Now with fairy magic! Heaven help you if you break the law or don’t know the right dance moves. How does this have anything to do with dinosaurs? Just ask a five-year-old!
Category Archives: Melody
Can Can pix
Beautiful girls!
While Auntie Tara and her family were visiting a few weeks back, we took Melody and Cassidy to have their portraits done. These girls are so beautiful! When Melody saw the photos tonight she burst into tears, “I miss Cassidy!!!” I know how you feel, sweets, I miss Auntie Tara too. xoxo
Caption This
Here’s Burke and Melody sitting on the firetruck at Disneyland. Caption this with your best quip!
Preschool graduation
I remember thinking “preschool graduation?” But now that we have been though it nothing could be cuter! The class sang a little song and then each child was presented with a “diploma.” I didn’t think I would get emotional but when her teacher started to cry, well, I got a little teary too. I suppose it’s partly because one stage is coming to an end.
Today Melody started at Kids Club summer program by the Boys & Girls Club which includes a kinder readiness program. She had a blast! Our next door neightbor also attends there and he showed her around this morning, allaying her uncertainty and nerves. What a major milestone…one day, preschool, the next kinder readiness!
Dance Recital Success!
Here’s the full dance from Melody’s Can Can dance last Saturday!
Little Cuties Can Can-Can
Can’t they?
March resolution recap and…
I’m pretty late with my March resolution recap. Honestly, I haven’t even turned the calendar from March to April. Does that tell you anything? I really don’t want this year to fly by like last year did, but I guess there isn’t anything that can be done about it.
The resolution for March was to walk,3-5 times per week for 20-60 minutes at a time. That would have totaled 12-20 walks in the month of March. Looking back, I see that I walked 13 times for 20-30 minutes. Usually I do this during my lunch break, so 30 minutes is really the maximum I can do. An evening walk with Melody involves the dog and working in the park somehow, which interrupts the walk. Consequently I tend to avoid the evening walk, even if I can make it a longer walk.
I feel good about that goal and have been continuing to walk during lunch breaks several times a week, upping my tempo as I become stronger. My biggest challenge is my foot, which is still sensitive to overwork. If I push too hard, the foot aches and swells. If I don’t push hard enough, it will never pass the next hurdle of healing.
April’s resolution is reading to Melody 3 times a week. She loves this! We recently read Peter and Wendy, chapter by chapter, and she loved it, so I’m looking forward to reading to her again. She is almost at the point that she can read, just not quite there yet. I’m excited for her to discover that whole world of imagination that was so exciting for me as a girl!
More dirty words
We have been working hard at keeping certain words out of our language in front of our now five year old daughter. You know the basics, the seven dirty words (note: the actual words are on that page in case you don’t want to read it). I’d like to add a few more to the list.
Stupid – I use it to describe the remote a lot but little girls don’t understand the distinction between inanimate objects and their classmates.
Dumb – see stupid
Fat – you can’t even say “big fat liar” without touching on body size. According to a recent article on CNN, children begin teasing and calling outcasts “fat” as early as preschool.
Diet – dovetailing off “fat” it’s been theorized that children exposed to constant parental dieting can become more self conscious of their body image at a younger age. High school is hard enough, I’m not going to burden her with a negative body image if at all possible. We talk about eating healthy, not about dieting.
Bad – as in “I’m going to be bad and eat this…” This goes hand in hand with the possible consequences of “fat” and “diet.” There are too many ways to screw up your kids!
Crap – she already knows it means the stinky deposits in the bathroom, it’s not much of a stretch to get her to say shit. Let’s just nip this one in the bud.
Shut up – self explanatory
Most religious statements and exclamations, like “Oh my God!” and “Jesus Christ!” and “for chrissakes!” For one because we aren’t religious and for two because a 5 year old saying “Jesus Christ!” might be funny but it isn’t a good thing at school.
Self censorship is pretty dammed difficult, isn’t it?
What, me worry?
This is a post i wrote as a guest blogger when the OC Register had their Mom Blog up and running a couple years ago. The Mom Blog has moved on, so I thought I would share this with you here. The feelings are still the same!
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I’ve been a mom now for just over two years, and I was starting to feel a bit more confident in my abilities. Until last week that is, when my daughter slammed a door on her foot resulting in an injury that looked a lot more serious than it really was. But, I didn’t know it at that moment.
At that moment, all I wanted to do was hold her and cry with her and make her feel better and not let her know how scared for her I was. Then I got a grip on myself and told her everything was going to be just fine. I stayed strong through the ER visit and the follow up at the doctor’s office the next day, even though on the inside I was crying. I worried she would be traumatized by the whole experience.
Moms in the 21st century really have a lot of worries to consider. Not that I lay awake at night thinking about these things (yet), but I am concerned that one day due to my own ignorance, I will allow my daughter to go to school wearing gang insignia; the school will be shot up while she’s in class; or heaven forbid, she will carry some ibuprofen in her handbag. Will someone snatch her as she skips down the street to visit a friend? Will I be able to handle it if something really bad happens to her?
My parents worried, of course, but there’s a significant generation gap between the things I worry about and the things that kept my mother awake at night. I asked my Mom about her worries while we were growing up in Orange County during the 70s and 80s. She told me she worried about smoking, drinking, our friends leading us astray, teachers influencing us in a way that was not consistent with my parents’ values, a little about drugs, and a lot about education.
Yet, we were still allowed to walk to school, bike to our friends’ houses, and be unsupervised all summer long. My grandparents had even less to worry about comparatively. My Gram worried about my mother crossing the major street that was the boundary of where she was allowed to go (and doled out a serious reprimand when it was discovered that she had), finances, education, religious upbringing, good food on the table, and taking care of their elders. A lot has changed in 70 short years.
But bridging the generation gaps are the little things that just don’t change. They are consistent from mother to mother, generation to generation. We count our babies’ fingers and toes the day they are born and see the future in their eyes. We beseech whatever higher power we believe in for their health and happiness. We hide our fears and tears as best we can in the effort to provide a stable home. We help them with their homework, and in making the tough decisions about which birthday party to attend and how to gently give their regrets to the friend whose party they won’t be attending. We take care of scraped elbows and knees and hearts, and with tears in our eyes we might send them off to college or the military to become the men and women we hoped for on the day we counted their fingers and toes for the first time. Parents, especially moms, will always worry, and my Mom assures me the worry doesn’t end when your children are 21 or 30 or 50, married or single, living right next door or across the globe.
Maybe in the future, I will jump up a little faster when my daughter is playing with a door, or I’ll find a better way to divert her tears as she cries after falling from her bike. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, but I will feel confident in knowing I’m not the first mom to face that dilemma, and that moms throughout history have felt the same.
Notes from the Melody Maker 