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A continuation of my original blog, "Surviving Motherhood". |
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Welcome to my world of middle school, high school, and motherhood. The life of a mom is never easy, especially as children grow, and especially when you have a special needs child. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Thanksgiving has come and gone. Today is the last day of break, and then everything goes back to normal again, until December 23rd. I thoroughly enjoyed having Don and the kids home, as I always do. Dixon also enjoyed it, and will be a very sad kitty boy when tomorrow dawns and Rowel, Marl and Rolul will be out in the real world, and he'll be stuck with good ol' Meowlel. Sometimes his disdain doe me is piercing, but not much I can do about it. I'm sure absence would make his little furry heart grow fonder, but I really have no way to give that to him. Today we'll hopefully be putting up the tree, which I've been itching to do for awhile now. Now that we have the pre-lit, it's so much easier to put it up. It's also a lot easier to take it down. I still enjoy it a lot though. Hopefully the kids will be into decorating it this year, like they've done for the last few years. I've decided that this is the last year Santa will be making his presence in our household. I've been playing Santa for the last 14 years, and really, I've grown quite tired of it. It was fun while the kids were small, but now that they're older, I've found it's quite the task to keep up. I've worked very hard over the years to keep up the elaborate rouse, and now, I feel it's time to put it to bed. This will be the last time Santa enters our house. Next year, Journey will finally know the truth. I hope she handles it well. I hope she's not mad at us. I hope it doesn't break her heart. We will find out in a few months' time though. All my friends with smaller children lament how sad it all is, that there will no longer be Santa in our house. Truth be told, I'm pretty relieved about it. One day, when their kids are 11, 12 years old, and they've been playing Santa for quite some time, they'll understand where I'm coming from and why they'll grow tired of playing Santa all the time. As kids get older, things become staler. It's time to give up the jig, and go on having Christmases that just include us. I feel it will make it much easier. I've gotten everything in for the Bronze Award ceremony, so I'm pretty excited about that right now. We'll be holding the Bronze ceremony on December 10th at a local pizza place (where we've held Ryan's birthday for the last two years actually), with hope that the girls enjoy it all. I've gotten them quite a few gifts, and I feel they've worked very hard to earn them. I'm looking forward to the ceremony. |
| Sometimes, the simplest things can set off waves of emotion, you didn't even realize you had some for that realization. Journey decided that it was time for her to use deodorant on gym days. While personally I don't believe she actually sweats from her underarms right now, I know that this is simply a passing of ages, and I won't discourage her from doing so. Too soon, she will grow into a teenager, and I will no longer have babies anymore. Now, I've blogged that I don't look back in a wave of nostalgia and wish for the old days. I still don't. But, I'd be a liar if I didn't say I just cried for a good 6 minutes about how my kids are growing. It really struck me just now, how my son will be in high school in a matter of months, and how my daughter will be in middle school at the same time. No more elementary school, ever again. We will never be a part of LES anymore. Tears just streamed down my face for the loss and the change. It feels like things have been moving so fast, yet they haven't been at all. So many friends and relatives have fuzzy memories of how old my kids actually are, and are quite surprised when I tell them that Ryan is 13, and Journey is 10. They can remember the days when Journey was a newborn, and Ryan was a precocious 3 year old. To me, it's less of a shock, because I witness them growing and changing every day; small steps at a time. For those that haven't seen them in a long time, it's an utter shock to see just how much they've grown and changed. Ryan is the size of an adult now. Journey hasn't shot up yet, but I won't be surprised at all if she's taller by the end of the year and starts looking more the part of a 6th grader. In other news, my 9 Bronze girls have earned their award. We will be holding a ceremony on the 10th of December for them, and I cannot wait to give them everything they've earned and deserve. I bought them some Junior Girl Scout fabric wristlets, as well as Bronze Christmas ornaments to commemorate the year of earning it. I am so super proud of them and everything they've accomplished. I cannot wait to put this ceremony together for them. They deserve it. Journey has already come up with her Silver Award, and has asked Grace to join her in it, which Grace has accepted the offer. They can start making things now over the summer and for the first year of Cadettes while we earn our journey, and then 7th grade, they can roll it out, and earn that Silver. Ryan had his school band concert last Thursday, and it was quite enjoyable. I was really impressed about how 7th grade and 8th grade band sounded together. 7th grade has some strengths where 8th grade has some deficits, and vice versa. 7th grade's trumpets are better than 8th grade's, but 8th grade's clarinets are superior. All in all, I was quite proud. Ryan has an All County Honor Band concert on Friday night, which he has earned 1st chair to play. In case you're not sure, 1st chair is highly coveted, and means you're the cream of the crop. I asked Ryan to continue to keep trying to earn everything he can with his clarinet as he gets older, and how he was given such an amazing gift. I did let him know though that when it stops bringing him joy, he can step down from it at any time. When the youth orchestra here denied him because he didn't take private lessons, I was highly upset and affronted at first. Now, I look at it as their loss. He was the only 7th grader in his entire school last year that made Tri-County Honor Band, and now he's 1st chair in All County Honor Band. Snubbing him for something so trivial is ridiculous, but like I said, their loss. They're missing out on a sensational talent. The kids' report cards came in yesterday, and I'm quite thrilled with them. For the first time since 5th grade, Ryan procured all A's. Language Arts has always been his toughest subject, so I know he worked extra hard to get that A this quarter. Journey has been struggling a bit in math these days, but she took that D she was scraping by with and turned it into a C, and I couldn't be more proud of her if I tried! The greatest part of their report cards is that they're trying their very best, and that's what I appreciate the most. Whether it equals out to A's or C's, as long as they're giving it their best effort, that's what's most important to me. |
| There is never a day where my kids don't amaze the hell out of me. They are upstanding human beings, and I am so privileged to be their mom and be in their lives. I know I've come on here and gushed and gushed about them ad nauseum, but I cannot help but being a proud and grateful mother. Today's edition is an ode to Journey. For the last 3 weeks, Journey has been borderline obsessed with creating a cat class president campaign. She's created campaign posters, drew up plans on how she's going to alter the school, written down changes she's going to make, who her VP and staff are going to be, made a victory speech, created a new mascot for the school, has attempted to email her principal about setting all of this up, has talked to and received votes (albeit they believed she was just pretending) from her teachers and friends, has held a debate, created vote cards, and has connected with financial backers (her Pokemon) to fiance her campaign. Never in her life have I witnessed her put so much effort into something like this. With all this work, she has singlehandedly earned the "Inside Government" badge from Girl Scouts. The sad part is, pretty much all this planning, developing, and creating is all for naught. Though her teachers are great in supporting her ideas and dreams, the reality of this actually happening is very slim (unless the principal and the assistant principal want to make her day and let it seriously run through the school for a day...I don't see that happening, but, I digress), and Don and I have tried to gently let her know that this may not even come to fruition. She was devastated last night when she told us that cat class president elections and ceremony were supposed to be today, and she hadn't heard back from the principal for permission to overtake the office and change things. I admire her gumption, her spunk and her determination. One day, with the right tools, she'll change the world. Don and I got to talking about her characteristics and her future when she went to bed. Journey is the most driven, dedicated, determined, hard working, persevering, creative, out of the box thinker that I have ever met. When that girl hopes and dreams, she doesn't just leave it at that-she gets to work. She plots, she plans, she spends time on it. She works on it whenever there's free time. Where there's a will, she makes a way. She's a tenacious little thing, and she doesn't take no for an answer. She has all this in spades, and thensome! I have watched her work fervently on this campaign for the last 3 weeks. I wish like hell all her efforts could be put into some special extra credit social studies project, because the detail and the planning that she put into this is top notch. When this girl gets an idea, she runs with it, and nearly nothing will stop her. All of this has me making wishes for her as she becomes an adult. I wish that she can work for a company that has projects all the time. I wish for that company to make her a leader of many of those projects. I wish for that company to adore out of the box, creative ideas and solutions, because she is just chalk full of them. She understands what needs to get done in order to make things happen, like creating a budget, getting the supplies needed, putting in all the work and effort, working on the details, smoothing things out, doing a practice run, looking for kinks and problem solving issues that arise as work continues. She helped do ALL THIS for Girl Scout 101. This is what I've been trying to teach my girls since they were Brownies. Journey already has ample supply of it. She blows me away. If given the right tools and opportunity, Journey is going to be very successful in this world, I have no doubt in my mind. She has the right attitude, the right work ethic, and a boat full of skills to go with it. She's shown this since product sales in Girl Scouts. She shows this in every project we put together in Girl Scouts. Hands down, even though me and the organization (or as I like to now call them, the corporation) don't always see eye to eye, Girl Scouts has done Journey a world of good. I do not regret it for an instant, because I'm seeing things in her now that are going to take her very far in life as she gets older. |
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