Crazy For Her…

Dear Maddie,
I am so proud of you for what you did today. I never thought that potty training would be so rewarding for both of us. You are teaching me how to be more patient each and every day. For the past two weeks you have been telling me “I will not pee in my panties anymore”. Actually, you say “anymore” like it is three words instead of one which makes it super cute and I love to hear you say it. “An Knee more!”

It is a tough thing, this potty thing but you have stuck with it and you are determined to do it. Today when I picked you up from school you were wearing the same clothes that I put you in this morning. I noticed it right away and I was so excited for you. This was a big day and I made sure you knew how proud I was that you made it all day for the first time!

And it’s not just the potty training. I am proud of you for so many other reasons. The last couple of weeks you have been changing and growing, it is hard to keep up with all the wonderful things you do. You make it so easy to love you that I am forgetting about all the petty things that used to cosume my thoughts. There are so many things in my life to be happy about and the biggest one is you.

Love,
Mom

Moments that…

Made me laugh –
While driving to a birthday party I heard Maddie in the backseat counting “9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14″. I adjusted the rearview mirror to show her the look of pure amazement on my face because I had never heard her count past 3. But before I could tell her how smart she was I saw what she was counting. Evidently she has 14 fingers and I didn’t know it.

Made me think –
We watched a movie this week and it is still on my mind after several days. If you haven’t seen it, rent it now. Crash

Made me thankful for my family-
Tonight Chris was putting Maddie to bed and I heard lots of giggling coming from her bedroom. I walked queitly to her door and overheard Chris telling her fishing stories. I cracked the door just enough so she wouldn’t spot me. I saw the smile, the one that she puts on for him and no one else. And again it reminded me how lucky she is to have a father like him. If all little girls were so lucky the world would be a better place.

Made me sad –
Fathers should not be over the road truck drivers. They miss moments like their daughters third birthday, it’s hard on their wives and their children. I know this because I was one of those little girls. The fathers may think it doesn’t matter but it does. After 20 years, it still matters.

Made me thankful for the Internet (again with the laughter) –
The Humps – Courtesy of Defective Yeti
Elmo-Puppy – Courtesy of Dooce
The Wombat – Courtesy of Mighty Girl

I never want to forget –

Today I took a vacation day so that I could go to the dentist – bleh! After my appointment I rescued Maddie from daycare and headed to Exotic Animal Paradise. Not extactly exotic nor is it paradise but she had a blast. There were two things that made this a treat for her. One: She got to ride in the front seat during the tour. Two: There were donkeys, ostrich, deer and lhamas poking their heads in the car to be fed. Sweet!

There are a couple of things that I would like to erase from the day. That would be the moment where the zebra decided to eat the trim off of my car! I was carjacked by a zebra and a lhama. They worked as a team, the lhama blocking the front of the car and the zebra consuming my Toyota as an afternoon snack. I haven’t seen the full extent of the damage because it was dark when we got home but I am sure that my car insurance does not include animal vandelism. I know the car was rammed several times by a long horn steer. And again there was a lhama blocking the way.

I used to think that we would by a lhama after moving to a new place but today I quickly changed my mind. Lhamas are coniving little carjacking creatures and I have no interest in having one close to the place where I park my car, not to mention the place where I sleep.

I have or should I say HAD a black pair of dress shoes. They were my favorite pair of shoes and I wore them to work almost everyday because my wardrobe is VERY black. I bought these shoes a week before I started my current job and I paid $10 for them. That was six years ago and these shoes were looking 25 years old. I wore them through my entire pregnancy, for big presentations, interviews, casual days, the shoes have been good to me. They were comfortable and they went with all of my black dress pants. They are pleather shoes with cracks and you can no longer read the brand name on the sole of the shoes. I knew it was time to let them go but I couldn’t do it alone.

I have a friend/co-worker who had to intervene. She is the kind of friend who will tell you when you have a booger hanging out of your nose, she will tell me when an outfit doesn’t look right and that is the best kind of friend to have at work. It happened on Wednesday, she told me the shoes HAD to go. Actually, the first time she told me was weeks ago and I laughed it off and said the shoes were staying. But this week she meant business. She bought me a new pair of black shoes and forced me to throw away the old pair. So the shoes are gone and my friend is happy but my feet are hurting. I would wear my old trusty pair of black shoes instead of the new but the crazy woman threw them in the dumpster! Not in the trash bin in the office but the actual dumpster outside the building. I would have to crawl inside the dumpster to retrieve them and I would have to do it after hours because she threatened my life if I so much as looked in the general direction of the dumpster. So thank you crazy friend, my feet are killing me and I am sooooo not going to tell you the next time you have spinach between your teeth.

A novel by Mark Haddon

Excerpt:

Chapter 47

In the bus on the way to school the next morning we passed 4 red cars in a row, which meant that was a Good Day, so I decided not to be sad about Wellington.

Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don’t speak to anyone and I sit on my own reading books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn’t very logical.

I said I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that is why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn’t have anything to do with whether they had a good day or bad day.

I said that when Father got up in the morning he always put his trousers on before he put his socks on and it wasn’t logical but he always did it that way, because he liked things in a nice order, too. Also whenever he went upstairs he went up two at a time, always starting with his right foot.

Mr. Jeavons said that I was a very clever boy. I said I wasn’t clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn’t clever. That was just being observant. Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used evidence to work out something new. Like the universe expanding, or who committed a murder. Or if you see someone’s name and you give each letter a value from 1 to 26 (a = 1, b=2, etc.) and you add the numbers up in your head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ (151), or Scooby-Doo (113), or Sherlock Holmes (163), or Doctor Watson (167).

Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.