little talks**

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Cindy

Oh, my poor little neglected blog. I have so many moments of things where I think, “I should blog about that,” but then I either forget it or I can’t come up with a way to capture it in an interesting storytelling format. Which sort of feels like the whole point of blogging, right?

Stuff like:
* Catie’s favorite candy right now is what she calls “Reese’s penis butter cups.” And every time she says it, I have to cover my face with both hands and leave the room so I can laugh where she can’t see me.

* Catie also told me that you have to take an airplane to get to South Carolina and that the people there speak another language. After much confusion, it appears that she thinks the words “Carolina” and “America” are interchangeable.

(And yeah, I guess they kind of do speak another language in certain parts of South Carolina. So she wasn’t totally wrong.)

* I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but Lucy cannot say that “Lu” part of her name, so she calls herself Cici. Which means that now we call her Cici most of the time. It’s kind of adorable and perfect for her.

* I got a notice in the mail about signing Catie up for a local beauty pageant. I laughed maniacally before tossing it in the trash. Do what you want to do, I guess, but I will never, ever be a pageant mom. And I cannot imagine my little nerdy tomboy child would ever go along with the fancy dress and big hair and all that. Unless you can count “playing games on the iPad” as a talent, because she would smoke the competition in that category.

* I’ve been dating quite a bit. It’s fun. It’s nice to have guys that make you feel pretty.

* My mom and I took the girls to see Yo Gabba Gabba Live a few weeks ago. And we (Catie, Lucy, and I) got down into the toddler mosh pit in front and we high-fived DJ Lance. This is what qualifies as a really awesome moment in my life. Don’t judge.

* Dave is in town for the next week or so, and occasionally he has to text me phonetic words to help him translate Lucy-speak to English.

Example:
Him: What does ‘Oo-oo’ mean?
Me: It means dog. That’s how she says ‘woof woof.’

I mean, duh. Obviously. How could anyone not know that?

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So, see, most of that stuff ends up condensed as a tweet or a Facebook status update, and then I don’t really come here to expand on things. Even though I want to. And I miss it. I’ve also been bad about answering friends’ emails for the same reason. Taking the time to sit down and string more than two sentences together feels like too much work.

And really, the reason it feels like so much work? Is because I am TIIIIIIRED. Because Lucy still isn’t sleeping. A lot of the sleep coach’s ideas were really good, but most of them are not things that I’ve been able to implement.

For example, she said that Lucy needs to be in bed no later than 7 to 7:30 p.m. Well, I don’t even get the kids from daycare until 6:00, and then I either have to cook dinner and feed them, or we go to my parents’ house for dinner, but either way, usually we’re only just getting into the bath by 7:30. If I get her to bed by 8:30, I feel like I’m doing really well.

Also, the reward chart? Lucy does not understand that at all yet. So that didn’t work.

And the baby gate in her doorway? Since this is a rental house, I had to use a pressure-mounted gate because I can’t screw one into the doorposts, and it took her less than 30 seconds to figure out how to go all “LUCY SMASH!” on it, knock it over, and then walk out of her room like nothing happened.

She looks cute during the daytime, I know. Trust me, this face is not cute at 3 a.m.

One of my own personal theories about Lucy’s sleep habits is that she simply doesn’t like being alone. When Dave is in town, she and Catie sleep together on a fold-out couch. And Lucy always sleeps through the night for him, without fail.

Dave said that he has seen Lucy wake up in the night. She sits up, looks around, sees him across the room and Catie right next to her, and then she lies down and goes back to sleep.

So, I’ve decided, the girls are going to start sharing a bedroom. Catie was dead-set against this idea when I first suggested it, but I’ve managed to bribe her into going along with it. (Promise that kid a new Skylander action figure and you can probably get her to do just about anything.)

Dave is going to help me re-arrange furniture this weekend to get their room set up. Is it weird to use my ex-husband for manual labor? Probably. Oh well. They’re his kids too, after all.

Wish me luck. Hopefully this will solve the constant wake-ups.

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** About the post title: this song by Of Monsters and Men?

I liked the song, until The Guy told me right around the time of our break-up that it reminded him of me. Now I hate it. Funny how that works.

…and now, she’s 6

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Cindy

Catie turned six years old yesterday. Which… ok, I know a lot of people get all sappy about numbers and milestones and whatnot, and I typically don’t fall into that category. I normally have more of an attitude that, yes, of course, time marches on. That’s how it’s supposed to go.

But I admit, six has thrown me for a loop a little bit. I mean, six is the age of a FIRST GRADER. How is that possible?

And in my mind, she still looks more or less like this:

I still think of her as this little soft-bodied, pudgy toddler. But there are no kissable fat rolls on her thighs anymore. No pudgy little wrists. Her soft little curls have turned into a thick, straight bob (which, for both its color and shape, is the envy of many adult women I know).

Sometimes I look at her and I do a double take. Who is this tall, skinny kid in front of me?

She is so smart, she blows me away. She picks up on everything. It’s starting to get to the point where I can’t even spell words that I don’t want her to hear because she knows so many of them.

This year, she asked for a birthday party at Monkey Joe’s (the bounce house place) again, just like she had last year. It was a much smaller party this year (which my wallet is very grateful for), and a lot of fun.

For one thing, last year, Lucy spent the entire party strapped into a Baby Bjorn. But this year, got to enjoy the bounce houses herself.

Although she has a pretty… unique?… way of going down the slides. Which she did about 10,000 times, and she laughed harder and harder every time.

The orange sticker on her back is her ID bracelet. She wouldn’t wear it on her wrist, so they stuck it to her back so she couldn’t pull it off. Kind of genius, really.

(Btw, major shout-out to my sister for crawling into the bounce houses with Lucy to keep her from getting trampled, while I was making small talk with the other parents.)

It was a really great party, and everyone had a fantastic time. Well, the kids did. The adults mostly felt like we’d been run over by a steam roller by the time it was over.

One random aside: a friend who obviously doesn’t know Catie very well gave her a Barbie doll as a present. Catie was very gracious and happy and thanked her friend, but I know for a fact that Catie has absolutely zero interest in Barbie dolls. (Believe me, I loved Barbies as a kid, so I have tried to get her interested in Barbie, to no avail.)

Last night, she asked my sister to open the Barbie’s box. I asked her if she was really sure she wanted to keep it, because we could take it to the store to exchange it for something else if she didn’t want it? She said, “No, my friend gave this to me, I want it.”

She took the Barbie doll’s shoes off, put on one of the other pairs of shoes, and looked at her for a minute.

Then she said, “Well, this is boring.”

Yep. That’s my girl.

Fortunately, Lucy LOVES the Barbie doll, and has already decided that Barbie should start working on potty training.

(Poor Barbie.)

Happy birthday to my sweet six year-old Catie-bug. You are the most wonderful, glorious little weirdo I have ever met, and I could not love you more for being exactly who you are.

karate kid, week 1

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Cindy

On Tuesday, I picked Catie up after kindergarten and we headed to the karate studio for her first lesson. She was nervous, as I expected, and said that she wasn’t going to do it, she was just going to sit and watch the class instead. I gave a noncommittal, “Uh-huh, we’ll see,” and kept driving.

There’s a very sweet lady at the front desk, and she was expecting us. She got Catie a uniform and showed her around. The dojo itself, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms, the area where the parents can sit and watch the class. There was something about her, she just had kind of a grandmotherly vibe, and she immediately put Catie at ease. She got into her uniform, and I snapped this picture of her.

(That’s the front desk lady standing next to her smoothing her hair. Like I said, just a really sweet lady who is obviously great with kids.)

We met the instructor, and when he said, “Ok, Catie, come on over here with the other kids,” she did it without prodding. Sometimes it pays to have a kid who likes to please authority figures.

The class starts off with a lot of basic exercises – running, stretching, jumping around, basically just burning off their energy – before they start teaching any actual karate techniques. And since Catie loves P.E. at school, that was right up her alley.

They separated the kids into small groups for the instruction, and it was just Catie and one other little boy working with a teacher. At the end of the lesson, they both got a stripe on their belts for doing the technique well.

She was so excited and proud of herself, and immediately started whining about wanting to go back. We went to my parents’ house to pick up Lucy, and she ran around in her uniform and showed my parents the new moves she learned.

So? First lesson was AWESOME. I was all proud of myself for how awesome I am at this parenting thing, and I was thinking how fantastic this was going to be for her.

You can all stop here to laugh at me now.

Thursday (last night) was her second class. She was all excited, couldn’t wait to get there and get her uniform on. We were a little bit early and she was all squirmy asking how much longer until class started because she just! couldn’t! wait! for karate to start.

Class started and the warm-up was the same as the previous class, and she seemed to be having fun. When they divided up the kids for the instruction, again it was just Catie and one other child, but instead of the main instructor (who she worked with on Tuesday), they put her with a teenage girl (who is a black belt and obviously incredibly gifted at what she does). But I could tell by watching Catie’s face that the lesson just wasn’t registering with her, and she was getting really frustrated.

At the end of the class, they do a run-through of the techniques they’ve learned to see if the kids are proficient in it. And Catie was… not. She wasn’t terrible, but she kept forgetting what to do with her left arm while her right arm was moving, and vice versa. She’s not a particularly coordinated kid (which was part of the motivation for getting her into martial arts in the first place), and you know, she’s new to all of this. It takes practice.

When it was all over, the little boy standing next to her got a stripe on his belt, and Catie didn’t get one. She wasn’t the only kid who didn’t get a stripe (I think that one little boy may have been the only kid in the class of eight who did get a stripe), but she saw him get his, and then she saw the instructor walk past her.

She ran over to me, buried her face in my chest, and burst into tears.

I took her into the dressing room to help her calm down, and also to change out of her uniform and back into her street clothes. She cried and cried. She said, “I just wanted to be better than all the other kids so you would be so proud of me, and I just did dreadful!”

(Don’t ask me where she picked up the word “dreadful.” I’m going to blame that on her British father. Or maybe she’s been watching Downton Abbey when I’m not looking.)

I told her that I was, in fact, SO SO proud of her, and that she wasn’t dreadful at all, she did really well, but she just needs to practice a little to learn these new things.

She said she hates karate and never wants to go again.

Sigh.

We got in the car, and even though it was pouring freezing rain with ridiculous wind gusts, I stopped and bought her an ice cream on the way home. I don’t typically believe in encouraging food as a comfort technique, but damn. Poor kid was having a rough night, and it really did seem to help.

When I was putting her to bed last night, I told her that I don’t want her to try to be better than all of the other kids, I just want her to do the best she can and have fun, and not to worry about how everyone else is doing. I said, “When we go to the bounce house, do you worry if the other kids can jump higher than you, or do you just go jump and have fun? And when you’re playing with dinosaurs at school, do you worry if the other kids know the names of more dinosaurs than you? Or do you just play with dinosaurs?”

I also reminded her that she was the only kid in that class who had been to only two karate classes in their whole life, all of the other kids had been going to karate for a long time, and it was because they practiced that they understood what to do better than she did, because it wasn’t all new to them like it was for her.

Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should have signed her up for one of those sports where all the kids get “participation trophies” just for showing up. She’s such a reward-focused kid, maybe that would work better for her? But I also believe that in the long run, rewards based on actual merit have more meaning, even to a 5 year-old.

I got her to agree to go to at least one more class. I’m going to try to practice some of the moves with her between now and then. Hopefully she’ll get her stripe next time and it’ll encourage her to keep trying. That was the whole point of doing this in the first place.

on trying new things

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Cindy

Despite the crud that won’t die, the weather this past weekend was gorgeous, and we maximized it by trying to spend as much time outside as possible. Sure, global warming sucks, but getting to wear shorts and flip-flops to the playground in January is pretty awesome.

We spent Sunday at the park with my cousin and her family, and my mom came along too. It was kind of awesome because it was the first time that I wasn’t hyper-vigilantly following both kids around the whole time. Catie had a blast playing with her cousins, so I didn’t need to entertain her at all, and Lucy has decided that she has no fear of climbing on play structures and going down slides by herself. So I sat on a bench, talked with my family, and watched the kids as they ran around and played their hearts out. It was fantastic.

Both of them were filthy and covered in sand by the time we left – Lucy even managed to get sand and bark in her diaper, which? Don’t even ask me how that’s possible. But they were happy and exhausted and everyone slept really well last night.

Lucy has no idea what I’m talking about with that whole diaper thing. She’s completely innocent. Just look at that face.

But! Before that! On Saturday, since the weather was nice, my parents and I decided to take the kids out on their new bikes that they got for Christmas.

I didn’t get a picture of Lucy on her “bike” (um, tricycle, but she calls it a bike, so whatever), but here it is on Christmas morning.

She doesn’t know how to pedal, but it has a handle that I can push/steer with, so it works.

As for Catie, some backstory first: Catie is cautious to an extreme. The first time you suggest she try something new (a type of food, an activity, whatever), her initial reaction is always to say no. So she was actually kind of upset that Santa brought her a big-kid bike (it’s a two-wheeler with training wheels on it), because she didn’t want one. When I had floated the idea of a bike to her, she said she was “too scared of bikes.”

Once the bike showed up on Christmas morning, she eventually decided that she was ok riding it back and forth across my parents’ kitchen, but she still insisted that she would never, ever ride it outside.

So, my parents put the bikes in their van and brought it to our neighborhood greenway. Catie took one look at the bike and balked. No way was she going to get on it. We tried to reason with her, and she started to have a tantrum about it.

Finally, I said, “Ok, you know what? If you don’t at least try, I’m taking away your iPad for the rest of the weekend.”

The ultimate threat to a nerdy child: that you’ll take away their gadgets.

So she got on the bike, and she immediately loved it. She rode her bike all the way down the greenway to where it ends (at a park with a lake), and after the girls played there for a while, she rode it all the way back.

I’m so proud of her. It used to take her a long time to warm up to new ideas, but she’s really getting a lot better about it.

And to that end – the whole “building self-confidence” thing (which has been a problem at kindergarten, too; she just freezes up when she’s asked to try something new for the first time) – I’ve signed her up for martial arts classes. (Huge thank you to Marty for the pass that’s allowing us to try this out for free!)

Her first class is tomorrow. She has said that she doesn’t want to do it, and that she’s just going to watch the first class. Which… um, no, she isn’t. Sorry, kiddo. I’ll hold the iPad hostage again if I have to.

The other motivation for the martial arts class is because I’ve noticed that Catie has a lot of quirks that look like attention deficit disorder, which is not surprising since it runs in both sides of the family. But rather than leaping ahead to getting her tested and on medication, first I thought I’d work on developing her concentration and focus skills this way. I’d rather give her coping mechanisms than drugs.

Of course, I’m not judging and I’m not anti-medication. If it becomes apparent later on down the road that she needs ADD drugs, I’ll certainly give them to her. I just figure that if there are ways to avoid it (or at least postpone it), I should give them a try.

And I have to say, I already can’t wait to see what she looks like in her karate uniform.

Worst. Christmas. Ever.

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Cindy

I feel like I need to try to sum up Christmas somehow, before the year is over. Only I’m not sure where to start. Be warned that I’m writing this under the influence of MANY over-the-counter cold medications. So. Just saying.

Dave’s been here for the past couple of weeks, and we had a pretty well planned-out agreement of how we’d divide up Christmas. I’d take the girls on Christmas Eve because that’s when we do most of the big stuff in my family (we go to church, have a big meal, etc.). And then after the Santa chaos died down on Christmas morning, I’d hand them off to Dave and they’d have a second Santa thing at his place and spend Christmas Day and night with him. Easy enough, right?

(cue foreboding…)

Last Friday (the 21st), while the kids were with Dave and I was happily in my PJs catching up on movies on my DVR, I started to notice that I felt a little weird. My throat felt scratchy. I shrugged it off as me being paranoid since one of the movies I had just watched was Contagion. Power of suggestion, whatever. I went to bed.

I woke up on Saturday and realized that no, I was really sick. Things got progressively worse.

Sunday, I ended up at a walk-in after-hours clinic.

Them: “Did you get a flu shot this year?”
Me: “Umm… I forgot. But I remembered get both of my kids theirs, so that kinda counts as me being a responsible adult, right?”
Them: “Yeah, not really. You have the flu. Go home and go to bed. Here, take this inhaler to help you breathe.”

The girls were with me on Sunday night, and I knew I was in over my head. My family stepped up and kept them at my parents’ house (since my brother and sister were also there to help). I quarantined myself to my house and tried to sleep it off.

Monday was Christmas Eve, and I spent most of the day sick and miserable. My family missed church services because of me, and my mom and sister made Christmas dinner (which is normally my thing). I also realized that our house was in no condition for any visits from Santa Claus. It was a mess, and there was no way I could get it ready in my current state. I told Catie (since Lucy doesn’t understand the Santa thing yet) that I had texted Santa and that he was going to bring her presents to her Mimi & Pop-Pop’s house instead of ours. I got them to bed at my parents’ house for the 2nd night in a row, barely managed to stay conscious long enough to set up the Santa layout at my parents’ house, then drove home and collapsed.

Christmas morning, I dragged myself out of bed before sunrise and got to my parents’ house at 6 a.m. so I’d be there when the girls woke up. They had a great time, and there are pictures of their beautiful happy faces, but they’re on my mom’s camera. I’ll get them someday. I basically lay on the couch having fever sweats while they opened their presents.

I barely managed to hand them off to Dave later on Christmas morning, then I immediately went to bed. Later that day, my fever spiked up to nearly 104, and I was… out of it. Somehow I called my mom, and she and my brother found me on the kitchen floor with my face pressed up against the refrigerator. Which in my head made sense, because my skin felt like it was on fire, and the fridge was cool. My brother picked me up and they got me to the car and off to the ER we went.

Oh, right, here’s the one picture I posted on Christmas Day. How unbelievably joyous, am I right?

Chest X-ray and bloodwork showed… yep. Really, really bad case of the flu. They loaded me up with fluids (because I was dehydrated) and pain meds (which I was incredibly grateful for, until the rebound headache kicked in), and then they sent me home.

Btw, if you can avoid going to the ER on Christmas Day? I highly recommend that you do so. It’s not a happy place to be.

All that to say… I’m kind of ok-ish now. The flu part (fever, aches, etc.), that’s all gone, but the cough got worse and turned into a sinus infection/bronchitis combo. And of course, I am now unable to say that I have bronchitis without thinking of Sweet Brown.

Ain’t nobody got time for dat, indeed.

I have to say, Dave has helped out a lot with the kids while I’ve been out of commission. And yeah, ok, he’s the dad, that’s what dads are supposed to do, but whatever. Credit where it’s due. They’ve had so much fun with him over the past couple of weeks, and for that, I am grateful.

And my family just… damn. I don’t even know how I’ll ever be able to thank them enough. I mean, because of their help, we managed to keep the girls’ lives as normal as possible through all of this, and they’re FINE. Better than fine. Catie decreed that it was the “Best! Christmas! Ever!” Which is funny since that’s exactly what she said last year. And they’ve thought that getting to have sleepovers at their grandparents’ house – with bonus aunt and uncles included – was just an awesome treat. So they’ve had a blast.

As for me, I’m waiting for these antibiotics to kick in aaaaaany minute now, and 2012 can just see itself on out the door, thankyouverymuch.

So damn lucky

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Cindy

(Apologies to Dave Matthews for using his song as a blog post title. It was the best I could do.)

I had plans to blog on Friday, and then… well. And then an elementary school in Connecticut got shot up and I spent the rest of the day crying in front of the news.

I don’t have any brilliant insight or words of wisdom here. I’m just as dumbstruck as everyone else.

These school shootings happen way too often, and normally they don’t get to me like this one did. I don’t know why. Maybe because this was an elementary school and the kids were all around Catie’s age. Self-centered worldview, I guess. It just really hit me in my gut.

On Saturday night, we were up late because we had spent the evening at my parents’ house. Lucy has a cold, and it took me a while to get her settled in bed. While she was waiting for me, Catie fell asleep on the couch. Rather than wake her up, I decided to just carry her upstairs to bed. My first thought was how big she is. She’s weighs about twice what Lucy weighs, and when I carry her, her feet dangle past my knees because she’s so tall.

But at the same time, I had this overwhelming sense of how little she is, because even though she’s heavy, she’s still little enough that I’m able to pick her up and carry her up a flight of steps. After I put her to bed, I went to my room and sat on the floor next to my bed, and I cried for all of the parents who don’t get to pick up their “really too big to be carried” babies anymore.

Last month, my friend Laura took some pictures of us for our Christmas cards. (Seriously, if you’re local and need a photographer? Go talk to her.) Today I’m looking at these pictures of my beautiful girls, who are still here with me, and I feel so, so incredibly blessed and lucky to have them.

I mean, seriously. How did I ever get so fortunate?

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My lovely friend Victoria lost her nephew Noah Pozner in the Connecticut school shooting on Friday. For info on how you can help Noah’s family, click here.

Transitions.

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Cindy

Random stuff from this weekend:

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My sister was here this weekend, and my mom and I went shopping for wedding dresses with her. That was… oh, man. It was bad. Two things:

1. Wedding dress sample sizes. I forgot how they’re all teeny-tiny (they say it’s a size 10 but it’s more like a 6), and they expect regular girls to somehow squeeze into these tiny dresses and try to get an idea of whether or not the same dress in our actual size (which is at least 2 sizes bigger than what we wear in regular clothes, because I guess wedding dress designers really like to screw with a woman’s self-esteem on the single most special day of her life by making her feel like a moose) will look good on us.

God, y’all, poor Tracy. I had been all, “Yay! Dress shopping! Fun!” Then as soon as she started putting them on, I was like, “ohhhh, PTSD, dude.” I feel so bad for not warning her in advance. I forgot about all of the bridal shops that I cried in because I hated the way I looked in all of their dresses. I swear it’s more traumatic than swimsuit shopping. At least in a swimsuit, you can think, “Ehh, I’ll blend in at the pool, no biggie.” In a wedding dress, you KNOW everyone is going to be looking at you. It’s horrible.

2. If you are a bride-to-be who is going shopping for anything wedding-related, you should perhaps think twice before inviting along someone who’s been divorced for all of a month. Bitterness and cynicism, party of two, your table is ready!

I fear I am a terrible, terrible maid of honor. Sigh.

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The girls have done really well this time after Dave left. Catie was a little sad on Friday, but then my sister showed up on Friday night, and she was pretty well distracted after that. Lucy has asked for, “Daddy? Daddy?” a couple of times, but I just say, “Nope, Daddy’s not here right now,” and she accepts that and moves on without freaking out.

Like last time, I told Catie that on Sunday, we could do something fun, and she could choose what our adventure would be. She picked the North Carolina History Museum. I swear I don’t know where this little nerd child of mine comes from, but I love her for it. The entire trip cost me the gas to get downtown and a whopping 51 cents so she could use one of those machines that flattens a penny and imprints it with a design (in this case, it was an airplane – the whole North Carolina “First in Flight” thing).

So, they’re doing really well. Which has been a huge relief.

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I broke up with The Guy last night. Via text message, because I am a coward when it comes to confrontations. There’s so much of the story that I don’t want to share, because only half of the story is mine, and I can’t speak for him.

I’ll say this: I spent years of my life trying to bend myself to make myself fit into the mold of what I thought the man I was with wanted me to be. (Not Dave’s fault, I take responsibility for that myself.) I realized that I was doing the same thing with him, just in a completely different way. And I can’t – no, I’m not willing to – live like that anymore.

It sucks, and I’m upset about it. At the same time, in the grand scheme of failed relationships of my life? I’m not sure if this one even registers on the Disaster Scale.

But that’s that. I’m thinking I’m going to take the holidays to focus on my girls and maybe a little more self-care (working out, meditating, whatever I need to do to feel more like “me” again), and then take it from there.

Onward we go, right?

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: Cate

little talks**

…and now, she’s 6

karate kid, week 1

on trying new things

Worst. Christmas. Ever.

So damn lucky

Transitions.

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