Cupcakes for breakfast.
Playdate with some good friends.
Getting your ears pierced.
Sushi for dinner.
New books, new dress, an archery set and lots of phone calls from family and friends.
Not bad for turning seven. . .
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Tomorrow is August 1st.
We are coming down to the end of Summer 2012 and what a summer it has been. I remember sitting at my desk back in March, surrounded by pamphlets and print-outs of the various activities I would enroll the girls in once school let out. The plan was for them to do an activity for a week, then have a week at home where they did nothing and so on for the duration of the summer. The whole thing would culminate with our family trip (notice I said trip, not vacation) to Martha’s Vineyard in August.
After I had completed sign-ups, remitted payments, bought supplies, and made all the arrangements, part of me felt like I had over-scheduled the girls. I mean, it is summer time, afterall. When would they just sit around and get bitten by mosquitoes? Catch lightening bugs and run through the sprinkler? Would there be time to grill out, get their mouths stained from Flavor-Ice and get their knees all gravelly from doodling up the driveway with sidewalk chalk? Add the early arrival of their new baby sister (SN: of course a baby is new, isn’t it redundant to say “new baby”? is there such a thing as an old baby?), it seemed like the summer plans were off the chain in their up to the minute busyness.
Then, I looked at the calendar. July 31st. Everything is done. They’ve been to Riverside Outfitters, they’ve been to RMS Survivor Camp. They’ve been to art camp and swimming lessons. They have spent the week with my parents where they ate Chinese food for breakfast, stayed up late every night, and had a free-for-all in the Dollar Tree when my dad gave them each a fiver and a shopping cart. They’ve gone to the museum, the zoo, paint your own pottery and the playground. They saw fireworks, waved sparklers and ran around with glow necklaces and bracelets as the sun faded from a red welt into a purplish haze. They’ve gone to the movies, the pool, and have played, played, played upstairs in the playroom. They’ve been to Target, to Barnes and Noble, and Build-A-Bear Workshop picking out books and toys. They are having the best.summer.ever.
I’m jealous.
August is peeking over the horizon and I’m stunned. The summer had stretched so far in front of us for so long, I’m surprised to actually see it come to an end. I feel like I was just writing about our plans and how I was looking forward to the start of the summer. Thankfully, we’ve got our last hurrah before it’s all said and done — the Vineyard. Even though we’re going to be driving (*shudder*), I have to say that I’m really looking forward to it. We’re committed to making this pilgrimage part of the Dixon family history and this year, we’re going to introduce Miss Vivi to it. The guest room has become a staging area for towels, sheets, beach gear, clothes and the usual detritus that makes its way into suitcases and duffel bags.
The end of the summer is always a transition and this year is no different. I’m marveling at how in a few short weeks, I’ll have a seven year old (August 23rd, and yes, Mo is reminding everyone and anyone in a 2 foot radius), a rising kindergartner and a 3 month old. Fast forward another week or so and we’ll be full on into the school year and all the stuff that goes along with it (you know I’m talking about all things pumpkin!).
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Time to enjoy the last few hours that July has to offer before fully wrapping my arms around August.
So this week, the girls have been doing day camps. Mo is doing her second year at an outdoor adventure camp and loving every minute of it. She gets to do kayaking, zip-lining, tree climbing, free fall swinging. . .it’s awesome. She comes home filthy, excited and full of new skills like knot tying, Hot 100 lyric recitation (you haven’t lived until you hear a 6 year old rap out “Dynamite”), and hand clapping games.
The hand clapping games aren’t that different from when I was a kid. There is still the traditional Miss Mary Mack and Miss Lucy with her steamboat. Now, though is this new game that I watched two girls play yesterday morning. I’d never seen anything like it.
The girls faced each other, pressed their hands together as if in prayer and bowed to one another.
Then, they pulled their hands apart as if they were going to do a chest press. One girl tried to slap the palm of the other girl. They took turns doing this until someone succeeded. The person whose hand got slapped placed it behind her back and so it went until the first person has both hands behind their back. If they hadn’t started the game by bowing to one another I probably wouldn’t have noticed. I think I can say the same thing for Mo, who is as enamored of Asian cultures as I am of French. The girls continued to play, not even pausing when the father of one of the players tried to say goodbye to his little camper. Instead of getting a kiss from his daughter, he got a face full of palm from her friend as he bent down to plant one on her cheek. And of course, I laughed. . .to myself, not in his face. I do have some manners, after all.
Later on in the afternoon, I was describing what I had seen to our babysitter and she said, “Oh yeah, that’s called Ninja. We play it all the time.” Now, our sitter is a rising college junior. I didn’t know that hand clapping games were still fashionable at that age. Evidently, on her campus, if ever a wait time exceeds five minutes, various games of Ninja will be in full effect.
This morning, I asked Mo how camp was going and how she liked her new friends. She enthusiastically described her favorite parts and when I asked her about the hand clapping game, she said, “You mean Ninja?”
Co stopped munching her Cheerio’s and said, “Isn’t that on the iPad?”
“Not Fruit Ninja,” Mo said, exasperated. “The game Ninja that you play with your hands.”
Co chewed thoughtfully for a minute. “Did I see that on YouTube?”
My four year-old citing the iPad and YouTube as her sources of information. If that wasn’t a defining generational moment, I don’t know what is.
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| Image |
The girls get out of school in about 5 days. Then the summer will officially begin. Oh sure, there are a few camps in the mix, but when those requisite summer activities are completed, it will be a summer of no plans. Shock of all shocks, right?
I’m hoping that me and the three love-bugs will spend many days outside just watching the clouds roll by and waiting for the delicious melody of the ice cream man rolling through the neighborhood.
There will be sidewalk chalk.
There will be bubble juice and every conceivable contraption to make bubbles.
There will be sprinklers and new bathing suits.
There will be trips to the pool.
There will be trips to the playground.
There will be Popsicle stained mouths and dirt stained knees.
There will be bug bites and lightening bugs trapped in jelly jars.
There will be cook-outs with ketchup stained paper plates.
There will trips to the Vineyard, to the grands.
There will be smiles and laughs and happiness.
Let’s get started. . .
A lot can happen in a few days. . .
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| Introducing Vivian |
I went in for my week 37 check and ended up staying to have a baby!
Now that the littlest biscuit has arrived, my time is not my own. Mo and Co have only a few more days until the end of school and then we are deep in the throes of the summa, summa, summertime!
I think it’s best that I put the blog on pause for a little while, just until I find my feet as a mom of three! I hope to post more – more words, more pictures – when I get a chance, so please check back often. Until then, have a safe and wonderful Memorial Day week-end!
I encourage the girls to spend time playing either on the own or together. Usually after a busy day of school, some kind of after-school activity, miscellaneous running around and the like, we get home in that magical witching hour of post-homework/pre-dinner. It’s a crap-tastic time filled with whining, huffing and puffing, and eye rolling. And then, there’s the routine that the girls go through. I kid (no, not really. No, really).
In any event, once all the school related stuff (making lunches, homework, assorted notices filled out or filed), has been taken care of, I need to move onto the next phase of the day: dinner time. Usually, I have a plan in my head of what’ll be on the menu. If I’ve really been on my game, I’ve already got some kind of protein defrosted or some vegetables in various stages of being cut up. It’s when I’ve got my hand up a chicken’s keister trying to take out the giblets when Mo and Co tromp into the kitchen to announce how bored they are.
They’ve got book — theirs and the ones from the library.
They’ve got dolls.
They’ve got markers, crayons, colored pencils and pads upon pads of paper.
They’ve got LeapFrog reading systems that will READ.TO.THEM.
They’ve got sidewalk chalk, jumpropes, and bubbles so that they can GO.OUTSIDE.
But no, they don’t want any of that. They want me to entertain them. Oh, and did I mention that they’re hungry?
Here, watch Mommy do some soft-shoe while she de-bones a chicken and blanches some asparagus.
Anyway, in order to distract them from oogling what I’m making and then issuing proclamations of “I’m not eating that!”, I told them to go upstairs and play.
Cue the girls going boneless, sinking to the floor as they strike up a chorus of “Do we have to?” and “I don’t want to” and “Why do you get to watch TV all the time and we never get to do anything fun.”
I’m not really interested in outlining the ways in which they live a cake-walk existence, but I do want to nip this rudeness in the bud. So, while they pause for breath between rants, I very firmly, but very gently remind them that I’m not one of their little friends that they can talk to any which way.
“And for the record,” I tell them, waving chicken parts in the air to emphasize my point,” I know that you would never talk to your teachers that way, being all rude and disrespectful, so please don’t do it here.”
“Now, go upstairs until I call you for dinner. And work on those disrespectful attitudes.” As they stomped up the stairs, I called after them, “Oh, I know! Go play school and practice in your workbooks!” Yeah, they’ll love doing that.
Some how, oh miracle of miracles, they stayed upstairs busily entertaining themselves. Dinner got made, the table was set, the plates put in the places. When I called them down to eat, they came enthusiastically without complaint. As they headed to the table, Morgan handed me a piece of paper and said, “Oh, here. We were playing school. It’s a note from Co’s teacher.”
I’m going to need a straight-jacket and a rubber room before they’re out of elementary school.
Last week, I mentioned that I was going to put up a few pictures of the little soccer themed medals I made for Co’s team. A little background: Co is in the midst of her first soccer season via the YMCA. As the date for the first game drew closer, the hubby kept getting emails saying that the team had no coach. The emails grew more and more persistent — there’s no coach, we’d really like a parent to step up and coach, the team needs a coach — you get the idea. So, my dear, dear, hubs decided to earn some cool points with his youngest daughter and signed up to be the coach.
I joke on him about it, but in truth, it’s really sweet. My hubby is a few inches over 6 feet tall and it’s absolutely precious to see him getting out on the field with seven pig-tail sporting, jersey clad soccer superstars.
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| Talking strategy |
Anyway, aside from taking our turn bringing snack to the team over the course of the season, I thought it would be nice to make a little memento for the kiddos. Surprisingly, Pinterest wasn’t involved! I mean, I had an idea that was relatively easy to execute. I didn’t need any Pinterest suggestions to totally blow my good intentions out of the water and then everyone ends up empty handed at the end of the season.
So, here’s what I did. . .
I figured it would be best to use the team colors as the basis for the medal. The team name — The Camels — proved a bit challenging for me to try to incorporate into a craft-tastic project. I even Googled “soccer camel” and the results were way less than stellar. I’m no artist, either. I mean, I can get by with some caricatures and doodles, but my attempts at a soccer playing camel cartoon were alternately hilarious and pathetic. If you thought Joe Camel looked like a penis, imagine him in full Pélé gear with a football shaped soccer ball at this feet. Yeah, that’s kind of how my rendering came out.
A trip to the craft shop for some cardstock and stickers (yay!) turned things around immensely. Here are my supplies:
1. Cardstock in the team colors: black, white and red. I even splurged on the fancy, textured cardstock. You can’t see if in the above picture, but each piece is Swiss dot. Ooohh la la!
2. A set of stickers that featured soccer balls and practice cones.
3. A set of alphabet stickers (because my handwriting is atrocious).
4. A roll of white satin ribbon.
5. My circle cutter from my stint as a card making Stampin’ Up! fanatic.
6. A glue stick
So, I made several concentric circles in the various colors. I figured the black would serve as a great background with the white as an eye catching accent and the red, the perfect canvas for the lettering. Snipped two lengths of ribbon, crossing one end and gluing it to the black. Then I affixed the remaining circles to the black circle. I snipped the loose ends of the ribbon to get those little points and let the whole thing dry.
Once everything was stuck together, I broke out the stickers and set to work. You’d think with only seven girls on the team, this would be easy, but let me tell you, those Alpha-Dot stickers are incredibly adhesive to their own backing. For every letter I pulled up, at least half of it still had paper stuck to it. Tweezers would have come in handy, but of course, I didn’t think of that until after the fact. Like I said, I opted for stickers because my handwriting isn’t the greatest. I should have invested in a level or some kind of centering device as well because eyeballing the center of the circle so that the name lines up just so left a lot to be desired. With the names in place, I embellished the circle with a soccer ball and a cone. It still looked a little plain, so contrary to my own intentions, I picked up a Sharpie and free-handed the season and the year under each kids’ name, along with a “Go Camels!” across the top.
And ta-da!
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| Everyone’s a winner! |
Co is really enjoying being a Camel and has scored at least one goal at each game. Aside from some pictures we’ve snapped, now she’s got a little something extra to commemorate her super season. As for me and my crafty ribbon/medal making, let’s just say all those shops on Etsy can breathe easy. Way easy. . .