sleep through the night, but we’ve gotten things down to a manageable form of torture: I get Lucy settled to sleep in her own bed, and later, when I go to bed, I take an insulated lunch bag with an ice pack and a sippy cup of milk in it. Sometime around 4 a.m. or so, Lucy comes into my room and climbs into bed with me. (I can’t pick her up right now because I’m not supposed to lift anything heavier than 5 pounds for the first month post-surgery, so I put a step-stool next to my bed, and she can boost herself up with that). She snuggles up against me and I give her the cup of milk from the lunch bag, she drinks it down, and we both go back to sleep until my alarm goes off. It’s certainly not ideal, I would love it if she would just stay in her own bed all night, but for now, it works ok.

Side note: for the past few weeks, Chris has been spending more nights at my house than not, so it’s now become a total non-event for the kids to wake up with him here. When Lucy comes in during the night, she snuggles up in between us like it’s nothing. I have to say, waking up and finding her with her little arm across his neck and both of them quietly sleeping away? Kind of kills me with how sweet it is.

So, even though she has her moments of being aggravating as all hell, she’s still pretty awesome. I think I might keep her around.

six and a half

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Cindy

I know that lately all of my posts have been about my relationship or my boobs, but can I stop for just a minute here and talk about Catie?

Because, my god. That kid.

She is this amazing combination of toddler and teenager. She can still throw a tantrum with the best of them — although to be fair, she didn’t have them for a long time, it’s only been since Lucy hit the “terrible twos” that Catie has started acting out again (obviously a case of sibling competition happening here). At the same time, she can throw her hands on her hips and heave a sigh at me, and I swear it feels like a 14 year-old just showed up in my house.

She picks up on everything. I can’t spell words around her anymore because she’ll immediately figure out what I’m trying to say that I don’t want her to hear.

She’s tall and skinny and she’s all long limbs that she hasn’t quite mastered yet. She’s clumsy, like a baby horse trying to find its legs.

She hides from my camera now, and on the rare occasions when she does smile for a picture, she does it awkwardly.

There are two missing teeth in that smile. Every day, she checks the mirror to see if her “grown-up teeth” have come in yet.

She loves Skylanders and Angry Birds and Plants Vs Zombies and a million other video games, and I have no doubt that she’s going to grow up to be a video gamer chick. Her favorite baby-sitter plays Legend of Zelda with her after Lucy goes to bed.

She’s a tomboy. She doesn’t like to wear dresses, and on the rare occasions when she does, she wants to wear leggings or shorts under them (which is FINE with me.)

She still says she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up.

One of her favorite songs is “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

She loves “Eye of the Tiger,” and songs by Michael Jackson and Duran Duran. She had me put the entire Xanadu soundtrack on her iPad so she can listen to it over & over, just like I did when I was a kid. (Only, you know, mine was on a cassette tape.)

She also loves most songs on pop radio – she’s a big Macklemore fan. I love singing along with her in the car while we drive.

She still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, although I know I only have a couple of years left for that. (I learned about Santa when I was 7.) One day, because of scheduling issues, she had to come with me to my chiropractor’s appointment, and he – being kind of an oddball dude – showed her a couple of magic tricks. She was amazed. It struck me that to her, there was no slight of hand or trick of the eye, that magic was all real to her. Which is pretty awesome.

But oh, she can be difficult. She’ll whine that I don’t like her because I only take care of Lucy and I don’t do anything for her, she’ll dig her heels in and refuse to try something new just because I suggested it, she’ll throw a fit because Lucy dared to pick up a toy that she hasn’t touched or played with in at least a year.

But then she’ll go the other direction and blow my mind. She’ll get out her old Halloween costumes so she and Lucy can play dinosaurs together…

…Or she, the one I’ve always called my Cautious Girl, will decide to go to some giant indoor trampoline place, which she would’ve been too scared to attempt even just a year ago, and she’ll launch herself off of a trampoline into a giant pit of foam blocks…

…Or she’ll sit down with Lucy to try to teach her how to write letters and color within the lines.

She has so much empathy for people around her. A little boy at daycare stomped on a caterpillar and killed it when they were playing outside – no reason why, he was just being a jerk, I guess – and Catie sobbed. She said she scooped it up with a leaf and put it under a bush in the shade to “bury it.” And then she cried to me, “And I told him that I hope he has a happy life in heaven.” I told her that heaven needs butterflies too, so it was ok, but she was heartbroken for that caterpillar.

Before kindergarten ended, she came home from school one day and told me, “Everyone in my class says that [little girl’s name] is fat, but I think she’s the beautifulest.” Since I was one of those fat little girls myself, my heart just melted.

Yesterday, I had to get my hair cut, and I had my hairstylist also do Catie’s hair, since it was looking really long and shaggy. She gave her this really great bob cut, and suddenly she looks so much more grown up to me.

Seriously, I do not know how I created a little girl that is this pretty. (I tend to not say too many flattering things about my ex-husband, but I think he gets the credit for most of her.)

She starts first grade in less than three weeks. I know she’s nervous about it, but she’s ready.

I hope she knows how proud I am of her. I tell her all the time, I just hope she hears me.

Because she is amazing.

PooBou.com

Mom. Stepmom. Nerd. Feminist. Pretty good wife. Outstanding ex-wife. I try to keep it light and funny. I'm not always successful.

Category Archives: Single Parenting

Born in the wrong decade

my life without kids

anxious days

I’m a better mom when I’m not sweating

a different new normal

26 months and counting

six and a half

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: