Okay, well, the tantrums are still occurring at random intervals, along with the moodiness, but I hope it's beginning to even out. The transition is difficult, going to full-day school, and G's freelance gig has been heating up a lot lately, so that good ol' Mommy doesn't have as much free time as she once did. And believe me, Daddy is no substitute whatsoever.
However, that told, Gaz is still doing funny things. We occasionally play all sorts of odd musical bits, here and there, and she latched on to the opening bit of Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge" (check it out in your online music source of choice).
The opening has Mr. Mothersbaugh going "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeah!" And Gaz adapts that rhythm to whatever she wants.
"Salty peanut, salty-peanut, saltypeanut!"
"Macaroni, macaroni, macaroni!"
"Hello Kitty, hello-kitty, hellokitty!"
So that's hilarious.
We also have this elementary school program called "ROBERTO" which stands for Read Or BE Read TO. And we read to her nightly. The requirement is 20 minutes a day, but it's not uncommon for us to run 30 minutes, and last week we had two nights that stretched to 60 minutes. So that's good, right? Problem is, I'm hoping her teacher doesn't actually check what it is they're being read, because she'll see a lot of issues of "Batman: The Brave And The Bold" (which is a pretty fun kids Batman comic) and "Tiny Titans" (which is like Muppet Babies only with the Teen Titans, so more like PreTeen Titans) along with the usual Seuss and Disney and Kipling (Gaz loves Kipling's "Just So Stories" for some reason).
Tonight I read her an issue of the Scooby-Doo comic she had me buy over the weekend, and finished up with the wonderful "Bats on the Beach." That's a good mix, I think. But then after I turn out the light, Gaz wants me to tell a made-up story, and while I can do that, I'm pretty tired myself, so I do what I've been doing the past week or so: I tell her about comic book characters. She's heard the origin stories of Superman, Wonder Woman (a favorite), Batman and Robin, Green Arrow, Green Lantern... what little I remembered of The Flash, and Martian Manhunter. On the other side of the fence, I've told her about Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and tonight I explained The X-Men.
Oh, the X-Men. She'd caught a glimpse of a little sketch of Wolverine over my shoulder when I was looking at a comics blog, and she asked who that guy was, so I had to explain mutants and Professor X and as many of the X-Men as I could recall offhand before I started to describe Wolvie. She was really impressed with his healing factor, and she loved the idea of an unbreakable metal skeleton, but she got really tickled when I explained the claws. However, despite thinking they were really cool, what she wanted to do if she had Wolverine's powers was to jump around really high! And she'd want Nightcrawler's teleportation, and Jean Grey's telekinesis power (I didn't explain to her about the whole Dark Phoenix thing becuase... you gotta leave room to grow, right?), and so on. This girl is gleefully investigating the whole nerd culture thing, and she's not even into her second hand worth of years. I love it.
I suppose I should investigate Wikipedia to refresh my memory on some of the superhero origins for tomorrow night... we'll see how that goes!
Monday, September 27, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
School, etc.
Jeez, now that Blogger has stopped telling me about all it's fab new features, I can finally type something! Not that I will be typing a long something, though, because I'm about to fall over. But first things first.
Gaz is finally in school. (Check out her back-to-school get-up! She picked it out herself, as you can probably guess.) I got her registered with little trouble on the 2nd (the third attempt being the charm), and classes started this week. It's somewhat shorter days this week, which is a drag on many levels (one of them is Gaz's lunch period is so short that she's not eating most of the food I send with her; that's one drag that I am especially frustrated over), but it's a massive adjustment for everyone. I'm still not sure how *I* feel about this school, but I don't think it's monstrous. Gaz's teacher *does* have some strange, trollish teeth. . . . But anyway, I'll be happier when Gaz is less keyed up all day and night.
Gaz loves school. She sins excited songs every morning as we walk to school, and the stretch of sidewalk that takes us to school has one section where someone once drew a Batman symbol on the wet concrete, so we even get to geek out in a DC Superfriends manner twice a day. She enjoyed gym today, and is looking so very much forward to art class that she has plans to bring in a special piece of painted wood to give to the art teacher, whoever she is. She's in class with one of the neighbor girls, which is more fantastic than I can begin to describe. They get along already, and now not only do they get to spend more time together, we have an easy connection for getting Gaz to and from school in the event of some kind of emergency or schedule insanity. We love the neighbors anyway, and now they're even super useful. What could be better than that?
We have had some difficult sleep this week (Gaz woke me up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to ask me to tell her a story, and to ask for a drink of water, and to ask for company on a bathroom trip . . . ), and my girl has been much more short-tempered with everyone and clingy with me. I know this is just a transition thing, and I am trying to give her all the extra support she needs to keep on being her big, crazy self. We'll get through this. We did okay overall with preschool and weaning; we can survive the kindergarten adjustment.
But how am I holding up, people ask. You would not believe how well I am doing right now. I've got so much editing work that I have been desperate all summer for school to start up again. Working from home and being the stay-at-home parent at the same time has been nothing short of hellish for me* and has resulted in many weeks where the dishes overtook the kitchen and started singing medleys about overthrowing the slovenly human oppressors. (You who have mechanical dishwashers: you are lucky, lucky creatures who darned well better appreciate your modern luxuries.) We're managing to maintain appropriate levels of apartment hygiene, but clutter is another story.
So no, I'm not at all upset by the start of the school year. It's making life tolerable again.
But once more, I am frustrated by the needs of work interfering with my spending time with Gaz, especially now that she needs extra cuddles and reassurance to get her past the stress of full-day school. I try to spend the time from after-school to Mark's arrival home and dinner time with her, scheduling my work day for before she's up and while she's at school, but she's been waking up quite early. We're having to do the other hard transition of less me at bedtime and more Mark, and she's really used to me being the one who gets her settled in more often than not for most of her life.
I am very far behind on blogging, uploading pictures, replying to email, visiting relatives, and who knows what else (apart from the dishes; I know how miserable the dish position is on any given day). I have no idea when I will be digging out from under the backlog, but between Gaz and work both needing me and everything that had to be done for school registration, I have been completely tapped out. I do hope to get more regular with the blogging again, but anything longer than your average Facebook status update or Twitter entry is difficult for me right now. Please be patient (and send patience. And coffee. And scones. And sleep!).
* And specifically: exhausting and cranky-making
Gaz is finally in school. (Check out her back-to-school get-up! She picked it out herself, as you can probably guess.) I got her registered with little trouble on the 2nd (the third attempt being the charm), and classes started this week. It's somewhat shorter days this week, which is a drag on many levels (one of them is Gaz's lunch period is so short that she's not eating most of the food I send with her; that's one drag that I am especially frustrated over), but it's a massive adjustment for everyone. I'm still not sure how *I* feel about this school, but I don't think it's monstrous. Gaz's teacher *does* have some strange, trollish teeth. . . . But anyway, I'll be happier when Gaz is less keyed up all day and night.
Gaz loves school. She sins excited songs every morning as we walk to school, and the stretch of sidewalk that takes us to school has one section where someone once drew a Batman symbol on the wet concrete, so we even get to geek out in a DC Superfriends manner twice a day. She enjoyed gym today, and is looking so very much forward to art class that she has plans to bring in a special piece of painted wood to give to the art teacher, whoever she is. She's in class with one of the neighbor girls, which is more fantastic than I can begin to describe. They get along already, and now not only do they get to spend more time together, we have an easy connection for getting Gaz to and from school in the event of some kind of emergency or schedule insanity. We love the neighbors anyway, and now they're even super useful. What could be better than that?
We have had some difficult sleep this week (Gaz woke me up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to ask me to tell her a story, and to ask for a drink of water, and to ask for company on a bathroom trip . . . ), and my girl has been much more short-tempered with everyone and clingy with me. I know this is just a transition thing, and I am trying to give her all the extra support she needs to keep on being her big, crazy self. We'll get through this. We did okay overall with preschool and weaning; we can survive the kindergarten adjustment.
But how am I holding up, people ask. You would not believe how well I am doing right now. I've got so much editing work that I have been desperate all summer for school to start up again. Working from home and being the stay-at-home parent at the same time has been nothing short of hellish for me* and has resulted in many weeks where the dishes overtook the kitchen and started singing medleys about overthrowing the slovenly human oppressors. (You who have mechanical dishwashers: you are lucky, lucky creatures who darned well better appreciate your modern luxuries.) We're managing to maintain appropriate levels of apartment hygiene, but clutter is another story.
So no, I'm not at all upset by the start of the school year. It's making life tolerable again.
But once more, I am frustrated by the needs of work interfering with my spending time with Gaz, especially now that she needs extra cuddles and reassurance to get her past the stress of full-day school. I try to spend the time from after-school to Mark's arrival home and dinner time with her, scheduling my work day for before she's up and while she's at school, but she's been waking up quite early. We're having to do the other hard transition of less me at bedtime and more Mark, and she's really used to me being the one who gets her settled in more often than not for most of her life.
I am very far behind on blogging, uploading pictures, replying to email, visiting relatives, and who knows what else (apart from the dishes; I know how miserable the dish position is on any given day). I have no idea when I will be digging out from under the backlog, but between Gaz and work both needing me and everything that had to be done for school registration, I have been completely tapped out. I do hope to get more regular with the blogging again, but anything longer than your average Facebook status update or Twitter entry is difficult for me right now. Please be patient (and send patience. And coffee. And scones. And sleep!).
* And specifically: exhausting and cranky-making
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Wedding Gaz
So, this weekend, we're up north in Gurnee for Auntie Lis's wedding, and Gaz is Flower Girl, and she's intensely excited. Oh, and Mommy is co-Matron of Honor, as well, but that's incidental.
We came up yesterday, and were up really late. This after Gaz got up at the crack of early. But we got her some peanuts and snack food to carry her through until her late dinner, and she had pizza, which ended up all right.
Today, so far, we went to the hotel pool while Mommy went to get her hair worked on (about 7 or 8 hours before the ceremony, which seems weird and too early to me, but I'm not a bride or bridesmaid), then had a bath to actually CLEAN her, and then went out for lunch. She wanted Chinese, so we just drove around Gurnee until we found a Thai place, and Gaz said that would work just as well. Turns out the owner/operator of the place used to live in our neighborhood in Chicago, but moved north for better school districts when her kids got old enough to hit high school. We had a nice talk with her, and Gaz practiced her chopstick technique.
Now we're just hanging until Mommy comes home. It's pretty low-key, but we just worry about the major things, and frankly, the Flower Girl's preparation is only minimal. And me, I need no preparation, as I'm only audience.
So that's the weekend.
We came up yesterday, and were up really late. This after Gaz got up at the crack of early. But we got her some peanuts and snack food to carry her through until her late dinner, and she had pizza, which ended up all right.
Today, so far, we went to the hotel pool while Mommy went to get her hair worked on (about 7 or 8 hours before the ceremony, which seems weird and too early to me, but I'm not a bride or bridesmaid), then had a bath to actually CLEAN her, and then went out for lunch. She wanted Chinese, so we just drove around Gurnee until we found a Thai place, and Gaz said that would work just as well. Turns out the owner/operator of the place used to live in our neighborhood in Chicago, but moved north for better school districts when her kids got old enough to hit high school. We had a nice talk with her, and Gaz practiced her chopstick technique.
Now we're just hanging until Mommy comes home. It's pretty low-key, but we just worry about the major things, and frankly, the Flower Girl's preparation is only minimal. And me, I need no preparation, as I'm only audience.
So that's the weekend.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Red Red Red Red RED!
Gaz loves her new art class at the Old Town School of Folk Music (the happiest place on earth in Lincoln Square). She loves it so much that I'm still not quite sure what all they did besides something involving the color RED. She exploded out of the classroom chanting RED and has only kind of stopped (mostly while eating her post-class snack).
We've got plenty more to do today, so I better get to it.
We've got plenty more to do today, so I better get to it.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Sugar and Spice and Everything Serpentine
We've recently gone through a couple of months of having to watch Barbie in A Mermaid Tale repeatedly, so when she said she was ready to trade that in for something with dinosaurs, the grown-ups were quite relieved. Barbie was better than some things she's watched (this subject will get its own post one day), but dinosaurs are something we can all enjoy equally. Thanks to Netflix, we got rid of Barbie and ended up with Prehistoric Planet. It's fun little show, and I never get tired of hearing Gaz go on about the old ornithocheirus. She's really into pterosaurs when she's not obsessed (as most kids are, I guess) with T-Rex. Though for the latter, we can probably blame Sue, or rather, our fondness for the Field Museum.
The reptillian fun hasn't just stopped with the constant viewings of dino-drama, though. I picked up a Step Into Reading book on snakes, since we had just been talking about the old family pet (a sweet little corn snake named Biscuit). While I was at it, I picked up a more herpetologically involved book for myself because, amongst other things, I've always been mystified by snakey taxonomy and was hoping to figure it out for once.
What I didn't figure on is how much Gaz would flip for the many color photos in my book, or what her tolerance for mommy stumbling over long Greek and Latin words that don't mean anything to her (and sometimes me) would be. She is in love with the eyelash pit viper and was quite disappointed when I told her they're venomous. But two nights in a row now, she's fallen asleep to me reading random snippets of squamate biology, ecology, locomotion, and evolution. But I am only allowed to read the pages that have photos. Is any of this actually getting through to her, or is she just dozing off to the sound of my voice? I don't know. But I do like that I am able to share something cool about the world with her, and I think snakes are pretty darn cool.
I don't know exactly where this attraction comes from (though the grass snake featured in the kid's book looks like the Utahraptor from Prehistoric Planet, we agreed), but I am so pleased that she is interested in learning about the weird looking creatures and isn't afraid of them. Of course, we've only seen one very tiny garter snake out in the wild, so she might change her tune when she sees her first enormous black rat snake. (Okay, maybe that's just me.)
Still, this all has me thinking about the logistics of getting another corn snake. I'm not sure our landlords would go for it, but when we're ready, I've got a game plan in my head. It would be nice to have a reptile around again.
The reptillian fun hasn't just stopped with the constant viewings of dino-drama, though. I picked up a Step Into Reading book on snakes, since we had just been talking about the old family pet (a sweet little corn snake named Biscuit). While I was at it, I picked up a more herpetologically involved book for myself because, amongst other things, I've always been mystified by snakey taxonomy and was hoping to figure it out for once.
What I didn't figure on is how much Gaz would flip for the many color photos in my book, or what her tolerance for mommy stumbling over long Greek and Latin words that don't mean anything to her (and sometimes me) would be. She is in love with the eyelash pit viper and was quite disappointed when I told her they're venomous. But two nights in a row now, she's fallen asleep to me reading random snippets of squamate biology, ecology, locomotion, and evolution. But I am only allowed to read the pages that have photos. Is any of this actually getting through to her, or is she just dozing off to the sound of my voice? I don't know. But I do like that I am able to share something cool about the world with her, and I think snakes are pretty darn cool.
I don't know exactly where this attraction comes from (though the grass snake featured in the kid's book looks like the Utahraptor from Prehistoric Planet, we agreed), but I am so pleased that she is interested in learning about the weird looking creatures and isn't afraid of them. Of course, we've only seen one very tiny garter snake out in the wild, so she might change her tune when she sees her first enormous black rat snake. (Okay, maybe that's just me.)
Still, this all has me thinking about the logistics of getting another corn snake. I'm not sure our landlords would go for it, but when we're ready, I've got a game plan in my head. It would be nice to have a reptile around again.
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