Of kids and lemons

Instead of having fish tonight for dinner we went to Cracker Barrel. No real reason for it other than I was terribly disgusted by the very notion of eating fish and desperately craving steak. It was a mood thing, I guess.

Anyway, we ate dinner and afterward I was sipping a cup of tea when K. started licking the lemon wedge that came with my tea.

Now, when she was a baby we let her lick the lemons because what better way to teach a child that's not the most yummy thing to do, right? Also, the face the kid makes afterward is always funny, and it only gets funnier with the second, third, and even fourth times. It's a learning process and some kids aren't always quick on the uptake. K. was usually pretty quick to decide lemons were not good eating, but for about a year it was always something she had to try again the whenever she saw one.

So tonight A. and I are sitting there looking at K. like she's lost her ever-loving mind, 'cause lets face it, someone reaches over and picks up a juicy wedge of lemon and starts licking it and you can't help but wonder if maybe they have a screw working itself loose. Of course, the eleven-year-old girl child bursts into a fit of giggles and "What??"s accompanied by a few "it's good!!"s.

Now, when she was a baby, it was her father that tormented her as all parents torment their babies. He'd be the one to put the lemon wedges within her tiny little reach. He'd be the one that, after she told him she hit her head on the wall, would ask for a demonstration knowing full well that she'd give it... five times. He'd be the one that would tell her things like pictures were always in color but before a certain year the world was in black and white... and in some areas of the world the color fades, reverting back to black and white until some technician somewhere refilled the color toner cartridges. Ever read "Calvin and Hobbes"? Calvin's dad was the inspiration for many of A.'s amusing little tortures.

Seeing how A. wasn't jumping on this giggling eleven-year-old sucking on a lemon thing with both feet, I figured it was my turn. I offered K. just a bit of sugar on a spoon. Being an eleven-year-old girl deep in puberty, she took it. I told her to chase it down quick with a suck on the lemon she had... and she did it, much to our amusement. After a few minutes I repeated the offer of sugar with another suggestion of a lemon juice chaser... and she took it and did it again. It only happened once more, but only because she'd sucked all the juice out of the lemon and A. really wanted to leave the restaurant.

Well, almost all of the juice. Just before we left the table she took that poor little lemon wedge and squeezed it for all she was worth. It gave her very little juice -- it didn't even fill the spoon halfway -- and what did my darling little girl do? Yup. She stuck that half a spoonful of pure lemon juice in her mouth.

I'm not sure which was funnier, the face she made with the sugar/lemon juice combo or the pure lemon juice.

No, I stand corrected. The face with the pure lemon juice was far funnier.

And now she has requested that I pick up some lemons next time I go to the grocery store. Seriously. The kid wants lemons on a daily basis. And she wants to try a lime, too.

Well, it is a fruit and it's not like she's going to eat too many of them and I can think of far worse things for her to be begging for, so what's a mom to do? I don't know about other moms, but I put lemons on the shopping list for later this week.

Summer, writing, and choices

I haven't been doing a lot on the internet lately. I haven't been reading forums or blogs,writing in my own blog(s), nor reading or responding to e-mail. As my excuse I say "Life has been in the way", but the truth is that I made the choice to back away from the 'net for a while. Not only did I need a serious break from the internet life, but there were - and are still - other things that I wanted to be doing with my time.

And that's what it boils down to, isn't it? The choices we make in life.

K. is out of school for the summer, and I'm wanting this summer to be a little more special than previous summers. I'm less crazy than I have been in recent years, thanks to a stabilized schedule and (more or less) regular sleep, and I really just want to spend time doing things with my daughter; things that she wants to do, things that I want to do, things that we want to do.

While it's a no-brainer choice for me to spend time with her, I'm finding that it will take more effort and work than I first thought. With limited funds (not to mention rising prices all across the board - rent, electric rates, gas, food) we have to figure out frugal/cheap ways to accomplish almost everything but staying home. We have to make choices about driving somewhere to do something fun or sitting at home and reading (or worse, watching tv). We have to figure out a way to acquire the supplies we need for projects. We have to figure out what we can make for lunch out of the food we have on hand.

It all comes down to choices. Even to the point of how we choose to react to circumstances beyond our control.

I suppose we, as a family, would be better off financially if I had continued to work all the years of the past decade, but me staying home (whenever possible) was a choice A. and I made together. If I were working, K. would be shuffled off to some daycare-type facility every day this summer. There would be no curling up on the couch together to watch the mid-morning cooking shows on PBS. There would be morning frolics in the pool. There would be no days spent sprawling at the library. There would be no impromptu visits to visit her great-grandparents - my grandparents - whom she is lucky enough to know in this age when few children know their parents, let alone their grandparents. There would be no letting K. sleep late then tickling her out of bed. There would be no early-afternoon phone calls from friends, no learning to cook, no weekly visits to the zoo to play with the stingrays or feed the laurakeets. This is the choice that I, with my husband, made: to give her these things, and so much more.

But that choice has cost us. Much of society sees our family as dysfunctional because only one parent works. More often than not I'm seen by outsiders as being a burden to my husband, judged to be lazy and worthless because I "contribute nothing" toward the finances. Yes, we would most likely already be in the house we want by now if I had been working all these years... but I wouldn't have been able to spend school vacations and summers with my daughter. I wouldn't have been able to be at home to take care of her when she was sick without worrying about my job. And then there's the pesky little feeling that I wouldn't have been the one raising her all these years if I had been handing her off to some daycare every morning on my way to work and letting them take her to school, pick her up from school, and help her with her homework or play with her until 5 or 6 in the evening when I picked her up. It's the choice we made, and as far as I know, we're all happy with it. I have to remind myself of that sometimes when I stand while being judged. While my instinct may sometimes be to react with all the self-righteous fury I can muster, the cooler part of my intellect calmly whispers that I have the choice to be better than that. It reminds me that it really doesn't matter what others think because whenever I pose the going back to work question to A. and K., both of them prefer I stay home for a few more years.

That is the choice that we, as a family, have made.

There have been sacrifices that go beyond financial measures involved with our choice for me to stay home and raise our daughter. Personal sacrifices. I gave up a career (that I really didn't like anyway, but it could have been used as a stepping stone to something I would have loved). I've not been able to go back to school (yet). I gave up adult social interaction... human social interaction (I won't call them friends because they weren't). More recently, I've had to set aside my writing because it's less important to me than fixing the chaotic mess my family has become. This is a huge blow for me. I was just starting to feel the edges of my writing groove again. It is, however, the choice I'm making.

I'm not giving up the writing completely, though. In fact, my husband just recently agreed to me registering a domain in the name I've chosen to write under. For the next two years it is mine, and with a little luck (and a lot of hard work) I'll be able to do something with it besides point the URL to the blog*spot journal I have for that name. Maybe I'll even manage to get something published.

But I know I won't be able to really work on that goal until after the summer is over and she's back in school. While this does bother me some, I'm also ok with it. It's the choice I've made. My family comes first. My daughter comes first. I know that soon enough the chaos will be calmed, and eventually my daughter won't want to spend as much time with me. She'll have learned all she thinks she needs to learn from me and will venture out into the world to make her own choices. When that happens, I'll have all the silence, peace, and time I need to write. Until then, this is my choice.

Recap of Days

Peggy commented to my "A Decade of Clutter" post (here) that "It sounds like you had a particularly tough few years there" and, well, yeah, I guess they were tough, but those times don't define me. That post was just a small glimpse of a small section of the past decade, mostly written to remind myself why I have the mess I have even though I clean daily (my daughter thanks me often for keeping the bathroom so "sparkly"). Life... it's not all been bad, and I thank God often that things weren't worse than they were. I know they could have been a lot worse, especially with the lack of sleep I had going on there for a while.

That being out of the way, the past few days have been sort of busy, while at the same time... not really.

Friday K. was out of school and though we cleaned a bit, we mostly spent the day playing together. We had a small hiccup in the day when the water went out for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon, but luckily the washer had already finished running so it didn't burn up!

We also made some chocolate chip banana bread, and then giggled at the pitiful way the results turned out. I think I need to either find my old recipe or find a different one than the one we used. Still, it wasn't horrible. It tasted pretty good (it was so good the whole loaf has been eaten already!), and it was fun baking it with K., as she actually helped.

A. came home Friday night, and when he walked in the door (with us behind him) he was greeted by the smell of not only the pot roast in the crock pot (I'd left it on low after K. and I ate so his food would stay warm) but also boiled peanuts in the other crock pot! Surprise!

Saturday... um. Oh. We were supposed to get up early and go to an Easter egg hunt but that didn't turn out so well. A. was tired from traveling and K. was tired from other stuff and I got up out of bed just after 7am and had some quiet time while they slept. By the time both of them got up, all (three) of the holiday events happening were over so we cooked lunch and ran some last minute grocery errands during the late afternoon, coming home to cook dinner and sprawl about with our respective books or to watch tv.

Sunday we went to my mom's and while A. watched tv (Mom has cable) K. and Mom colored eggs, and I sort of helped/supervised. Then we all sprawled about Mom's living room to watch part of a movie then came home to cook dinner.

Today it's rather cool (it's after 4pm and barely 58 degrees F... in Central Florida... in April...) and it keeps trying to rain but isn't really having much luck with that. K. is out of school again today and we seem to be having another "quiet" day. It's kind of nice to be able to spend time in the same room with my family and none of us yelling at anyone else. Another glimpse of another sliver, I suppose. We're all sort of doing our own things, just in the same area with a strange sort of peace lingering over us.

The cleaning? I'll get back to that tomorrow.

Family Fun

We went to the AirFest out at the base today.

Wow.

We were only there for a few hours, and those were the last few hours of the show. We showed up just to watch the Blue Angels fly.

See, Mom had taken K. out there yesterday and they saw a few of the earlier flying exhibits from the car before they had to leave. Mom told K. a lot about the Blue Angels and K. really wanted to see them. So despite all that we had to do today to prepare for A.'s flight tomorrow, we drove the 45 minutes or so to the Air Force base on the other end of town, sat in traffic for nearly 20 minutes, walked nearly 45 minutes from the parking area to where the air show was actually being held, stood around in the sun watching the Blue Angels for 45 minutes, spent the next 30-45 minutes trying to get autographs (got one Blue Angel pilot's and took a picture of K. with him - she was thrilled), then made the hike BACK to the car where we sat for 20-30 minutes before we even got the chance to get back into the main flow of traffic.

It was so very worth it. K. loved the Blue Angel's show, and after several attempts, I managed to finally catch them splitting. The picture quality itself is rather poor, but I'm sure they're much better than what the people taking pictures with their cell phones got. Out of all the pictures I took today, this one is my favorite. I'll be posting others at my flickr account tomorrow.

And with all the fun, there was bound to be a bit of a downer thrown in. The Universe likes to keep such balance, after all. A., being a natural red-head, is burned pretty good on all exposed skin areas. K., being 10 and not quite as fair-skinned as her father, is experiencing her first ever sun burn. Thankfully it's just her shoulders and the top half of her upper arms, with just a bit on her chest. She wore a tank top today. I... well, I'm a natural blond and a reformed sun-loving desert rat (I haven't spent much time in the sun at all in the past 15 years). I'm a bit charred around the edges, meaning my face is all pink and I can feel the heat it in, but I'll be fine in a day or two.

I think K. now understands why I'm always pushing her and her father to wear their sunblock, and I don't think she'll balk so much when I reach for it for a while. I haven't decided yet if I'll keep her home tomorrow or not. I'll decide in the morning when I get her up. It may be a good day to keep her home and let her sprawl on the couch and re-watch Happy Feet while her skin soaks up all the aloe gel it can handle.