The Moment

So... I have wasted nearly an entire 23 minutes of quiet time. This is how the long the actual story seems to be on Playhouse Disney shows and Caroline, of course, doesn't seem to like to watch the fluff- once the story is over she's done. I have wasted this time deciding whether of not to talk about last night's historic speech.

I have made a decision and will try to stick to it, to not discuss politics on this blog. If, though, I look at this blog as a journal, as a record of our life as we are living it now, I can't not mention last night's speech. You can agree or disagree with the politics and policies. You can love or hate the man. But Barack Obama will change history.

Much will stay with me of the speech itself but Barack's exit taught me something too.

I am constantly trying to live in the moment. I try and I try and I try. I can't seem to do it. I always use the excuse of being too busy to slow down. Last night as Barack left the stage, he paused and looked over his shoulder. It was brief but noticeable. Perhaps he was not stopping to live in the moment but it sure looked like he was. It looked like he was taking a moment to breath, to look, to listen and to appreciate his moment in history.

I will try to learn from this. I will try and try and try.

Sick Day

After vacationing with our family on and off for the past three weeks, the same virus with fever, aches and headaches has gotten all of the children and is starting to make it's way through the adult population. I started feeling yucky yesterday but blamed it on lack of sleep. When I heard that my father-in-law had a fever, I took my temperature and realized that I wasn't just tired but sick too.

The girls and I were scheduled to leave for my mom's this morning. I knew if I could take lots of Motrin and manage to make the three hour drive that I would be better off. Both my mom and my mother in law asked me if I was still coming/going. While a three hour drive with a fever and two small children wouldn't be fun, neither would hours home alone with the same fever and the same two small children.

The drive was not fun but we made it and I have had the closest thing to a sick day that I've had in five years. As all mothers know, there is no such thing as a sick day when you are the mom in charge. Today though, while my mom played with the girls, I slept, read Maria Shriver's new book- it was short but I dont' care- I haven't finished a book in one sitting in a long... time- and slept some more. I actually rested enough to feel better.

It appears that for a mom to have a sick day, she needs to have her mom!

Words

I love the things the girls are doing with language right now- each in their own way. We had a great example from Caroline tonight at dinner. We had grilled bone-in chicken thighs which we have never served before. When Caroline saw them she said, "Can I have a chicken on the cob?" Sure enough, when you watched Rob eat a piece, with fingers not a fork, it looked a whole lot like eating corn on the cob...

A litte poet

We are back at the beach for a few days and just had to record this...

As we were playing at the beach, Caroline said

"I love the sound of the beach. Sand sounds like seashells."

New Jersey Moms Blog

I have a new post up on New Jersey Moms Blog- read it here.

BIG Weekend

We had a really big weekend. I mean really big.

As I've mentioned before, Caroline has a sensory processing disorder. This has made many typical kid things really hard for her to do. Sensory processing issues affect all kids differently but motor planning has been one of her biggest issues. This is really just a fancy way to say that she is terribly uncoordinated. Or maybe I should say, she was terribly uncoordinated.

Caroline has been begging to take her training wheels off for months now and we have really resisted. Why set her up for failure, we thought. Saturday was a beautiful day and we had no plans so we figured, despite our misgivings, we would go ahead and give it a try. Rob took Caroline and her bike down to a track in town and I crossed my fingers while Katherine napped. Rob and Caroline returned triumphant. She had managed to ride about 500 feet a few separate times. She couldn't start or stop on her own but she could ride. On Sunday, she asked for the "whole family" to go and watch her ride. We all went expecting a repeat of the day before. We should have planned a bit better because when all was said and done, Rob had run a mile and half- pretty quickly. Caroline started with only the smallest bit of support and she was able to stop independently. She rode for long periods of time, without stopping. She once made it 3/4 of the way around the 1/2 mile track!

I guess Caroline figured if her body was serving her so well, the weekend of success should continue. We spent the afternoon at the pool where she jumped off the diving board for the first time without blinking an eye. We also have been working hard on her stroke. While she has been a fearless swimmer, going under the water, jumping into the pool and efficiently getting from point a to point b, her stroke has been really funky. Yesterday, it was perfect.

We then returned home to complete the triumvirate. Caroline has loved to play soccer for a long time. It has actually been, by far, her best sport- with no eye hand coordination required she's met with a bit more success. Yesterday though, Rob reported that she kicked farther and smoother and stopped the ball with greater ease than ever before.

London 2012! Here we come!

NYC

It has been nearly a year since we arrived in New Jersey. Some days it feels like it- like when we went into Stop & Shop this morning and knew four families that were there- and some days it feels like we just arrived- like when I have to use Map Quest to get to a new store...

Before our moved, I promised myself that I would take advantage of our proximity to New York. Without traffic, we are truly 25 minutes away which I still find really cool. I am proud to say that we really have gone into the city a bunch- we could go more but we have done really well.

Last night, Rob and I went in for dinner and show- how cosmopolitan of us! We had dinner at a yummy Thai restaurant (recommended by our friend Vanessa and saw Phantom. I have been going to the theatre since I was really little. Mom is a big fan of theatre, musicals in particular and it certainly rubbed off... I still remember going to a local college to see almost all of their performances before I was really old enough to go the shows at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

There is a reason that Broadway is Broadway. As I sat in the theatre last night, I just couldn't take my eyes off the stage. The performance was truly remarkable.

The other piece of seeing a play on Broadway, of course, is the whole New York experience. Our trip in was much less eventful than my last trip in to Broadway , thank goodness. I was worried when I realized we had to take Rob's car which meant that I couldn't drive. We still had the roof rack on my car and we learned on our first rookey trip into the city last summer that cars with roof racks are not welcomed in city garages.

While we made it with limited car sickness, we were still late for our dinner reservation. We were not late because of car traffic but because of people traffic... you couldn't turn because pedestrians blocked your path for the duration of lights. And August is supposed to be the quietest time to go into the city...

As we walked from the car to dinner to the theatre, there were countless sights to see. A hot dog vendor, praying to Mecca on a small prayer rug placed beside his hot dog cart, people stepping over him...people taking pictures with their cell phones of M & M World- a store devoted to M & Ms., babies sleeping amidst the din.

Our seats at the theatre were high up but fortunately, the theatre was small enough that it didn't matter. It did matter though to the funny woman from Texas who sat behind us. She couldn't stop talking about how the man had said, "You are getting the best seats in the house- the second mezzanine." She must have a had a very different definition of mezzanine because sure enough we were sitting in the second mezzanine- they just weren't the best seats in the house. Fortunately, she seemed to have recovered from her disappointment by the end of the show- she high fived each of her adult sons as the curtain came down.

While I don't typically high five strangers at a Broadway show, I have to admit to being tempted. It was that kind of show and that kind of feeling...

High five to Phantom, high five to New York and high five to us for keeping our promise to take advantage of this wonderful city...

4 Things Meme

Memes are certainly great things... Today I have been struggling to find a way to compose a blog post- I'm sure there is lots going on to talk about but I keep coming up short. Perhaps it is the teething toddler coupled with my own migraine and complicated by a pre-schooler's fever... Anyway, I stumbled upon this meme on the wonderful blog Food for Thought and thought I would run with it...

Four jobs I've had in my life:
1. Babysitter
2. Camp counselor
3. Reading specialist
4. Speech Therapist

Four movies I've watched more than once:
1. Wizard of Oz
2. Gone with the Wind
3. Sound of Music
4. Cinderella

Four places I have lived:
1. Rhode Island
2. Richmond, VA
3. Bethesda, MD
4. Ridgewood, NJ

Four TV shows I watch:
1. The Today Show
2. Lost
3. The Countdown with Keith Oberman
4. Little Einsteins

Four places I have been:
1. Austria
2. Italy
3. France
4. England

Four people who email me regularly:
1. Rob
2. My mom
3. My mother-in-law
4. Vanessa

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Ice cream
2. Cheese
3. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting
4. Pasta

Four of my favorite beverages:
1. water
2. coffee
3. ice tea
4. lemonade

Four places I'd rather be right now
1. In bed
2. At the beach
3. In a bookstore
4. In bed

Four things I'm looking forward to in the next year:
1. Seeing Phantom of the Opera in NYC (tomorrow!)
2. Getting back to our writing class/group in September
3. Growing my fun new business (more to come on this soon!)
4. Katherine getting in all of her teeth so that I can start sleeping!

If you are reading this, consider yourself tagged!

Still Five

Caroline is so verbal that I often forget that she is five.

This can be a problem when it comes to responding to her behavior. I almost always expect her to be far more rational than she should be at her age. I recently learned that children do not become rational beings until around the age of 7- that certainly explains a lot...

On another note, her vocabulary is so huge that we rarely have moments like we did today. As I was getting dressed for a run- I took both girls running with me- a whole different story- Caroline said, "Is that your breast thingy?" She was pointing to my sports bra. This is the same child who, while swimming during a pretty rough high tide, said to Rob multiple times, "I believe I should go under this wave." or "I believe I should dive into this wave."

Perhaps, this morning, I should have said, "Yes, Caroline, I believe that is my breast thingy."

My Three Minutes of Fame

While we were on vacation last week, I appeared on national tv. This was definitely a first and quite exciting. Even more exciting was the fact that they found me through my blogging.

A few months ago I wrote a post for New Jersey Moms Blog about our fantastic babysitting co-op. People from the CBS Early Show found it and decided they wanted to interview our group for a segment on inexpensive alternatives to pricey childcare.

Five hours of taping resulted in three minutes of air time. Fortunately, the producer did a beautiful job of editing and the piece was great. Here's to continued co-op success!

Grand Plans...

We are home after nearly a week and a half away.

I had grand plans for our return; lengthy and meaningful blog posts, work on an exciting on-line project I will be unveiling soon, home organization, fun plans with the girls...

Grand plans rarely seem to work out...

We returned home to a cat that had peed on our sofa and water in the basement. We were lucky enough to have a company come yesterday to start the clean up- they will return today and my grand plans will begin tomorrow- I hope...

Vacation

I have been quiet this week not because we are on vacation but because we are getting ready to go on vacation. I still don't know what it is about traveling with kids that is so challenging but it really does seem to take nearly a week to pack to go away for a week. I also promised myself that I would go to bed early tonight to prepare for the week of disturbed sleep that often comes with a vacation. Lots of work and little sleep... ahhh... vacation!