the birfday partaaay!!

Being around for four whole years doesn't go without some celebration around these parts.

We started with a little family party...

And then I did a little sewing....

And then the friends showed up and the rest is history...

There was a dinosaur egg hunt...

And some little guys who needed some rescuing from big guys...

And what is a birthday without your best girl?

I love this one.  His face makes me so happy.  Thanks, Anney, for the pic.

Rexy, if you were even half as happy during your party as you make us every single day...I will call it a success.  We love you birthday boy.

birthday boy

Dear Rex,

Somehow I blinked and you turned four years old.  I have no idea how this happened because I really feel like you are still the little gigantic baby we brought home one hot day in July.  But here we are...several weeks after your birthday and I find myself so grateful for such a special boy.

You seem to be so many things, my little jelly bean.  You are the parts of a child that I never knew I needed but I so desperately do.  You are so easy and yet so hard.  You are so much more of a go-with-the-flow kind of kid than you brother will ever hope to be.  You are so open to new adventures and what's next that it is always my favorite thing seeing your reaction rather than experiencing it myself.  With that being said, you can throw on the brakes faster than any kid I know and hold them there long after we are all beat down.  You are a stubborn one, Rexy, and your confidence in your opinion thrills and scares me beyond belief.

You are so little and yet so grown up all at the same time.  You are able to do things faster, better and with less effort than I would ever imagine...probably a result from your constant studying of your older brother.  You have a knack for athletics, for building, and one of the most vivid imaginations in the world.  I could spend hours watching you line up all the little plastic animals in the house and listen to your conversations and wars between them.  And yet I would trade all of those hours for just five minutes of the precious privilege I still enjoy of being your go-to lap when you are tired and want to drink some milk and pick my nail.

My little social bug, I am in awe of your confidence...your raw ability to walk into a room of strangers and have them eating out of the palm of your hand within minutes.  I pray that you learn to use that skill to better your life and to help others.  That you find success with it and learn to use it as a tool.  Oh...and your father and I have secret conversations about once a week about how terrified we are for all the poor little girls in your high school and are already plotting a way to safeguard all the parties in college. *sigh*

Your fourth year has brought so much growth when it comes to being a contributing member of our family.  You have become so responsible and gentle with all of our animals, have clearing the dinner table and your room down to a science, and can tell a joke like it's your job.  The best friend that you have become to your brother is perhaps one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced.

You are a gem, Rex Patrick.  You light up the lives of all that you come in contact with and I feel honored to be your Mommy.  I will spend this last year of Pre-K soaking up the afternoons with you and memorizing all the small bits of baby that are still here.

I love you.  We all love you.  Happy Birthday.

love, Mom

schooling

For the two years we have lived in Omaha, Roanin has attended the Montessori school that is close to our house.  We chose it because he had started as a 3 year old in a Montessori back in Texas and felt like the familiarity with the Montessori Method would help with his transition here...not to mention I am obsessed with this type of schooling method and love it to pieces.  His kindergarten year went great, but due to the fact that the kinder year is spent in the same classroom as the first and second year...it was very familiar and anti-climatic.  We all missed out on the first day of kindergarten freak out session and the "my baby is all grown up feelings" that I have heard horror stories about.

*cue this year*

Sneek-a-Peek Night at Roanin's new school

We decided to make a switch.  I adore Montessori and think that the education system in America would actually do better if it had more of these concepts Incorporated into it, but there were things about Roanin's experience that needed some consideration.  First, as is traditional at all Montessori schools, the bulk of the learning experience is done through independent initiation of works.  Teachers don't tell you what to do for the most part...the students tell the teacher what they are interested in and ask for help if they need it.  Although Roanin has a work ethic like you wouldn't believe, his timidness finds him often looking for cues about what to actually hone in on.  His teachers told me at conferences that they would often find out Roanin had a question about something in the class only after they approached him and asked him why he had not chosen a new work to pursue.  He had the desire, and the potential to be successful at something, but would sit quietly because other children were asserting their questions and he didn't want to barge in.  Secondly, and a point that could have potentially cancelled out many of the problems of the first if it were different, but our school was extremely small.  Roanin had a small pool of his peers and an even tinier few that he latched onto and got his cues from.

I had a great public school experience as a child.  From the time I moved to my school in 2nd grade through my graduation day, I loved it.  I learned a lot (for the most part).  I made life long friends to whom I still share my most intimate secrets and get the honor of listening to theirs.  Shawn's public school experience was not so great.  Shawn was very shy as a child and also laid claim to a horrible case of undiagnosed (and unnoticed - WTF) dyslexia to boot.  So he was often under the radar...and really off the radar for that matter.  He didn't learn a lot and doesn't talk to a soul from high school.

I began snooping around.  I looked at our public schools, local private schools, parochial schools, and reevaluated our current learning situation.  It kind of became a case of having too many good options...and I won't bore you or annoy you with the details but a decision still loomed.  I toured and grilled other moms I knew for their opinion.  I lured kids with juiceboxes and drilled them about their school experience.  I will even admit to finding a way to fit school history into cocktail conversations with adults who I respect and think are thriving in life in order to accomplish some weird no-where-close-to-scientific study in my head.  If you haven't figured it out yet - I tend to over think things a bit.

*sigh*

So the decision finally was reached.  We chose a school in a neighboring district and I wrote the dissertation that was necessary to have a chance at getting into it.  And we waited.  And we heard back.  And we celebrated.  And then I overthunk some more and got nervous.  And then we got his teacher assignment and list of classmates.  And then we cheered some more.  And then we got backpacks and supplies and laid out clothes.  And then it was the night before the first day and I felt a lump in my stomach.

There it was.  It was the elusive "my baby is grown up feeling" and it hit me like a ton of bricks.  I woke up the next morning and found that it had found a partner, reproduced itself 14 fold and picked up the skill of breathing fire all overnight.

German tradition of first day of school Schultutes for the boys.

We give ours the night before as to avoid the sugar dump right before class.

So Rexy and I walked him in, and I disguised my disheveled new emotion with lots of smiles and pats on the back and blurry photo opps with my phone.  But it was happening and I couldn't breathe.  We walked down the loooooooong hallways and pointed to all the cool new things about this school.  A lunchroom that is also a gym!  My own cubby!  My own desk!  A girl named Rowan in my classroom! And she's cute!  But for each new thing that was cool, I could have listed off 100 that were not cool about this little baby of mine being able to perhaps make this walk tomorrow by himself.

Rex and I returned home and I sat down at my desk to shuffle things around to feel productive and avoid a pretend play marathon with overly-eager Rexy.  I came upon an old notebook that I had when we were living in Idaho and had our first born.  Roanin had some nursing problems for the first few weeks and we didn't know and were trying to troubleshoot the situation by any means necessary.  At the suggestion of the pediatrician, I kept a detailed log of Roanin's life....eating, sleeping, mood, etc.  As I studied this detailed list of Roanin's life from his first few days, I was shocked at where I find myself today...just six short years later.  Somehow I have catapulted from knowing every ounce he ingested and every minute he slept to waving at him through the glass door of a K-6 public elementary school and then spending the next six and a half hours obsessing about what he is possibly doing and how he is feeling.  If he is making friends and whether he is making good choices.  Wondering if he ate all his lunch and if he is being bullied at recess.  And the dichotomy is MIND BLOWING.

For me, parenting never ceases to surprise me.  The second I am somewhat comfortable with where we are at, and I feel as if I might possibly be getting into the groove of things...we free fall to the next level where everything is completely the opposite and no one has explained anything and yet everyone seems to be watching and quick to criticize if you don't get it right straight out of the shoot.

Roanin made it through the first day.  And even more shocking, so did I.  He was elated when I picked him up...with news of recess and PE, with the report of having his name on Super Student all day,  with directions about what he would like in his lunch the next day so he has time to finish it all before recess and with a toothless grin that tells me we made the right decision.

And even if we hadn't...it would all still be okay.  

Professor

We have a silly little neighborhood magazine here that asked me to write a little story.  The following is what I submitted.  Thought you would be entertained...

          

  We brought a Blue-Tick Coonhound with us from our little house on acreage in Texas when we moved to Omaha two years ago.  His name is Professor.  He is a hunter by nature, but poor old dog is confined to our yard and does the best he can with any little creature stupid enough to wander in.

            It was a normal Wednesday, and my full day of staying at home with the two little boys had me feeling beyond done for the day.  My husband, Shawn, had offered to take this evening as his turn to wrangle the boys down for bed and I had quickly taken him up on it.  Before sitting down to a little wine and some worthless reality tv, I decided to take the trash out.  It was completely dark outside and as I opened the back door, Professor bolted out and immediately began letting out his classic hound dog bark upon reaching the grass.  I didn’t think much of it, however, because the bark that traditionally means he has found something stopped as quickly as it had began.  I threw out the garbage and began calling his name as I walked across the porch toward the door.  I saw Professor’s silhouette as he came trotting out of the darkness and I didn’t give him a second look as I opened the door for him to come in for the night.  As he passed me onto the rug in the dining room, that is when I noticed it.  The dog had something in his mouth, and it wasn’t little.

            Professor proudly strutted across the hardwood to the middle of the room and set down the fruit of his labor…the biggest opossum I have ever seen.  He looked up at me with eyes that begged for recognition of the job that was clearly well done.  We did, after all, have a dead opossum in our house before the end of the day. 

            My choices at this point boiled down to one of two things: I could either scream for Shawn to come and help and then take over bedtime routine with the two kids that resemble wild animals or I could simply remove the actual wild animal from the dining room myself.  And of course I picked the easier of the two…I would remove the opossum from the dining room. 

            Despite being larger than I could have ever imagined an opossum to be, the thing was dead so I figured this couldn’t be too hard.  I grabbed an empty plastic Hy-Vee bag and put my hands inside to use as a kind of buffer when I made my attempt to pick it up.  There was no blood, so I thought this should be fairly easy and not too far away from some of the jobs I am used to raising two small boys.  You see, Coonhounds are not killers by nature.  They are finders.  They will only fight something until it surrenders, or dies, so that the dog can bring it back to their owner.  We have seen this time and again with various raccoons, squirrels and bunnies in our yard.  Professor manhandles them enough to get them to stop moving and then guards their corpses all day in the yard, proud as he can be. 

            As I got down on one knee to scoop up the latest victim and got my plastic bag laden hands under his meaty little large body, I giggled a little to myself about how ugly and fierce this little creature looked and how if it were alive I would probably be freaking out.  And then it happened.  That opossum opened his beady little eyes and locked with mine, which suddenly were filled with terror.  It turns out that the whole “playing dead” thing is a real opossum strategy…one that had clearly fooled the dog and his owner.

            The opossum began hissing while showing his mouth full of sharp teeth.  It was when he reared back to try to bite me that I dropped him like a hot potato, back onto the hardwood floor of the dining room.  He didn’t run, he didn’t squirm…he just lay there.  I looked over at Professor, and he simply looked at me like, “ummm…I did my job.  This part is ALL YOU.” 

            Once again I found myself faced with the same two options I had grappled with just a few minutes prior: yell for Shawn and take over bedtime or handle this animal.  The stakes were a little higher this time, of course.  It was apparent that the animal was indeed not dead at this point, which made me lean toward bringing in the husband recruit.  However, I knew that I didn’t have much time before this critter decided the hardwood wasn’t the most comfortable spot and relocated somewhere even more problematic like anywhere else in the house.  I had to act fast.

            So I did what any normal housewife living in Fairacres would do.  I ran like a bolt of lightning to the garage and grabbed a snow shovel and proceeded to use my tennis shoe clad foot to hoist that opossum up into the snow shovel as best I could while avoiding his snarling and biting which were back with a vengeance.  As soon as I had him leveled out on the shovel, I shuffled as quickly as one possibly can while simultaneously holding a giant possum at the end of a shovel as far away from her body as humanly possible all the way to the back door.  Once open, I transformed into an Olympic javelin hopeful and threw not only the creature, but also the entire shovel as far as I could out onto the back deck.  Perhaps it was shock, or possibly just another round of “guess whether I am alive or not,” but that opossum laid completely still after landing with the shovel at his side.

            Back inside, I paced around the kitchen replaying the last ten minutes over and over in my brain.  I heard Shawn walking down the stairs, probably anticipating finding me curled up on the couch with my red wine and a tv show.  I met him halfway with a crazed look in my eye.

            “There was just a live possum in the dining room.”

            *long pause*

            “I don’t even know what that means.”

            I took him by the hand and led him to the back porch to show him the evidence, and all that was left was the shovel.