I have a little girl who has a little curl....

Life with a 3 year old....
  I had this little girl who was so sweet... and listened to what I told her to do....and now, she is slowly turning into an independant stubborn little sassy pants.  Everyofne said it would happen, but I really didn't think it would...I mean, she was so good!... And now she is so...not.
  I mean, don't get me wrong, she isn't terrible all the time, but like the old nursery rhyme goes..."When she is good she is very, very good, and when she is bad she is HORRID". They must have been talking about a three year old when they wrote that one.
  This afternoon, Jen and her two daughters came by for a visit and to let the kids play together for a while. Carlie actually threw a xylaphone....THREW IT!  Those things are HEAVY!  Then proceeded to have a total melt down, hissy fit that got her taken  out of the fun and games for the remainder of thier visit....I know that this too shall pass, and she's just testing her limits... but damn, it sucks. 
Henri and I have made the very difficult  decision to take her out of  the daycare that she has been at since she was 1, and move her to the child care center that I work at. Tomorrow will be her class visit, so she will come to work with me. This ought to be interesting.  I'm looking forward to getting to have her around me all day.  It will be a challenge to keep my work and her pre-school life seperate.... But she is resilliant and has risen and conquored every challenge life has thrown at her with  great success, so I am confident that this will be no different. She has a great way of rolling with the punches. I pray that this is a skill she keeps for life. If it is,  I know that she will  always do just fine.  We are sad that she has to leave the comfortable small child care center that she has come to love and the fantastic teachers there who have the patience of saints... The one on one attention she has gotten there has made her thrive and she is a smart little cookie...But the root of life is change...and I guess there's no time like now to teach her that.

  We are going to C.T. this coming weekend to visit my Father in Law before he leaves for his bird watching RV trip across the country. I love Western MA and CT. I miss the days when Henri lived in Springfield and we would pick a road on a Sunday morning and follow it just to see where it went.  Or the trips to Fishkill NY to the I85 Diner for lunch and cheesecake... Those trips were usually filled with conversations about where our lives would be in 5 years and how nice it would be to be settled down. Funny, now we talk about how nice it would be to be able to do that trip again whenever we want... The grass is always greener.

  

VALENTINES DAY

We had a great Valentines Day weekend.  Carlie and I made this card for Henri and had a blast decorating it.  There were roses and chocolates and Tinkerbelle lunchboxes full of little gifts....We all snuggled up on the big bed and watched G-Force...Which Carlie had absolutely NO interest in whatsoever.... But that was OK.

A few days ago however, it was anything but relaxing. We were all running around  preparing for a blizzard of "epic proportions" according to the weather forcast... WRONG. We got about 6 inches of slush.... Some towns didn't even get snow!  This is what our Main St. looked like the morning after our "BLIZZARD"

Inpassable huh?  Oh well, it's just as well....Henri was up half the night and was out in our driveway at the crack of dawn salting and scraping the snow/slush mess. Such a great guy.  My job dismissed early along with just about every other buisness in town...so it wasn't a total loss.

It's over.

                                                                         

Well, The holiday's have come and gone without much fanfare. "Good" I say, I was looking for a fanfare-less kind of holiday season anyway this year.
 Everytime someone asked me what I was doing for Christmas, I felt myself stiffen and a knot form in my stomach, because I knew the next line was coming..."Oh...This is your first Christmas without your Mom"....Yes... Thank you for reminding me. As if I need reminding.
 I think my Mom was popping in and out on me alot during the last few days before Christmas to be sure I was alright, because I felt very peaceful about my first parentless Christmas. And even though it seemed like she was on my mind constantly, it was in a good way more than a sad way. 
This year I felt more like a Mom myself than ever.  Call me a spoiled only child, but Christmas has always been about "ME".  Even the last couple years, of course we spoil Carlie and she gets more than she could ever want... but she was too young to really get it.     My Mom always spoiled me... I was her only child and that's what she did best. And no matter how old I was, I loved it...really, who wouldn't???    But not this year, for the first time in my life it was totally about someone else.  Yup, it's official... I'm a grown up...like it or not.
Oh these life lessons are so much friggin fun.

    I had the week after Christmas off and so did Carlie. We hung out alot at home for most of the week, until New Years Eve day when we made a pilgrimage to Bostons Childrens Museum with Jen (Carlie's Godmother) and her two daughters Olivia and my Godchild Ava.  We had a great time...The kids seemed to enjoy it too.  There was so much to do and see it was absolutely amazing! I wanted to see it all, but we were short on time.  It went pretty smoothly too!( if you don't count the fact that I was put in charge of "Ava watch"  twice and lost her both times....But I found her...and that's what really matters). 
   It was a much diffrent place than I remember. The last time I was there I think I was about 9 years old and the only thing that sticks out in my memory about the whole trip was that my Mother got screwed on a taxi ride from the bus station to the museum.  From that point until today I have always thought of Boston as a bad place full of bad people.  I have also learned through experiences in my fairly recent adult life  that nothing good happens in Boston, so I normally avoid it like the plague.

It was a refreshing experience to go to Boston for some fun, not get screwed (except for the prices at the cafeteria in the museum) and to be able to relax and enjoy.  Thank you Jen for that.

 We got home by 6PM and I was expecting company for dinner and a movie...at 6PM.   A quick txt to Henri to txt Thom and Amy and hold them off for a half hour longer...a whirlwind of putting toys away and wiping down the counters and bathroom...A zip trip to Windfall Market for dessert, snacks and a few essentials and VOILA!  A New Years Eve shin-dig that would have made June Clever proud.  (Except I forgot to put on my pearls).  We watched Julie and Julia wich was FANTASTIC and ate Chineese food  (Wich I detest...but seem to be the only one on earth that dislikes it). And had a great time visiting with friends that we haven't seen in far too long.   Everyone went home early, Thom had to work at 5AM. Henri and I were in bed and watching CNN countdown to the New Year  by 10:30PM. Perfect.

  I recieved a few HAPPY NEW YEARS txt wishes and watched for my friends Andy and Jess in Key West on CNN LIVE till midnight.  That was that. It's over.  Happy 2010 and here's hoping we can all get through it healthy and happy and better off by the end of it.
  
    

How NOT to make a Gingerbread House.

This is the story about the day that I decided to become a "Martha Stewart Mom" and make some memories with my daughter


Step 1.) Decide that since your husband has gone to a high school reunion for the weekend and it's raining, this would be a good time to "bond" with your daughter over a home baked gingerbread house...how festive!!! and how hard could it be...really???

Step 2.) Take your little angel to the grocery store and buy $29.00 worth of candy and

supplies...telling EVERYONE what a wonderful mother you are...and your going to bake a beautiful festive gingerbread house!!...Forget a bag of ingredients at Walmart and stop halfway through the recipe to load back up in the truck and go get said bag.....OK, back home...




Step3) Dress your daughter up in a new apron and get crackin! Within minutes use every mixing bowl in your tiny kitchen and have at least a pound of flour at your feet....but were having FUN!!!







Step4) Run out of molasses 1/2 cup short...but so what?...whose going to REALLY eat the walls???...Keep on baking!!!

(I am NOT going back to the store!!) The dough comes out great!! and actually seems like things are going remarkably well so far!!

Step5) Cut out the walls and roof using the downloaded template from the computer....Here is where things went wrong I will learn MUCH later....

Step6) Create a graham cracker cookie house for your daughter to keep her from asking you for the 1,000,000th time..."Mom, can we put the candy canes and marshmallows on now?" So she can do just that while the gingerbread house bakes and cools...and I sit down for a few minutes....This keeps her quiet for a while....(Because her mouth is now completely full of candy for pretty much the remainder of the day). This is where I stopped taking pictures because the house was done and it was time for me to start my "Creation".

Step 7) As I said in step 5...things went wrong at the "cutting out" point because the template "eluded" to a cut that shouldn't have been...I learned this as I was holding two walls up with one hand...trying to "glue" them together with my homemade Martha Stewart royal icing...propping up one side with a box of jell-o that I grabbed with my teeth from the cabinet and of course I couldn't let the walls go until the icing "set up" then, as I stood there going over the next step in my head the realization set in ...there was no place to attach my roof.....ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME???????

(probably a good thing there are no pictures of this particular part because it got ugly.)

I propped up the walls with everything I could reach and grabbed my roof to be SURE I wasn't mistaken. I wasn't. Just then, the whole thing imploded...one wall cracked in half and I snapped.

Step 8) Open the kitchen window and hurl the entire gingerbread house out of it. OH yes I did!!!

Carlie came out into the kitchen to say..."Mom?...Why you trow de gingerbwead house out de window?" Because I MESSED IT ALL UP!...(What a wonderful lesson to teach my impressionable daughter....But right then and there... I was too mad to care!!!)

She thought that was just hysterical, disappeared and returned with a pretzel..."Mom...You shawe my pretzew wid me?"
I wondered if anyone was walking down the street when I opened the window and flung a whole gingerbread house out it... My neighbors must think by now I'm a lunatic, this isn't the first kitchen disaster to go out my window....

Step 9) So now what do I do with the fact that I have all this friggin candy and no gingerbread house?

I go to Shaw's and buy that damned kit that I scoffed at a week ago thinking...."That's for losers... I can make my OWN!" HA HA HA!!! Foolish me.

So at 6:30pm I loaded up Cricket Carlie and myself and we headed to the store to by the "Looser Gingerbread house kit" just to get the FRIGGIN THING DONE!!! After that, we stopped at McDonalds for dinner ( Because we've eaten so healthy so far all day, why break a cycle?) And then headed home.

Step 10) Once we ate our most nutritious dinner, I opened the " Looser kit" and took out the dinkiest little cardboard looking un appetizing gingerbread house I have ever seen..."F____IT!" I dove in with every bag of candy I had and decorated the hell out of that house!!

Carlie had long since lost total interest in anything but stuffing as much candy into her mouth as possible and was continually hopping at this point on a crack like sugar high while watching NICK JR. for the third cosecutive hour.

Before I knew it it was 8:30PM and I had run out of places to stick candy onto this little creation of mine. THANK GOD THAT IS OVER!!!!

Step11) Survey the damage. After all was said and done, the kitchen was DESTROYED. Royal icing by the way sets up to a cement like substance that can only be removed with scalding hot water and a putty knife. I had dishes everywhere and I was stepping on graham crackers, candy and chunks of gingerbread house everywhere I went...(This was SUCH a good idea).

So after bribing Carlie into my bed and getting her to lie still for 5 minutes she passed out cold.

I did the dishes....chiseled off the counter tops and made myself a spiked eggnog with an Excedrin chaser.

I will probably never attempt this again...good thing I took these pictures so I can one day prove that I made an effort at being a "Martha Stewart Mom". But by then, Carlie will know me well enough to realize I tried...and it's not me. And I think I just realized that too.