Busy busy busy

A lot of families in our neighborhood have a couple or three kids who are each involved in multiple activities practically year-round. That hasn't turned out to be how we roll, for the most part, but right now, we're living at least a semblance of that life. Reed has flag football (two practices a week and a game on Saturday) and Amy's doing Girl Scouts, tennis and since I took this photo of our weekly family calendar she's added piano lessons as well. Oh and Tod's playing softball again, one night a week, and has been doing some extra time at work too. It's all good, since these are things the kids enjoy, but man it's a lot! We're accustomed to being home all the time and having our weekends totally open, so it's a bit of an adjustment. We'll get back to being lazy-ish sometime soon, I'm sure.

An Amy for Amy

Back in February, Amy got a special gift from Grandma Allder...

Grandma gave this Madame Alexander doll of "Amy" from Little Women to my Mom when she was nine years old, in 1960. (Wanda got the Jo doll.) Over the winter, Grandma had Poppy locate the doll with the plan of passing her along to Amy. Her clothes and hair were in great shape, but her body needed some work....so Poppy took Grandma to Maryland to visit a woman who runs a "doll hospital" at her house for repairs. Then Grandma washed the doll's clothes and got her all cleaned up to give to our Amy.

Poppy and Grandma took Amy out to lunch at Ford's Fish Shack and gave her the doll, who now has a special spot on the bookshelf in Amy's room.

Amy hasn't read "Little Women" just yet - she started on it but didn't quite get hooked in, so maybe when she's a little older she'll enjoy this classic book.

Family sayings

I think every family has some little sayings that are unique to them.

For our family, a few come to mind. "Eat place" is what Reed called restaurants when he was probably 3 years old. That one's kind of stuck.

My mis-speaking during a game of Clue got us "lead poop" instead of "lead pipe" as a weapon of choice for would-be murderers.

Last year, Reed was asked to take care of his friend Robbie's pet gecko while the family was on vacation. The first sentence into a full-page description of his care was "Geckos are a fairly low-maintenance pet" - um, not really, when you've got to leave out meal worms in a certain spot, put damp paper towels out, and I can't even remember the other very specific instructions!

And then there's the family favorite "But there's no post on Sundays," which Amy will never live down. In November 2012, we were ordering her a Pokemon game she'd been saving up for, and Amazon said it'd be delivered that Sunday. Without missing a beat, Amy aid "But there's no post on Sundays" - it was so quaint and adorable (she was deep in a Harry Potter phase at that point) that we all laughed and she got really mad! And she continued to get mad any time it got mentioned after that...but we didn't really mean to upset her, of course, it was just such an unusual thing to say! She doesn't really get too mad any more if we say it, but we have to be judicious.

"Jackets are for the weak"

That's this morning's bit of wisdom from the teenager...."Jackets are for the weak." Learn something new every day!

How long is a minute?

We are constantly in a state of time warp with Amy. I know it's both developmentally and age appropriate that she can't tell how much time is passing, but man is it frustrating! This morning I told her we needed to leave in two minutes to get to running club. Five minutes later she says she's ready to go, and I tell her it's too late, we've missed it. She yells at me that she "only put two things" in her backpack (those two things were apparently scattered through the house, I guess). We give her plenty of warnings, we do our best to move her along but still we all end up frustrated. Putting her shoes on is never less than a 3-5 minute production, most often closer to the 5-minute mark. How is that even possible?!? And yet it's our everyday reality. One regular minute is equal to at least three Amy minutes. But she's growing up more and more all the time, and I know it's just a matter of time before she "gets" this concept and we're all a lot more calm!

School days

Last week was the seventh grade honor roll celebration. Reed said he didn't want us to go, but this is part of the never-ending parental dilemma....they say they don't want you there, but maybe secretly they do. Or at least maybe one day they'll appreciate that you were there. So I went. I wasn't received well. If he was secretly happy that I was there, he hid it pretty well. I know, I know...normal teenage behavior. Still made me a little sad. Then Tod reminded me that the during an outing to the Torpedo Factory art gallery the previous weekend, Reed very frequently held my hand (which was so nice). So maybe things are just as they should be. 

The certificate is a little worse for wear
after a trip through Reed's backpack.

Another school thing that was weighing on my mind was Amy's sixth grade classes. The middle school principal indicated that a lot of kids who were placed in accelerated math (Math 6/7, where they do all of 6th and 7th grade math in one school year) turned out not to be ready for the class, so they changed the testing process with the hopes of getting only students who could really handle the class. The day she went to the computer lab to take the test, for some reason the test wasn't loaded on her profile the way it was supposed to be. They tried to fix it but she ended up having to miss science class later in the day to go take the test on her own. I was concerned that she might have been really stressed out over all the changes of plan, but no need to worry – she got a 90%, when a 70% or higher was needed to be recommended for the accelerated math class. The same day we got those results, we got the rest of her recommendations...

All honors classes.

Way to go, kids!

50s on 5

A little while ago, on one of Reed's forays into riding in the front seat (still a novelty at this point), he changed the XM satellite radio channel from the usual pop music over to the "50s on 5" channel. And now must times he's in the car, he asks that we listen to that station. He says the music is "weird" and funny and has lots of different sounds, but he likes it. I try to keep my enthusiasm for it tempered, lest my happiness at his hearing the Everly Brothers or Elvis or Sam Cooke turn him off of it entirely.

I remember Saturday mornings when my Mom would drive us to the Safeway in Reston to hand us off to my Dad for the night, listening to oldies countdowns and hearing lots of these songs. I guess that's where it all started!