I'm a twenty something striving to become the person I want to be "when I grow up". Yes, I may be a wife and mother, but my adventure is just beginning. My motto: "Live Stronger. Live Greener. Live Simpler. Love."
1.) Oklahoma Renaissance Faire
2.) Story time in the Park
3.) Woolaroc Kid’s Fest
4.) Oxley Nature Center Children’s Walk
5.) Go get Grandma’s Puppy
6.) Kansas City, MO Family vacation
7.) Complete Summer Reading Program
8.) Midsummer Party
9.) Camping in the Rockies
10.) Rowan Remembrance Party
11.) Bike/Picnic on Riverside Day
12.) Take Doc on Adventure Date
Today is Little Bird’s last day of school, which means that I am working hard at home doing things I don’t like to do with her at home.
Child Free Preferably Activities
1.) Cleaning out child’s room for donations.
Sometimes I like to do things like toys with Little Bird at home. I like her to be a part of choosing toys that we are ready to give other children a chance to play with. Sometimes it can be hard, but she always impresses by making good choices when she is a part of the process. I do NOT like to clean out clothes with her. Ever. If she loves a dress, it doesn’t matter if the sleeves are so tight her arms turn purple, she will insist that it still fits and it’s her favorite and it’s beautiful. So in the last few days, I cleaned out all of her clothing by discarding all of the clothing items that were riddled with holes or worn and donating the clothing that was gently used.
2.) Cleaning out my bedroom.
Do you remember how much you liked to get into your mom’s shoes/jewelry/clothes/jump on her bed/knock over laundry baskets, ya know, all things that impede the process of producing a clean and neatly reorganized bedroom.
3.) Cleaning out the study.
Little Bird LOVES coloring on papers she finds out. Not the best idea to sort papers and supplies with her armed with a marker. It’s a swipe and dash to a quiet corner to destroy things I’d like to keep intact and sorted.
My favorite project I’ve worked on this last week was Little Bird’s closet. I resorted her toys, which I do every few months to make sure that things she is interested in and finds challenging are readily accessible and easy to put away. Since we don’t allow TV during daylight hours during the summertime, I want lots of choices available for her. You can only “color” so much.
Tomorrow starts a long, fun summer. There will be some truly rough days ahead with the anniversary of my son’s death coming up faster than I’d like to remember. But it’s also a summer of celebrating the fight. Our family is still together. We have a lot of life ahead of us.
Little Bird has been working hard to learn her 50 states at school. She has been learning them in Alphabetical order. She was chanting them in the backseat when I suddenly got super excited about teaching her a song I learned in elementary to help me remember the 50 states in order. So now she’s learning it. She’s about halfway through but we have road trips to work on it this summer! Here’s the song for those interested.
AND – if you are a super star, here are the states and capitals courtesy of Animaniacs!
Animaniacs also has a wonderful multiplication song and “Nations of the World” song.
…and you can’t keep them from rolling out no matter how hard you try.
The older I get the more I treasure friendships. The more I really appreciate the ones that are full and healthy and thriving. The more I am frustrated when friendships start to wane.
When we see movies, there is a long theme of BFFs. Friends that you grow up with, have houses next to, grow old with, and even have sisterhoods with in your old age (YA YA!). It seems common place to have sleepover and braid your hair, talk about boys and your first kiss, share a limo to prom, go to college with, have them be your maid of honor, end up pregnant together, raise your kids together, retire together, all with the same friend.
That isn’t how my life has been. I remember my first “best friend” from 2nd grade. I remember my next “best friends” from 5th-7th grade when my middle grade years turned me into a kind of self-righteous “can’t be friends with everyone” jerk and I mean-girl broke up with a girl who was a wonderful friend to me. The other one moved.
I remember 7th-12th grade where I met what I thought were those BFFs. Then I moved to Texas. We went to different colleges. I got married and had kids. Ya know, different directions in life.
I made a very few good friends in Texas. Those 2 years built a couple of friendships with people I love to see or hear from, despite none of them living nearby.
I met friends in college. Amazing friends. Some I am still close to. Some have become distant. Some I only see at weddings (PLEASE someone else get married so we can do this again).
I have made new friends since. Friends from work. Friends from the heart community. Friends from Doc’s medical school and residency.
And you know what? I’ll probably see several of those fade out after residency ends too.
But here’s the amazing thing. Those best friends from 5th-7th grade? We’ve reconnected thanks to Facebook. I’m overjoyed to follow what’s going on in their life and see their beautiful children. The girls I thought were BFFs? We still talk some. I still love hearing from them. The college friends? I like seeing them too.
There is only one person who I expect to be with me forever. One BFF. One person I know that I will take our kids to the park with, and maybe go on vacations with, and sit on the porch when we’re old with. My husband. Everyone else can fade in and out and I’ll be so happy when we’re really clicking and enjoying our friendships, and probably a little sad when we no longer are.
I don’t look at friends I’ve become distant to over the last year badly. I’ve had a lot of major changes in my life. So have many of them. Sometimes you grow apart. That doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong. It doesn’t mean you need to find new friends and tell them to screw off because it’s not easy anymore. Sure, it might not be “fixable” right now, but maybe it doesn’t need to be.
Maybe we just need a few years to reconnect, and be excited to follow their life again. Maybe even be a part of it once more someday.
When the friends you have let you down, when they head in a direction you can’t follow, or you can’t really connect with them, or when things just are so stressful because your relationship is disappointing now, it doesn’t mean you need to cut them out. Maybe it just means you don’t force it.
It means it’s time to move forward, reconnect with old friends, make some new ones, and let that relationship ease out, so it can come back in later when you won’t disappoint each other. When it’s time.
Some friendships might not rekindle later. And that’s ok. Nothing beautiful can last forever. But that doesn’t mean that the time I’ve had with each of my close friends, whenever we were close in life, doesn’t still bring warmth to my heart when I think about it.
My daughter twists her hair when she’s sleepy. She twists her hair in her sleep and as all hair twisters know, when it gets too tightly wrapped, it can tear out. In clumps.
Essentially, we’ve had our daughters hair cut several times to try to balance out the clumps of missing hair. What else can you do? She does it in her sleep! I can’t sit by her bed and keep her hand out of her hair…
…but I can put a hat on her.
Which is exactly what I did. Now she sleeps in a soft knit hat that has animal ears. She plays with the ear on her hat, not her hair, which is by the way, finally growing in.
Part of the reason for our trip to the Northeast was a scouting mission. We are approaching the end of Doc’s 7 years of medical training here in Tulsa. We have a year left and it is time to think about the future. Our plans include the possibility of graduate school for me and a desire to live somewhere different for a few years.
One of the strengths of living in the Northeast is their transit system. Amtrak is awesome. Metro railways are awesome. The prospect of living a life that was not automobile dependent is intriguing.
So we decided to try it out authentically. We woke up early Thursday. We took the Metro to Union Station. We boarded a train on a platform (and I quelled my impulse to yell Harry Potter lines while dragging Little Bird along the train). Train travel is amazing. You can get up and move around. There is a food car. There is no take off and landing. Also, you don’t have to show up two hours early for your train. In fact, I was shocked at the lack of formality in train travel. We didn’t have to pass through security. We didn’t check our luggage (we loaded it on the train car with us) and the only do random ID checks. This type of travel with a child was fun. Extremely fun.
Once we arrived at Penn Station in New York (which was icky…compared to Grand Central), we took the Subway to our hotel in Times Square. Luggage on the Subway in NYC is NOT luggage on the Metro in DC. We will take cabs with luggage in the future, despite the extra cost.
We met our friend, Amanda, at our hotel and spent the rest of the day with her, and later her husband, Pat.
Suffice it to say, Little Bird and Amanda are now #1 best friends.
Let me say, that I am extremely happy we went to New York last fall without our daughter. Even though we had an amazing guide, we were far more comfortable in the city with her since we knew our way around a bit better than first timers.
We had to eat some New York Pizza.
Central Park
Disney Store at Times Square
I mentioned that Little Bird and Amanda are BFFs, right?
Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty
Walking to Rockefeller Center and the NBC Store
If you haven’t taken a Double Decker bus tour in a major city before, I highly recommend it. We bought a 48 hour pass to use a hop on/off tour with Big Bus tours. You ride on the top of the bus where you can get a good view and the buses stop at each of the major attractions to let people on and off. Buses run about every 20 minutes, so you generally do not have to wait very long for the next bus. We spent our last two days in D.C. utilizing this tour service to get around and to see some of the sites that are a bit “out of the way”.
Union Station
The Capital Building
The Bus
Statues of Generals are everywhere.
The Jefferson Memorial
Inside the Jefferson Memorial
FDR Memorial, full of waterfalls
Cherry Blossoms Everywhere
We asked Little Bird to stand like the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. Art is open to interpretation right?
The White House from the South Lawn
Snack time is important.
Ford’s Theater, and not pictured is “Lincoln’s Waffles” across the street.
The National Cathedral. This is the one place I wish we’d hopped off the bus to see, but we were all too tired by the time we got there.
The National Zoo
The Pandas
The Original Georgetown Cupcakes, where TLC’s DC Cupcake is filmed.
And yes, this is how we ended each day.
