Rose's new kite

After almost a week stuck in the house (she and I have both been sick the entire time it's been rainy), we finally had a little energy and a bit of dry weather with a spring breeze. Perfect for flying a kite!

Happy spring! Fingers crossed that some warm weather arrives and the runny noses leave soon!

Rose's 4th birthday: Weekend of celebrations!

Rose is loving her birthday more and more every year. This year, since her birthday fell on a Friday, she ended up having multiple days of celebration!

Thursday evening Grammy picked her up from "school," per usual.

But this Thursday was anything but usual since Grammy had arranged for Rose to receive a birthday phone call from a princess!!!

 It was a call from Aurora! Aka Sleeping Beauty! Aka Briar Rose! Aka Rose's favorite princess!!!

The festivities continued bright and early the next morning with an "immediate family" celebration. I had run out to Cub at 5:30am to pick up flowers and donuts, and Mike had wrapped her big pile of presents. She obviously thought it was a great way to start her day!

On Friday afternoon, my parents picked her up! Somehow I managed not to get a single picture of them with Rose this past weekend, but I did get this one shot of her dressed as a bride and opening her presents from Ninja and PopPop.

Then Saturday was Rose's "cousins party!"  Really it was a party for all her extended family (we missed you, Sara/Dave/Eleanor!), but she was so focused for weeks on wanting to play with her cousins...and then she proceeded to be too shy to talk directly to them for the first two hours of her three hour party. :)   

 They did color, play dolls, and play at the park all side-by-side for awhile.

 The adults mostly enjoyed the beautiful weather outside. Some day our lucky streak will come to an end, but so far we've had great weather for her parties! (See: 2013, 2014, 2015)

 

See the construction out there?!

I also like to get a photo of Rose with her cousin Annie each year. Annie is about 5 weeks older - and
their height discrepancy seems to increase each year!  I love seeing the normal variations of their respective growth curves.

 Rose had requested a special meal of  "salad with cucumbers, sausages, fruit, and ice cream cake" for her party. Her favorite part ended up being the Cheetos that her cousins brought for her!

 Although I think the "princess cake" was a close second. (I amused myself by calling it a "Frozen cake" -- note the double entendre!)

 Rose got some WONDERFUL gifts. She has slowly been playing with each of them - coloring books, princesses, games, etc.  (Thank you, everyone!!)

 

 She is especially in love with this dress from Grammy and Grandpa.

Maybe she'll be a "princess scientist"  when she grows up???

Then Sunday was her "friend party." We paid for a short nature program and space for dessert at our local nature center. 
 

 

The naturalist seemed like he might have been a little comfortable with a slightly older audience, but the kids had a great time seeing (and touching!) the turtle and the salamander, and some of them really loved watching the turtle poop on the floor. Ahh, that's what four year olds really love, apparently.

As you can see the weather was a bit cold and drizzly on Sunday, but we still went on a VERY short nature walk.

All in all, we had a great time! In fact, a little too great of a time. As is our tendency, unfortunately, we did a little too much over the weekend and now we are all recovering. Rose came down with a slight fever, headache, and runny nose on Monday, so Mike stayed home with her yesterday (Tues) and I'm staying home with her today. I have a scratchy throat too, so I'm also appreciating the R&R! 

Thank you to everyone who helped make Rose's birthday so special and memorable for her!!

photo albums

Many of you know that I've been using a certain online photo service for years. We generally get our Christmas cards printed there, and I've created countless photo albums over the years.

In fact, for Rose's birthday each year, I've started a new album, worked on it slowly throughout the year, then printed it as a birthday gift (more for myself than for her, if I'm being really honest!), before starting the new one for the next year every April.

Well, a few months ago they "upgraded" their website and lost NINE MONTHS of my work on her age-3-to-4 album. ARGH!!!! I debated starting all over again, but not only did they lose the formatting of my photos into the albums, but they also lost about 75% of my photos themselves. As a result, redoing all that work would take countless hours of sorting through the hundreds of pictures on my hard drive, picking which ones to include, uploading them, and then reformatting them into a new album. Ugh.

So, after much internal strife, I finally decided to just let go of this project.  Sigh.

As life gets busier and I keep working on finding balance, I am continually evaluating what brings me joy vs. what I think I "should" be doing.  And I realized that these albums definitely brought me joy when she was a baby, but at this point in my life I think I could get similar joy from simply keeping this blog up to date.

Easier, and with similarly joyful results? Sounds like a win all around!

Hopefully this means you can look forward to more frequent updates from me :)

annual birthday questions

Rose is 4!! (2016)


Favorite color:  pink
Favorite toy/game:  playing Kristoff or Prince Hans
Favorite food:  mac and cheese
Favorite drink:  milk
Favorite movie:  Sleeping Beauty
Favorite TV show:  the car one
Favorite song:  Jasmine ("A Whole New World")
Favorite book:  Anna and Elsa
Favorite outfit:  my twirly dress I have on now
Best friend:  Eden
Favorite holiday:  my birthday
What I take to bed each night:   pajamas
When I grow up, I want to be:   a princess
I'm afraid to:  bears and alligators and dinosaurs
I'm proud of:   Daddy
Something I do really well:   watch a movie
This makes me happy:   when I have love around me
This makes me sad: when someone hits me or bites me or pinches me or kicks me
Favorite time of day:  playing with Eden
Dream vacation:   to the princesses! (i.e., Disneyland)
Favorite thing to do with Mommy:  play Candyland
Favorite thing to do with Daddy: play Candyland again!

(age 3 - 2015)

beautiful vs. fancy

I'm sure you all aware at this point how very much Rose loves princesses right now -- collecting the dolls, dressing up like a princess, acting out scenes that involve princesses, etc.  Mike and I have both been grudgingly accepting of this form of dramatic play (and hopeful that it's time-limited!), but we've also been trying to stress that it's more important to be kind, generous, smart (etc.) too.

It hasn't been sinking in too well, unfortunately.

Recently Rose has decided that she is ONLY "beautiful" when she is dressed up like a princess, which has been upsetting to us. (Perhaps it has something to do with the adulation from friends and strangers -- "look how beautiful you are!!" -- when she is all dressed up??) We keep trying to tell her that she is always beautiful, because being beautiful is not about the clothes we wear, but it's about the kind of person we are. And because she is kind and generous and smart (etc) that means she is always beautiful.  But every time, she would insist "NO!" and state that she is only beautiful in a princess dress. UGH.

This aisle is my nemesis at Target.

Maybe it was too advanced of a concept for a three-year-old??


But then we FINALLY hit on the apparent solution:  we now tell her that she looks FANCY when she is dressed up like a princess, and tell her that she is beautiful (kind, generous, smart, etc.) at regular intervals no matter how she is dressed.


Hooray!! It seems to be working. So please do us a favor and tell Rose she looks "fancy" when she is dressed up and "beautiful" when she is being a beautiful person. :)

back amidst the living

It's been about a month since I last blogged, which has to be a record of some sort for me. But the good news is that I haven't been blogging much because I've been working hard at getting myself better. I've now "graduated" from therapy (again), I'm doing a lot more self care (yay for baths, books, and fun walks/lunches with friends!), and I've been working with my boss to make things better at work.

Not bad for a month's work!

Here's a few highlights from the past several weeks...

My parents came to visit one weekend:

Rose has gotten super into collecting money, so now she constantly asks for "special" chores (as opposed to her usual chores) so she can earn extra dollars or coins. Mostly she buys dolls for herself, but she also does a pretty good job of putting some money in her piggy bank "for college."

Two of her friends have had birthday parties at this giant warehouse with huge bouncy houses and slides (Pump It Up), and Rose thinks this place is the most amazing thing ever! (Too bad it was outside of our budget for her party that's coming up.) A brilliant idea for whoever originally came up with it, as I'm sure they're raking in money hand over fist.

And, of course, Easter!

On that note, I'm off to read some more of my latest novel before bed. Have a great week!

mourning

The pain of losing Lucy and Mac seems to come and go. It times I think I've come to a place of acceptance and even gratitude that they are no longer in any pain, but other times the pain of missing them completely takes my breath away.

My parents sent us these beautiful flowers today. Receiving them was bittersweet - we basically haven't been able to have flowers in the house for the past 13 years, since both cats would eat them all and then throw them up. So I welcome the beauty of the flowers (and appreciate that I won't have to wipe up cat puke any more) but it also makes me miss them so much!!

I even caught myself thinking at one point, "oh, I need to cut that ribbon off the vase, otherwise Mac will eat the ribbon and throw it up later." I can go from realizing the cats are gone and thus the flowers are on display, to a split second later thinking I need to keep the ribbon out of his reach?! I'm just having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that they really are gone.

There have been a million other times that it has caught me off guard:
-when I came into the house after work yesterday and automatically lifted my foot to keep a cat from running out the door while it was open
-when we had pizza for dinner last night and didn't have to close the kitchen door to prevent Lucy from eating it
-when I didn't have to shake the can of treats to get Mac out of Rose's room at bedtime
-when no one came to sit on my lap as I was reading yesterday afternoon
-when I was able to leave an unwrapped stick of butter out in the kitchen while I took a break from baking in order to help Rose with something
-when I rolled over in bed last night and realized I didn't have to worry about accidentally kicking a cat at the foot of the bed
-when I wasn't awoken by hangry cat meows after I slept in a bit this morning
-when I dropped a dollop of yogurt on the floor while baking and realized that no cats would lick it up for me
-when we didn't have any cats circling us, demanding the scraps of our fish dinner tonight

I could go on and on. I miss them terribly.

I've been coping by spending lots of time with my family.   Rose, Mike and I have enveloped ourselves in baking, artwork, and family excursions these past couple days. We'll get through this together.