Last night, three of our kids had dress rehearsals for their upcoming dance recital. If you told me as a young person or even as a young mom that I would be a Dance Mom one day, I likely would have scoffed at you. Yet watching my kids perform last night in their costumes gave me an unaccountable sense of pride. There were many wins yesterday afternoon. Everyone who needed hair, makeup, and tights without holes got them. We managed, against all odds, to make it to the studio on time, everyone in their appropriate costumes.
The Chaplain met us there, and we tag-teamed the little kids. I took scads of pictures that turned out terrible, as I knew they would, due to the dark purple walls of the studio and the unforgiving fluorescent lights. I had used both my camera and my phone so hard that by the end of the practice performances, the batteries for both were limping along and close to death. I thought we were finished, and the Chaplain and I started loading the Littles into the car.
Pictured above, number Two in the kitchen of our first home, when she was one year old. We had just moved in.
When I was in college, I worked in a sporting goods store on breaks from school for a couple of years. I remember one of my coworkers rolling his eyes and sighing because his mom had made him, his dad, and his brother paint their kitchen for a fifth time because it wasn’t the right shade of yellow. I commiserated. Who does that?!
A few years later, I was married and living in our first apartment, the upper floor of an old house on Long Island. It wasn’t a typical apartment; the walls were painted shades of brown and gold. There was original dark trim and wood built-ins were throughout our upstairs dwelling. The kitchen had granite countertops and cheery, sunshine yellow paint.
The house our rental was in was situated in a strange way. It seemed as though it used to have a much bigger plot of land around it. It looked like some previous owner and had gradually sold off bits of the land to different developers, so that our street ended just after our house in a small sort of road that led past one more house and to a nursing home whose entrance was clearly visible from our kitchen window. You can just see the nursing home in the background to the right behind the trees in the photo above. (We used this pic in our immigration interview photo album, but that’s another story. Keep an eye out for it this summer.)
The nursing home employees would come outside to smoke on their breaks and it always felt like they were looking in our windows, but I hated to assume.
Back in April, I mentioned I was trying a new plan for Mother’s Day. I told my family ahead of time what I wanted, and then tried not to feel guilty for asking.
My family delivered. A big part of my plan was not being responsible for preparing meals on Mother’s Day. I honestly can’t remember what we ate that day. Which is fine. Because whatever it was, I had nothing to do with it.
My family actually OVER-delivered, because they willingly let me get more family photos of them than they have in a very long time. We spent time outside together. It was relaxing. There wasn’t a lot of pressure.
It was just what I wanted.
When I was pregnant with Seven, I went to the chiropractor regularly. It started before he was born.
I have a lot of responsibilities. Some might say, more responsibilities than I am capable of keeping up with. So in order to get a break, sometimes my body just quits working. This can look like a head cold, a stomach bug, or a sudden, unexpected nap. In this case, I tried to lift my head off of my pillow one Monday morning and it felt like something in my neck had snapped.
This weekend, I lived an introverted homebody’s nightmare: I went to the Bronx Zoo on a beautiful holiday weekend with six kids, and I went to the mall afterward to get new shoes for Two, who is the most indecisive shoe shopper I have ever met. Perhaps that’s one reason why she has only one pair of shoes.
Many times, I get so caught up in needing everything to be just right before I get started, that I never actually do anything meaningful.
