What Day Exactly??

Mac has decided that we will be having a 4th of July party at our house this year. (Come on over, you are invited!). Only we are having it on July 3rd because I want to take the kids to a big fireworks show this year. Liam overheard a snippet of the conversation and wanted the scoop.

Liam: Are we having a 4th of July party?

Mac (thinking he is funny): Yes, only it is on the 3rd of July.

Liam: There is no third of July!

Mac: Liam! What day is the third of July?

Liam pauses, gives thought and finally answers: July third.

Mac: Right, Liam! And what day is the 4th of July?

Liam: June 14th.

Memorial Day Memories to be Forgotten

Memorial day - the unofficial kick-off to summer. Thank God it is unofficial because there is nothing remotely close to summer around here! In my 12 years of Oregon residence, I have grown a pretty good pair of webbed feet and tolerate the wet weather fairly well, but not when it lasts till Memorial Day!! After lasts year's garden fiasco, I vowed to invest the time and energy necessary for Total Garden Awesomeness this year, but unless we get some official summer soon, it ain't gonna happen!

But the weather was just the start of our misery. I got caught in a "be careful what you wish for" moment, early Friday afternoon after spending most of the morning telling people I was hoping we'd get to leave early. Mac called to report that when Liam said he had a tummy ache that morning, he wasn't being his usual overly dramatic self; he really meant it and could back up his claim with profuse vomiting.

Mac could certainly handle a sick kid, but Megan had dress rehearsal for her ballet. So I skeedaddled on home to spend the evening with Mr. Barfy.

Mr. Barfy, the sad heap of protoplasm

On to Megan. Actually, Megan was great all weekend, but I have an issue with a ballet performance being on Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend. Yes, little girls waving their arms and twirling in uncoordinated zeal is undeniably cute (the junior high schoolers doing the same thing, not so much), but come on, couldn't we get this over with on Thursday night and let us have our holiday weekend to ourselves?? I really don't see why we need such a big production, in Salem's biggest theater, for six year olds doing ballet! Wouldn't they be just as cute in the high school auditorium??

Sure she's cute, but this ain't the Russian Ballet!

So Saturday, our afternoon was dedicated to ballet. And puking, because we wouldn't want to leave Liam out. This time I was off to ballet (and post-ballet frozen yogurt), while Mac was rubbing Liam's back every time he dry heaved (because Liam would yell,"You have to rub my back!").

Sunday, Mac completed his second 50k. He had a good time with his friend, but that little pain in his foot wasn't so little when he was done. And while he was gone, Liam was...well, you know. And Megan was moving about the house in panic trying to stay as far away from Liam as possible because it turns out she is a complete vomit-a-phobe and she's break into hysterics every time Liam got within arm's length.

Monday morning, Liam stopped vomiting! Instead there were some, er, other GI issues that had us in the bathroom at least a dozen times, But the saddest part was the little guy's spirit, which was completely broken at that point and he laid lifeless, moaning "It's not fair that I am sick and nobody else is;" "Nothing will ever make me feel better;" and "I am just sick of being sick." LiLi Bear and I stayed home and cuddled while Dad and Megan got to party and ride motorbikes at a friend's BBQ.

Tuesday, Liam seemingly turned the corner. His first words out of bed were,"I am SO hungry." and then he ate four day's worth of food. But Mac's foot woes had escalated and he was off to the doctor's to get checked for a stress fracture after dropping the kids off at work.

We raided the doctor's lounge for food and the kids ate up. As I buckled Liam into his car seat when Mac came back to pick them up, he complained of a tummy ache. "Liam, you are all better now, you are fine," I told him. But he was not so agreeable and neither was his stomach. In a quick move, I got him out of the car just in time to have him empty his stomach right in front of the hospital entrance, with a little splatter on my pants, just for good measure.

Mac's X-ray was negative but he still needs an MRI. "Don't do it while I am working!" - my sympathetic response.

Memorial Day weekend may be the unofficial start of summer, but let's just say, we have higher hopes for the official start of the summer.

Happy As A Lark

When reading, a frame of reference is always nice.

Mom (reading): ... and the Pokey Little Puppy went to bed as happy as a lark.

Liam: What's a lark?

Mom: A bird.

Liam: Well, How happy are they?

:)

A Sprinkle In Time

This morning Liam thought I was playing a trick on him when I moved his clock forward an hour. So I explained Daylight Savings as best as I could.

"Is Daylight Savings a special day?" Liam asked me.

"Yeah, well it is kind of special because now it'll stay lighter at night time" I answered.

"But do we get presents?" Liam got right to the point.

"No! You don't get presents for Daylight Savings!!"

"But can we have waffles with sprinkles?" Liam persisted.

"Yeah, we can," I allowed, because Daylight Savings might not be presents special, but I think it is sprinkles special.

Daylight Savings special breakfast: Waffles with Halloween sprinkles (which won out over Valentine's Day sprinkles and Christmas sugar sprinkles)

Snow Day!

All week we listened to weather reports predicting "snow-mageddon" and "snow-pocalypse" for the Pacific Northwest. Rather than get me worked into a state of panic, the reports made me very glad that I wasn't a meteorologist. I mean, seriously, how f*cking boring does your life have to be if you are sitting around thinking up retarded words to describe a snow-storm?? And then what a let down when snow-mageddon never hits.

But Thursday we did wake up to a light white dust on the ground - not enough to keep me from my 5am run date. But by the end of our 12 miler, we were being pelted by big white flakes. There was enough accumulation that I skidded by our driveway and had to park on the side of the street on my return home. Shortly after, we got the call: Delayed start for schools, but by breakfast our "high elevation" school (about 500') had closed for the day, the only school in Salem that failed to open. That means there was plenty of time for us to go get a "snow-ducation."

Look at those two inches of white doom.

Let the angels save us from the Snow-pocalypse!

Liam, riding his Snow-cat away from the horror of it all.

By 10 am, more precipitation was falling. It looked like snow, but it melted most everything that was on the ground. Kind of like the disappointing ending in Micheal Crichton's Andromeda Strain, our pernicious crisis had mutated itself into a benign situation. Ho hum.

That afternoon we celebrated the clear roads with a trip to the movies. (We highly recommend Megamind for those with kids) . Hurray, we survived Snowmageddon!

Silence

Lately, we don't hear from Megan as much. She is a reading fiend and has made it through almost all of the Magic Tree House series and Junie B. Jones. Megan is very much like me in that she doesn't like to quit things until she is done, so once she starts she'll usually plow through 70 or so pages before we hear from her again. We aren't the only ones to notice: At school Megan will be joining the first graders once a week for their reading group. Now if only we could find a way to get Liam to sit quietly (besides TV!).

The Gifted And The Retarded

Every parent thinks they have the smartest kid in the world. "Oooh, little Johnny is so smart, he says,'meow' when he points at the cat!" Yeah, well if Johnny's so smart, why doesn't he point to the feline and say, "Cat" instead of making nonsensical animal noises?? But these are the delusions we grasp firmly as parents, because we have high hopes for our children, the world is their oyster, their life is a blank canvas...yada,yada,yada. No parent ever announces,"Wow, our kid is dumb as dirt. Hey, but we're fine with it, because now we can take the money we have in little Johnny's college fund and buy us a new motor boat!"

Nope, all the little kids in this world are geniuses. Kind of makes you wonder what happens to them between age 2 and 18, huh?

Actually, we all know there are dumb kids out there. If you don't believe me just go hang out at the play park for an hour or so. Uh, Johnny, trying to jump from the picnic table on to the Big Wheel is not such a bright idea. It's just that we are convinced that somebody else's kid is the dumb one, not ours.

But last week we got outside confirmation that we were not living in fantasy land when Megan's teacher sent her home with a TAG application. As parents, all we had to do to prove that Megan was talented and gifted was fill out a three page application.

And so Mac and I joined forces to legitimize Megan's brilliance.

Question 1: Show examples of your child's awareness of time and space.

WTF???

"Ummm. Well. Megan knows how to tell time. " Mac offered.

That didn't seem to fit the examples (yes, at least we had examples).

"Why don't we talk about Megan's interest in maps?" I proposed. And so we filled in that Megan likes maps and understands that they are a representation of larger land masses. And we added that she can tell time just for good measure. You know that feeling when you are taking a test, and you don't know the answers but you start writing a bunch of shit down anyway? Yeah, we were in that mode.

Question 2: How does your child show empathy for others?

"Yeah, this doesn't sound like Megan at all," I started.

"Come on, she has to show some kind of empathy."

"Yeah, I don't think she really does. Liam is the one who is always worried about other people."

"Okay, skip that one. We'll come back to it."

Question 3: Does your child conceptualize spatially when solving problems or doing math?

Okay, now I was starting to get pissed off! "What does that even mean? Is this application supposed to make Megan look smart or is it supposed to make us look retarded??"

Question 4: Does your child make up songs or stories?

Mac chimed in, "Oh, Megan is always writing books!" Maybe we could do this after all!

"Yeah," I countered "but Megan only writes autobiographical stuff. She never makes anything up."

"That should still count," Mac insisted.

"They are asking about imagination. Just writing stuff down is not imaginative."

"Well, don't you want Megan to get into the TAG program?"

"Not if she doesn't belong there! I don't want her to be the dumbest fish in the pond." OMG - this 'test' was sucking IQ points out of my brain!

Finally we got to question 8, the last question, which focused entirely on academic achievement and here it seemed we didn't have enough room on the page to write in our answers. Aaah, our belief in Megan's intelligence was restored! As to us, well, we were still pretty sure that we were retarded.