kids

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy.



Mister has started kindergarten and LOVES it. Missy Mopps has started pre-school and LOVES it. WIN!



We started the fall season of gymnastics; Mister chucked his seasonal hissy fit, running away and refusing to join in his group, protesting loudly and laying on the ground, like I am the most torturous mother on earth...which is ultimately what I ended up being. After about 10 minutes of his antics, I thought "Bugger this!" Got down to his level and muttered that we would be coming to these lessons every week for the next 10 weeks whether he liked it or not, so he had better get used to the idea because there is no way in hell he is getting out of gymnastics. And yeah...I have noticed that he only carries on like this while I am present so perhaps next week I will leave him and go and do something else for the hour, and come back at the end. Mafia style tactics prevailed and he eventually participated. Predictably he ended up loving it - like every other time (why me????) and can't wait for next week, because one of his friends ended up in his group. Missy Mopps on the other hand was champing at the bit for her lesson the same afternoon and had a great old time, minus the self-inflicted drama.



Speaking of Missy Mopps, I actually had a great day with the kids today. We are getting used to the new, frantic routine, but today turned out perfectly.



At present, it is still lovely weather out, so we have been making the most of these warm sunny days in dwindling supply and have spent most of this week outdoors.



While Mister was in kindergarten Missy rode her trike while I walked. Her trike is pretty cute. It has an umbrella top and a handle so I can push her when she gets tired (and to save my back). This trike pulls a lot of attention and she loves it. A little old lady was walking by when we were heading back from the park. The lady asked Missy if she would give her a drive home if she sat behind her on her bike. With a wide eyed nod of the head, Missy agreed to ride the lady home on her trike...melted that lady's heart she did. "Oh, you are sooooo cute", she crooned. She really is. My little missy mopps is so sweet.



Funny ting happened at the store today. We were walking along the pavement, heading toward the area where they keep the shopping carts. Along the way there is this great pile of dried bird crap - there must be a nest high in the rafters or something, because no other mounds of crap were visible. On the way back to the shop entrance, cart in hand, I notice a little boy, probably about 7 years old, standing, staring at this great pile of dried bird shit; he appeared totally mystified by the vast quantity of shit heaped on the ground. As I passed him by, he spoke, trance-like, as if speaking the private thoughts of his own mind, "did some bird die there or something", he questioned to no one in particular. I lost it - cracked up laughing. It sure did look like some one had blown the shit out of some bird.

Binned!

I just finished the book Power of Now by Vancouverite, Eckhart Tolle. I must say, I think this book has had a bit of an impact on me.

In the past, I have been quite a reader of the "spiritual growth" type books, but soon tired of them once most of them started saying the same type of thing... while I occasionally stumbled upon something helpful, the majority weren't really doing it for me anymore.

A very good friend of mine gave me "The Power of Now" for a birthday back in 2004 and for whatever reason, I just wasn't in the right place to read it back then. Even still, I basically only plucked it from the bookcase, because I had nothing else to read one night, while sitting with one of the kids as they fell asleep.

Tolle's words are helping me to let go of the anger I have too long held anger over the SIL and MIL incident. His words are helping me move on from past disappointments and hurts, especially about the career I planned, but never had. His concepts are really helping me let go of "stuff", which is symbolic I think, of this release of emotional baggage. I feel more capable of going with the flow, regardless of the uncertainties that still reign unclear at the present moment. I am reminding myself "in this exact moment, everything is perfect"...because it is. The past is gone, both 15 seconds ago and 15 years ago, and the future has not yet happened, this moment really IS perfect.

We have been sorting through all this stuff. We don't have that much stuff really; we are quite minimalistic people. But man...there is still all this....stuff. I love sorting through stuff I no longer need; clearing the path so to speak. It seems like it is just stuff, and yet it has always felt so freeing for me to do that.

We are having a garage sale in a couple of weeks and so there are piles of miscellaneous goods stacked in the corner of our lounge room. Tonight we have gone through the office cupboard. Every house, it seems, has a dumping ground. My parents chose their pool table. We tend to throw papers and foreign objects into the office cupboard with the intention of sorting through the clutter and filing it properly, in the ill defined time of later.

Tonight, while going through a stack of notebooks and paid bills, I found, yet again, the diary I kept while in year 12; I spoke about it a couple of weeks ago - the one that was filled with teenage angst and unintentional hilarity. I threw it out. I don't need it. Yeah, it holds some of my history in it. For sure, it talks about the emotional pain I was in at the time. It talks about parental frustrations, school struggles, boyfriend issues, stupid pranks played on school friends, bad poetry and other stuff, but why keep it? For 18 years I have kept that diary as a reminder of my youth; as a material snippet of my journey thus far; perhaps even as a testimony to or evidence of my very existence.....I don't need it anymore.

Carth

My son is completely obsessed with anything to do with the Disney/Pixar movie Cars. I am not really sure how he became aware of the movie. We didn't take him to see it at the cinema, but when the posters began to emerge advertising its release on DVD, he begged for a copy.

We got the movie, unsure of whether it would hold his interest, but it did. He loves it. He even pretends to be Lightning McQueen, who actually helped him out with some pre-school bullies when he found, while pretending to be Lightning McQueen, that he could outrun all the kids in his class. Since then he has been progressively collecting all the little die cast car characters from the movie. He has t-shirts and pj's emblazoned with the Cars theme, even his sandals and undies have Cars on them.

Leading up to kindergarten, Mister has been less than enthusiastic about starting something new (read: outright defiant). Last week however, I managed to find a Cars backpack, lunch kit, drink bottle AND pencil case, so now he is impatiently counting down the minutes until he is able to use all his new Cars stuff and show it all off to his new school friends. Hey, whatever helps.

Recently his best buddy has been enthusiastically collecting cars and they play well together with their cars and swapping characters with each other. This week his best bud got a number of new cars and excitement over these toys reached fever pitch as they plotted together which ones they wanted to collect next. Upon hearing this for the entire week, I went on the net the other day and searched out some hard to find characters that we NEVER see in the shop and won an eBay auction for some of them. I wasn't sure how or when I was going to give them to him, until today....

Mister has a bit of a speech problem; he quite badly th'usses his ess'es, and unfortunately Missy Mopps decided to copy him even after she had originally started saying these sounds correctly. I once spoke to a speech pathologist about it, and she told me, if the rest of his speech is fine, especially if he can say his z's properly, then his th'ussing is merely a habit - "a habit that will be difficult to break", she assured me. Thus far, she has been right. We have tried everything to help him out of the habit, but he would become so frustrated that he would simply refuse to co-operate or he'd intentionally th'uss at us with exaggerated defiant emphasis.

Today we bribed him. "Practice saying your ess'es correctly and once you have them down pat and spoken without a second thought, we will get you a couple of hard to find Cars characters". Well! Never before have I heard him so enthusiastic and excited by a challenge. I was impressed. We corrected and reminded him for a good 2 hours tonight, without one wobbly cracked - he was really trying. As I said...whatever it takes.

Guess who he wants to be for Halloween?