Le Troisième Petit Cochon

Today my husband and I went to the kids' school to see my daughter perform in her Third Grade French play. They presented Les Trois Petits Cochons, the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf all in French. She was le troisième petit cochon, the little pig who builds the brick house, except her version was also a rockin' singer.

Sometimes I am so amazed by what my kids can do. Even after five years of high school and college French, my diction wasn't nearly as good as a class full of eight and nine-year-olds.

Today was an excellent example of two of the many things I love about Southfield School. One is the amount of performing each kid gets to do. For a school that isn't a performing arts magnet, they do an amazing job of including every child in a wonderful variety of programs, plays and presentations.

The other thing I love is the opportunity the kids get to pursue enrichment activities like French, art, computer, and music. My kids can converse in French. It's how they talk to each other when they don't want me to understand!

I think both of my kids have a deep sense of confidence and self-worth because of both of those opportunities. They have no problem speaking with adults or in front of groups and they have plenty of interesting things to talk about. I know this will serve them well as we interview at other schools when we move.

And I am so tremendously thankful. I feel like my children have a solid brick foundation that no big, bad wolf could ever blow down. No matter how hard he huffed and puffed.

Running with Bacon

Have you ever wanted to trip a runner?

I have. I do every time I see one. They think they're so awesome in their tight little pants.

Sometimes I go to races just to fantasize about tripping them all on their way to their post-race brunches.

On Saturdays, we go to the downtown YMCA for my daughter's basketball games. This week a whole group of runners was chatting by the door after their run.

They all had tight little pants.

I was quietly working hard at suppressing my urge to trip them all when one announced, "Come on, you guys. Bacon's waiting."

If only my eyes shot laser beams.

After we entered the Y, I turned to my husband and said, "Did you hear that? He said bacon! I hate them."

"You don't really hate them," he replied. "You just want to be them."

I think he's wrong. I think he just underestimates my love of bacon.

Tailgating and Hockey Games

For the first time ever in my whole life, I went tailgating this weekend.

It was...fun. I guess. I don't know. I'm just not an eat-food-outside kind of girl. I'm more of a tuxedoed-waiters-and expensive-cuisine kind of girl on a tailgating budget.

But we went tailgated with my husband's squadron before the Mudbugs game and it was a good time. We are not hard core tailgaters though. Instead of my husband's pick-up, we brought my new Mazda CX-9. We set the DVD player up and let the kids watch Air Buddies. If I was a Girl Scout, I wouldn't' have earned my Tailgating Badge.

We are hockey people though. My husband and I grew up playing hockey. I even remember going ice skating in P.E. class in elementary school. One of the things we hope our new town will have when we move is a very good youth hockey program.

Recently my son has really gotten into hockey. He wants to watch games on television every night. And of course we have DirecTV Center Ice so we get every NHL game televised. We even TiVo every Bruins game. So the kids were very excited about going to the game.

Despite having to go to the bathroom three times, my son loved the game, especially since the Bugs won 3-0. And my daughter loved the game to. "Except for all the fighting!" she exclaimed. She just can't understand why the players need to beat each other up.

The only answer I have for her is, 'Testosterone." She'll understand some day.

When it comes right down to it, I think the thing the kids love most about going to the Mudbugs game is the food. Somehow...I don't know how...but somehow this is the first hockey game that my son has puked after.

I guess I'm not the only spoiled one in this family.

Grace

My daughter's middle name is Grace.

Shhh, don't tell my husband, but I got that name from a Natalie Merchant song that I loved in college. He thinks we named her after his mother.

I loved to listen to the song Wonder on the little radio in my college dorm room.

I believe
Fate smiled and destiny
Laughed as she came to my cradle
"know this child will be able"
Laughed as my body she lifted
"know this child will be gifted
With love, with patience
And with grace
She'll make her way"

Aren't those great lyrics?

Except years later when my daughter was in Kindergarten I finally got an iPod. I legally downloaded Wonder and couldn't wait to listen to it. But in all its digital glory, I noticed something.

Laughed as my body she lifted
"know this child will be gifted
With love, with patience
And with faith
She'll make her way"

I hit the back button over and over. "Did she just sing 'faith'?" I asked myself aloud.

With love, with patience
And with faith
She'll make her way"

Yup, she did. A Google search proved it. My daughter is misnamed! All because I grew up before the digital age!

Mom First

A friend of mine just became an uncle to two tiny, twin baby girls. Seeing the pictures of the sweet babies in their incubators at the NICU has brought back memories for me of when my twin nephews were born.

Almost eight years later the details have become fuzzy. I think they were born at 32 weeks, but maybe it was 34. But what I remember most about visiting them in the NICU is a feeling of being very fortunate.

My daughter was eight months old at the time. She had been a bit premature herself, born at 36 weeks. But she never went to the NICU. She never had tubes coming out of her face or needles in her tiny head. She weighed six pounds and three ounces when she was born. She had her struggles with jaundice and feeding, but by her two week checkup she was fine.

Compared to the twins, she looked so huge!

We were very lucky.

Because my brother is four years older than me, I guess I always thought I'd be an aunt before I was a mom. But I ended up getting married first and it all just worked out that way. In fact, my parents were visiting my newborn when we all found out that my brother and his wife were pregnant.

I have lots of friends who just love being aunts and uncles. But it wasn't that way for me. I was a mom first, and my nephews (I have three now) and my kids are close in age. I can never be the spoiler; I have to be the mom first. Plus, I live far away. One of the twins is my godson, but I've never felt like I can treat him special because their mother is very invested in keeping things even for the twins.

The twins turn eight next month and it is hard to believe that they were ever teeny, tiny, little humans in incubators. If I could give my new uncle friend any advice it would be this.

Savor every second. They grow up quickly. Soon the tubes will be gone and the constant worry about their weight will be a thing of the past. Help your sister as much as you can. She'll need it. And never, ever let those kids forget that you're their uncle.

Role Models? Us?

I friend of mine is getting married back in Boston, but she is having her big, blow-out bachelorette party in New York City this weekend. Unfortunately, she just told me about it two days ago.

I said to my husband, "Danielle is having her bachelorette party at a karaoke bar in New York City and she invited me. I've never been to a bachelorette party before."

"When is it?" he asked me.

"This weekend," I replied.

"Well, you know what," he said. "You're still never going to have been to a bachelorette party."

Shoot, I think I almost had him convinced to send me. If only I'd had more notice.

I wrote my friend back and told her that I wouldn't be able to come, but I thanked her for the invite and told her to have fun. She sent me back an e-mail in reply that had me saying, "Awwwww."

She said, "And thanks for being such a strong, positive example of how to make a marriage work. You really inspire me."

See? Say it with me now. Awwwww.

Like every marriage, my husband and I have had our ups and downs. But even during our hardest times I always knew that we would come out of the difficulty with our marriage even stronger than ever.

But to hear that someone else sees us as role models? That's amazing. It makes me feel incredibly proud. And more than a little lucky. I hadn't realized that anyone was watching us.

Happy Valentine's Day to Me!

My husband is an incredibly sweet and generous man who loves me more than ten women deserve. But he has never, ever been able to pull off a romantic surprise for me. He even managed to blow his marriage proposal.

But he's a hotty so I learned to live with it.

But today he did it! He managed to combine a sweet surprise with high technology. Those are my favorite kinds of surprises.

When I got in the car to drive the kids to school this morning, I found this.


It's perfect, especially since my old 3rd Generation iPod became a very expensive paper weight just yesterday.

I guess now when my friends call me spoiled I'm just going to have to grin and bare it. I might get some nice gifts sometimes, but more, I am spoiled by having the best husband in the entire world.

Now if only he'd take me to Paris.

Great Moments in Parenthood, Part 3

This past Thursday, my son and I set off for our little adventure. We went on a whirlwind tour of a town we might move to this summer. We visited some schools and enjoyed being together.

But after three whole days of flying, interviews and tests, my son was really looking forward to a "Mexican grilled cheese" (known to the rest of the world as a cheese quesadilla) during our layover at George Bush International on our way home.

So when he was only half finished and tipped his plate onto the floor and started crying in grief, I had absolutely no qualms about picking his tortilla up off the floor, wiping it off and handing it back to him.

"It didn't hit the floor. I caught it," I lied because he wouldn't eat it otherwise.

What would you have done?

The "Not-Knowing"

Sometimes when you have news to share, you lose track of who you've told.

There will always be a part of me, too, that feels like it is egotistical to think that people would even care about my own drama. But right now, there is little I can share without setting the stage with some background information.

We are moving.

When my husband was in Iraq he told me that we would be moving this summer. For a while he thought he might know where we were headed. But things change.

We're moving this summer but we don't know where.

At first I thought that I would keep this information to myself until things were clearer. I hadn't even planned on telling the kids. But things get complicated. They get especially complicated when you start dealing with contracts and admissions deadlines for private schools.

As always with this military life, it is the "not-knowing" that is the hardest.

After living here for nine years, our roots are deep. My children were born here. We've lived in this house on base for seven years. And our daughter started at Southfield School six years ago.

We have fond memories of this base, for sure, but we won't be sad to leave it. Shreveport/Bossier City has grown tremendously in the last few years and we like it here more than we thought we would. But we won't miss it either.

It is the people we will miss. And our school.

So, even though we don't know where we're moving too, we know that we want to find another Independent School (a private school like Southfield) wherever we may go. Since my husband will be moving to a certain type of job, there are a handful of places where we are more likely to move than others.

And so armed with this knowledge and the database from the National Association of Independent Schools, last month I started to do research. I soon discovered that the admissions deadlines for most of these schools were February 1. I also knew there was no way we'd know where we were going by then.

I must admit that I felt a certain amount of despair. Not only will we be leaving a school and a life that we love, we don't even know what our life might be like next year. I feel rudderless. I feel like we're leaving our family yet have no destination in mind.

I decided to be proactive and go ahead and apply to the schools that we loved the most in the cities where we may most likely end up.

Of course all of these schools want us to visit.

This past week we decided to bite the bullet and my son and I headed out to visit a couple of these schools on the East coast. It was quite an adventure and the two of us really enjoyed our time together. We both fell in love with a school and now my son is desperate to move there.

But we still don't know where we are going. If nothing else, it was a good experience for him to test and interview at high-quality schools. And we spent some serious quality time together.

I haven't slept well in weeks. I've been dreading telling people we're moving because I know from experience that you can start to feel the distance right away. People stop making plans with you. People who don't want to say hard goodbyes start to distance themselves now. Some people even get mad at you for planning to leave. (Blame my husband, not me!)

And I've been losing sleep because I can’t stop speculating about where we might go and how it might be. We have lots of decisions to make and they are all on hold.

It's the life of a military family, but it has been both easier and harder because we have been here so long. It's hard to sever deep roots. It's hard when you don't even know where you're headed. For all I know, it could all fall through and we’ll end up staying here!

It's the "not-knowing" that is always the hardest. Always.

Mardi What?

As a good New England Catholic school girl, I learned about Mardi Gras back in middle school. But to be honest, the nuns taught us that indulgent Southerners would engage in gluttony and indecent acts prior to Ash Wednesday.

I thought Mardi Gras was interesting, but I never thought I would participate myself.

Our first exposure to Mardi Gras was when we lived in Pensacola in the late 90's. Their parade was pretty decent and not too crowded. We had Moon Pies and we were happy.

The next year we traveled to New Orleans with a bunch of our fellow aviation training cohorts. After an hour of gawking at the madness on Bourbon Street, I was done. I'd had enough. On our way back to the hotel, someone on a balcony peed on my head, and I was officially done with Mardi Gras for all time.

The nuns were right!

But my children really are Southern born and bred. They were born on the bayou. As much as I consider myself a New Englander, my kids don't think of themselves that way. They love Mardi Gras, even though their mean parents won't take them to a parade.

Still, our school has one of the sweetest Mardi Gras traditions I've ever seen. The Kindergarten class does their parade every year on Fat Tuesday. They pull floats (decorated wagons) around the gymnasium and present songs and poems. It's adorable.

This year their theme was "Sail Away on a Poem" and my son was a sailor.

It hasn't turned my mind around about Mardi Gras completely but it was so cute. Even the nuns would be moved.

The Boy

My husband and I often refer to our son as just The Boy. I don't know why. He has plenty of nicknames based both on his proper name and the names of NHL players (not that we have high expectations). For some reason, The Boy just seems to fit him right.

My son is...well...he is one of a kind. He has got to be one of the most self-assured humans on the entire planet. His self-assuredness causes him to do things like speak out in groups and take center stage that, frankly, make me want to crawl under tables. I'm proud of his self-confidence for sure, but still. Come on, Buddy. Give someone else a chance.

This weekend the kids and I attended a violin workshop at Centenary with our Suzuki Strings program. The whole experience was amazing. Each kid had a semi-private, small group and large group lesson with some of the best instructors in the country. We ended the weekend with an informal concert in which every kid, from the oldest to the youngest got to play together on stage.

It was inspirational.

But over and over again parents would make comments to me about my son. "He's so cute!" someone would say. "He's so funny!" another would add. "He's so smart! We just love him!" It went on and on.

And while I am extremely flattered and proud, inside I sort of have to shake my head. I want to ask them, "But doesn't he drive you crazy with his constant talking? Doesn't it drive you nuts that he asks a thousand questions?"

It's funny and a bit sad how sometimes as parents we see our kids' very best attributes as negatives. The very things that endear them to others drive us batty.

I'm trying very hard with my second child to accept him for who he is. I'll try to teach him to control himself, but I don't want to crush his spirit.

The Boy is a special kid, to be sure. He's sweet and kind and smart and happy and inquisitive. And if he asks me one more question tonight, I'm going to lose it!

The Humor in It

My daughter is learning her multiplication tables.

Well, I take that back. My daughter is supposed to be learning her multiplication tables, but all she really has been learning is how to test my last nerve.

I absolutely hate to hear my daughter say things like, "I'm not good at math." For one thing I think it sets up a lifetime of missed opportunities and unfortunate expectations. For another, it plays in to the world's worst kinds of gender stereotypes.

The truth is that she's a decent math student. She just psyches herself out.

But these multiplication tables have been a bit of a stumbling block. She understands the concept but refuses to memorize facts. She still counts out every answer, mostly on her fingers. So my husband and I decided to follow our instincts and be the militant kind of parents we really are at heart. We're drilling her.

And she's crying. And crying, and crying, and crying. It got to the point where she was sobbing out answers. My husband and I just had to laugh. We had to! At some point you just have to see the humor in it.

Of course this only made her cry more. "Stop...(sob sob)...laughing...(sob sob)...at...(sob sob)...me!"

We apologized but also explained how we felt. As a parent you have to have a sense of humor. Without it we'd never get through having our kids whip their clothes off at inopportune moments, or pee in Santa's lap, or tell their whole class about how mommy snores.

And without humor we'd never get through these times. Not even two times two.