Super Star

The first year that Emma played soccer, she was terrified. She wouldn't touch the ball during the games and most of the time, she wouldn't even make an effort to look like she was even pretending to be playing. Knowing that her fears were part of her bent toward perfectionism and that she wouldn't ever enjoy something until she was at least a little bit good at it, I made an ultimatum. She had to play for two more years and then she could decide if she ever wanted to play again or not.

The second year, we figured out that she wouldn't just play soccer without some parameters. So we told her that she should try to kick the ball 10 times during each game. It worked like a charm. She'd run right into the bunch, kick the ball lightly- right back into the bunch- and then look at us to make sure that we saw what she did. A big improvement but she still didn't like playing.

This year (her final year if she so chooses), she has some super stars on her team so she's convinced herself that they don't really need her on the team "because I'm not very good at scoring goals." Even though I've explained that there's more to soccer than scoring goals (I was a defender in my past life and in 12 years of playing soccer I only scored like twice), she's not convinced that it's worth her while to show up to the games. With lots of encouragement from her wonderful coaches, and a healthy bribe from her parents (treats for lots of contact with the ball and an ice cream sundae for a goal), she has been becoming a little bit more aggressive and trying to be a part of the action. For the first few games she had no problem earning treats for touching the ball, but this past Saturday, she earned this:

 

My baby girl scored a goal!!!!!!! 

[And I may have caused Stella to lose hearing from my screaming so loud!]

Seriously, after more than two years of dragging her to practice and games and trying to convince her to at least try her best, we had all but given up hope that she would enjoy playing sports. And I was [kind of] okay with that. But now that she has scored, oh man, oh man is she into soccer! She's been practicing in our yard every day and saying that she's going to score more goals every week. For her dad's birthday on Saturday, she's going to score 5...

She's still not sure if she'll play again after this year, but at least she's enjoying herself!

On another note, what's the deal with parents not cheering for their kids anymore?! Seriously, I'm all about obnoxious cheering, but most of the parents just sit and watch quietly and clap a little bit when their kid scores. I mean, people are encouraging and all, but I guess at some point in the past decade it has become un-cool to cheer wildly and loudly for your team. Lucky for us, we never were cool to begin with so we aren't ruining our reputation or anything ;)

And so it begins....again

I'm not organized. My house is a mess. My baby won't sleep anymore. But we're doing it anyway, so help us God! 

We are home schooling Emma again this year. We switched home school programs and hope to have more accountability and support this year... but I'll have to do more work so we'll see how that goes ;) One thing for sure is that we are going to miss our former adviser SO much. Hopefully our new one is just as awesome! We are looking forward to lots of fun things like art and science classes, gymnastics classes and a two-week road trip to visit Aunt Joy in New Mexico.

Grady is going to do home school pre-kindergarten this year. Although he loved his teachers at preschool last year, he didn't really care if he went or not, so I decided to save hundreds of dollars per month, not to mention hours and hours of driving time, and teach him at home. He will also most likely be going to speech classes at our neighborhood school a few times per week to get some extra practice with his L's, R's, and a few other consonant blends.

Here we go!!!!!

Random Thoughts from August

• Emma started soccer again. She has WONDERFUL coaches this year and will hopefully begin to enjoy the sport. Her team colors are navy with red and white accents so they named themselves the USA All-Stars. She's not into that name- she would have much preferred something along the lines of the Striped Unicorns or American Flag Princesses. I guess the other 2nd graders don't feel the same way. I'm pretty sure she won't play again after this year, but hopefully some of my other kids want to play because I drive a minivan so it's pretty much expected of me.

•  Stella had her 9 month check up this week. She's 20lbs 10ozs. I'm not really sure what the other kids were at that age, but I'm pretty sure no one was over 20 lbs at 1 year. Emma now weighs 44lbs. She'll be in a booster seat until she's 13.

•  We start school NEXT week! Does that seem crazy to anyone else but me? School is supposed to start in September and end in June. I'm not ready for the summer to be over already.... mostly because I'm totally disorganized and without the slightest hope that I'll become organized by next week.

• Stella is really into hair. When she's tired or upset, she wants to bury her hands in my hair. On more than one occasion when she has woken up in the middle of the night, the only thing that I can do to soothe her is to lean over her crib with my hair and let her stroke it until she falls back asleep. Last week I chopped my hair off and she's not too happy about it. 

•   Emma and Grady have been working on their Christmas lists aaaall day. It's August 17th. Maybe it's because every time they ask for something, I tell them that I'm not gonna buy it but they can ask for it for Christmas. Grady is dictating his list to Emma and she's writing it down for him. I guess it's good handwriting practice so I shouldn't complain. FYI, Grady wants a real gun.

•  A bunch of girls from my family are doing a Mud Run in October. My sister-in-law who will be 7 months pregnant, my mother, and my aunt are all doing it, so really, I have no valid excuse to not do it... other than that I don't like mud and I pretty much don't like running. It's supposed to be a team building experience so, um, that's good, I guess.

• I  made some homemade laundry detergent this month. It's still in it's trial period but it seems to be working great and it was pretty easy to throw together. And cheap. If I keep liking it, I'll share the recipe with you soon. Lucky you!

• We have lots of tomatoes in are garden this year. Last year we hardly had any so I'm VERY happy about this. We also have a bean plant that produces about 2 green beans per week, a hot pepper plant, and zucchini and cucumbers that are  producing just enough to not be considered duds. And we have a GIANT pumpkin growing. Dylan bought seeds for the pumpkins that win awards and, while we won't win any awards, it is pretty cool so see how big one could grow in not ideal conditions and without TLC.

 Well, that's all I have for you today. Stella's upset so I gotta go give her some hair....

What. The. Heck. Raccoons.

Around here, we used to really really dislike raccoons. They tear up our lawns and frighten our children and keep us awake at night with their chattering and dig through our trash and make big messes in our yard. We used to  dislike them, now we hate them....

Last night while Dylan and I were watching some two-day-old dvr-ed Olympics, we heard someone walking around in our kitchen (God bless our noisy kitchen floor!). Of course our first thought was that one of the children must have snuck out of their rooms, but they would have had to walk right past us to do this so it wasn't likely. When we stood up and turned around, we saw a RACCOON running out of our kitchen. WHAT. THE. HECK! It ran back through the family room, over several nerf guns and bows and arrows, and paused at our broken screen door, then went outside. Dylan ran to find his pellet gun (that he bought soely for this purpose) and I scrambled to find my camera. The little stinker popped it's head back through the screen just as I was taking the lens cap off my camera, but ran away before I could take a picture. We went out back with a flashlight and the pellet gun but saw no sign of it except for some piles of dirt from where it was digging up our lawn.

As I was trying to sleep last night, I kept thinking about how many times I've come out in the middle of the night for one reason or another and realized that as we were locking up, we left the slider open and just had the broken (as in ripped off the frame on two sides so that it blows in the wind and the kids can just walk through it without bothering to open it) screen door closed. In fact, just the night before I was laying on the couch all night trying to console my screaming, teething, stuffy-nosed baby. Maybe the door was open then? What if I came out in the middle of the night for a drink of water and was attacked by a hungry raccoon? What if this raccoon has been coming in every night? What if it tried to eat my children? What if it was having babies in my house?

Basically, I think it's time that we get the screen door fixed. Or at least remember to close our doors at night.

 

So what does an ear tube look like anyway?

Remember when Landon got ear tubes put in?

(December 2010)

 And then he looked like this when he would take a bath?

 (go ahead and laugh, we won't be offended)

Well, today he went to the ENT for a check-up and his right tube is still in place, but his left tube had fallen out and was just sitting in his ear canal. The doctor used some super long tweezers and pulled it out, wrapped it up in a piece of gauze and sent it home with us for show and tell....

So there you have it, something new you learned today :)

My Favorite Things: Dishwasher Soap That Really Works

About a year ago, I started noticing that my dishwasher detergent wasn't working very well. There were sometimes food residue left on dishes and my acrylic "glasses" were suuuuuper cloudy. So I started adding some vinegar into a dish on the top rack and that helped to clear up the residue on my cups, but I still wasn't entirely satisfied. 

Enter Pinterest, aka. the World Wide Web's newest black hole. After searching around for a bit looking for dishwasher detergent recipes and then reading the reviews that different readers left, I settled on this one  because there are only 3 ingredients and NO prep or pre-mixing needed. Sounds good, right? And you know what else is good? It works GREAT! And it's really, really inexpensive- like pennies per load. 

If you want to join the cool club and make your own, here's what you need:

1 teaspoon oxygen bleach (Oxiclean or a generic brand)

1/2 teaspoon liquid Dawn dishwashing soap (the blue one)

1/2 cup plain ol' vinegar

Put the Oxiclean in the soap dispenser and add the Dawn. Close the lid.

On the top rack of your dishwasher, in among your dirty dishes, place a dish with the vinegar.

Run the cycle. 

Be amazed.

If you don't want to take my word for it, click the link above for more information, instructions and lots of reviews.

Some notes: 

*although my glasses were MUCH less cloudy after the first wash, they were completely sparkly after a few.

*I tried just splashing the vinegar in the bottom of the dishwasher and also adding it to the rinse aid slot- this didn't work.

*Don't worry about putting liquid Dawn into your dishwasher. It's such a SMALL amount that it won't suds very much and ruin your dishwasher or overflow into your kitchen.
*Sometimes the silverware doesn't seem to get very clean- I'm not sure why it works better sometimes than others, but for now I'm going to put the handle side down and maybe this will help. Also, I pre-wipe the extra sticky things like the knife from the peanut butter or the spoon from an avocado. {My regular detergent had a problem with these, too, so it's probably a problem with my dishwasher, not the cleaning agent}

Camping: The Great Equalizer

Here in middle-class suburbia, we spend lots of money and energy trying to live in the nicest houses and neighborhoods within our means. We send our kids to the best schools possible. We take care to find and encourage quality friendships with "good kids" for our children. We turn our noses up at fast food and try to buy organic food for our families because we don't want to die (or at least become genetically mutated) from eating bad stuff. High fructose corn syrup is synonymous with the Devil and we take the five-fruits-and-vegetables-a-day rule very seriously. We send our students to D.A.R.E. and M.A.D.D. assemblies so that they learn that drugs and alcohol are bad. And we never leave our houses without looking put-together.

Then we go camping and even though we bring our super-high-tech REI camping gear, brand new KEEN sandals, and french press coffee pots, at the end of the day, we're covered in dirt and mosquito bites (because our "green" bug spray didn't do a thing expect for act as a glue for dust), sleeping on the ground, and lining up with the rest of humanity for our turn to poop in a pit toilet.

We essentially become equals with our neighbor campers who may or may not: a)smoke weed and blow it into our campsite, b)walk through and pee on a tree in our campsite, c)loudly coach their children on how to be "bad ass" as they walk through our campsite drinking their 40s. And as the week goes on, it becomes perfectly acceptable that we haven't showered for a week. Tooth brushing becomes optional. Diets get thrown out the window and white sandwich bread is allowed (gasp!) along with consuming junk food whenever possible. Organic fruit gets traded in for canned peaches in heavy syrup. Our children are allowed to take off adventuring unsupervised. We don't recycle our paper goods or compost our food scraps; to heck with the ozone, we burn everything!

And you know what? Us filthy, uncivilized, non-green people end up having the best week ever.

and my personal favorite: