when mother's day and drug awareness week collide

There is just nothing I love more than the homemade cards and books that the kids make me for Mother's Day. I got the one above from Elizabeth, and as you can see the #1 thing that she loves about me is that I don't do drugs except medicine. Number 2 is that I help her in hard times. I love these kids.

I also got a giant stack of coupons:



offering some traditional services (extra hugs) and some family-specific ones (no complaining about yoga). {I haven't exercised during my children's waking hours in 9.5 years, so the sight of me walking out of the house in yoga garb on Saturday morning has been confusing and (fake) traumatic for them}.

Jacob made me a comic strip:



And we got a rare mom-with-kids photo!

storefront window wisdom

I let him know this early in our relationship, and we've been very happy ever since. Coincidence? I think not.

I will never make your brownies, Abby

It's a very busy week, with a huge deadline looming at work and tons of year-end stuff for the kids at school, and yet, still no cloning. I thought that at the very least I'd be able to sit down at the end of a long day and soak in some sound advice from Dear Abby, but what do I get? A brownie recipe:



Seriously, Abby? Seriously, Anita B. in New Jersey? That's like asking Dorie Greenspan what to do about your 28 year old son who still lives with you rent-free and sleeps until noon, refuses to look for a job and may be running a meth lab out of your basement. She might have awesome advice, but why would you even think to go there? What I really needed today was to see some sage wisdom of any persuasion; it did not even have to be remotely applicable to my life -- something along the lines of what you told the snubbed ornithologist would have been completely fine. But nooooooooo, instead you go shilling your cookbooklets. Argh, the badness of this week continues.

Piano recital

With this post I hope to find myself riding a two game win streak of keeping Grandma happy with my blog content - this time, grandchildren piano recital photos!

Jacob and Elizabeth just started taking piano in January, and they both seem to enjoy it. While practicing was somewhat inconsistent, they rarely complained when I remembered to remind them to practice, and they would sometimes even take the initiative to practice on their own. On the rare occasion that I told them to go practice and they would complain, I would regale them with tales of Tiger Moms who demand three hours of daily piano practice and threaten to give away their kids' dollhouse piece by piece if they don't master The Little White Donkey before next week's lesson, which suddenly made the 10 minutes of practice that this Western mom was requesting seem eminently reasonable. I hope that their enjoyment of piano continues, because mom was right, I really do regret quitting as a kid.

They both seemed comfortable with their songs as the recital approached, and the teacher had them well-coached in performance protocol and what to do in the event of a mistake. But since Jacob in particular is prone to a bit of nervousness and perfectionism, I had a little chat with him before the recital:

C: You are going to do GREAT. What will you do if you make a mistake?
J: Just keep playing.
C: Right. You know Dr. P, Robert's dad? He is a neurosurgeon. If he makes a mistake while doing brain surgery, it matters. If you make a mistake while playing Ode to Joy, it doesn't matter.
J: I know. {long pause}. What would happen if Dr. P makes a mistake while doing brain surgery?

Both kids seemed totally relaxed when we got there, and they had a few minutes to practice on of the gorgeous 9 foot Steinway grand:



Elizabeth was the youngest student performing, and she played "Skating" and "Basketball" with great enthusiasm:



Jacob knocked Ode to Joy and Alouette out of the park:



And remembered to bow:



The most stressful part of the whole experience was walking through the gallery of $50-$100+ K Steinways with the kids; I know the point is to actually play the pianos at places like this, but my instinct was to shoo them away from the instruments while my eyes darted around looking for the dreaded "You Break It, You Buy It" sign. Thankfully, no breaking (or buying) took place, and it was a lovely afternoon all the way around.

Dance recital

Mom, good news. Just when I was about to sit down and dash off something about my sadness over the untimely passing of the Beastie Boys' MCA, maybe go on for one too many paragraphs about significant Beastie moments during my formative years or where I was the first time I heard Professor Booty, perhaps reminisce about how hilarious it was that year in law school when David and his friends went as the Sabotage video for Halloween:



Well I was thisclose to a beastiescentric post just like that (or maybe one about how they never have enough checkout lanes open at Publix during peak store hours), when we got our computer fixed (or most accurately, were told by the Geek Squad that it was never broken), and now I can post pictures of the grandchildren from last weekend's dance recital instead. Wooooooo!



The girls started at a new ballet school this year,and I've got to admit that it was not my favorite. It felt a little bit intense to me; not intense for the dancers -- the teachers were very sweet and loving and fun, and the girls loved them -- but for the moms, as the school has a long list of rules that I could just never seem to follow all at once. It started early, when I sent Elizabeth in the wrong color leotard. After that initial (and especially egregious) rules violation, I took turns violating (1) the no runs in the tights rule; (2) the no changing in the bathroom rule; (3) the no waiting for the dancers in the hallway rule; (4) the wear your hair up off your face rule; and (5) the no males in room N110 rule (well actually David violated that one, but I forgot to tell him about it and it is not exactly an intuitive rule -- and as David pointed out, it is one that is particularly difficult to comply with while simultaneously complying with the "no waiting in the hallway outside of Room N110" rule.

Anyway, despite my difficulty in keeping up with the regs, the girls loved ballet and want to take at the same school again next year. The recital's theme was "Noah's Ark," and Elizabeth was a tiger, which suits her personality perfectly:



And Caroline was a purple butterfly, which suits her personality perfectly.



Busting a move (or whatever the technical ballet term for that is):



Jacob (who patiently sat through approximately 5 hours worth of dress rehearsal and recital) with Caroline:



Post-recital:

(un)happy feet

If I were remotely entrepreneurial, I would start a business of toenails-only pedicures. Surely I'm not the only person out there who desperately wants this service? I want my feet to look presentable in the summer months, but having somebody scrub at my feet with what is essentially a sandpaper block is something I would classify as physical assault if it was happening outside the spa-service realm. It tickles to the point of extreme pain. I feel every muscle in my body tense up as I white knuckle the chair arms while they assault me scrub my feet. If I had something to chew on, like a teething ring, I'd be gnawing for dear life. If I could paint my own toenails without getting nailpolish up around my kneecaps, I'd be doing it -- trust me.

My pained body language is apparently not enough to convey my extreme discomfort with this process, and there seems to be a bit of a language barrier that prevents us from understanding each other, because whenever I'm getting a pedicure, they assume I want more, not less, in the feet prodding department. They assume I want a total body experience, which I do not. Case in point, the massage chair:



Note the tears in the massage chair control cover. It's torn because people like me, while being aggressively bucked, stretched, and rolled by the chair, frantically poke at it while mentally screaming "oh for the love, how do you turn this damn thing off?!?!?!" And then the nice lady looks up from my feet, notices me poking at the control panel and says "you want higher?" NO! I want stillness! When I finally figured out how to turn it off, she looked at me sadly, like she'd personally failed me. I almost wanted to turn it back on just to make her feel better, but there was that motion sickness thing . . .

I can never seem to successfully communicate that I really want the absolute bare minimum that will allow me to walk out of there with decent looking toenails. That's all I want. Leave the feet to me. I am sure I'm in the minority here, but I can't be alone. If any local friends know of a . . . minimalist . . . pedicure experience, please share!

controversy over the dancing queen's real age

{Confidential to blog readers who shall remain nameless, but who may have grandchildren who live in my house, who patiently check this blog every day in the hopes of seeing pictures of said grandchildren, but are instead forced to endure random musings about bacon, Glee, yoga, and caramelized onions: I promise that we will get the computer fixed by this weekend so that I can post some grandchildren photos.} But until then, more randomness!

A sure-fire bad mood buster in our house is Dancing Queen {I mean, isn't Dancing Queen everybody's bad mood buster?} Well, at least it was until yesterday. It was playing while we were cleaning up from dinner, and we were happily singing along:

Dancing Queen,
Young and sweet,
Only seventeen.
Dancing Queen
Feel the beat from
The tambourine (oh yeah!)

We continued on, you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life, oo-oo-ooh, etc. etc. -- but when we got to the next verse, Jacob abruptly changed the words.

Dancing Queen!
Young and sweet,
Only fifty-three.

And then all hell broke loose. Elizabeth cracked up. I spit out my water. David shook his head and said "well, the average age of people who like Abba is fifty-three." And Caroline screamed: "SHE'S NOT FIFTY THREE!! SHE'S ONLY SEVENTEEN!!" and went running out of the room in tears. {She's an Abba purist -- I can respect that}.

Jacob and Elizabeth thought that Jacob's lyrics change was the height of hilarity and kept replaying the song so that they could continue singing the revised lyrics and guffawing. I laughed in spite of myself after getting the inevitable visual of an AARP dance-off, even though it wasn't nearly as funny as it might have been if I wasn't closer to fifty-three than I am seventeen myself (hey, why CAN'T a fifty-three year old be the Dancing Queen?) It took me a few minutes to compose myself enough to go find Caroline, who was hiding in a corner in the basement, and console her ("Don't worry honey, it's okay -- the Dancing Queen is only seventeen, Jacob was just being silly.")



I really hope we haven't forever lost this song in our house.