luckily we had classes all morning to take my mind off of our pesky house guests. darla started pottery last week. she’s WAY into it so far. and i’ve made the mistake of not putting her in pottery appropriate attire two weeks in a row. sigh.
here she is at the wheel:
we picked up monsters, inc. at the library this week.
darla said she wanted to draw pictures of the monsters like boo does, so we did.
that’s her rendering of mike and randall. i did the inside of mike’s eye but little one did all the rest.
i’m surprised b/c most of the time when we draw darla just wants to do scribbles or a series of straight lines, which is fine, but i didn’t really know until yesterday that she did have ideas of anatomically correct placement of limbs and facial spacial relations.
i guess i’m just going to have to remember that this girl gets inspiration from monsters, ghosts and cavities. asking her to draw me a mermaid, flower garden or fairies will produce just a bunch of scribbles.
the perfect twirly dress for darla marie. i can’t wait for the next holiday/excuse to give it to her.
i love thief and bandit kids designs!
here’s the rest of darla’s vacation. i say “darla’s vacation” because there is a noticeable lack of any photos of me, meg or my lovely girl friends. just darla, cory and elsa. it looks like they all had a great week together, huh? oh well, jussgonnahavtagoback!
THIS is a mike wright smile
i love these last two pictures. darla was trying to argue with me about something probably inconsequential and then she was trying to be indignant. it’s pretty hard to take an indignant banana seriously… i can’t wait to put these pics on a graduation announcement some day.
we had lots of adventures, a good deal of which were not captured on film because i was trying to put the camera down, have conversations and be present some of the time.
i would say darla’s first trip to “Lost Angeles” was a success.
california has been a whirlwind of wonderful activities, so far, and it is thoroughly kicking my butt. yesterday we took the girls to Disneyland. It was darla’s first time in an amusement park. she was amused. here’s just a bit of the day:
well, what can i say about the day? thanks to the precision science the buzzker family has perfected of amusement park going, we thoroughly covered the parks. Our coined phrase was “thrilled to the max.” Darla was pretty enthused about her first trip to disneyland.
i hadn’t been on a rollercoaster since before darla was born and it was soooo good. i have this, ummm, we’ll call it a “condition” where i just start laughing uncontrollably on rides. it’s prominent in the teacup video if anyone wants to hear. i’m sorry that the audio in that is just me laughing hysterically. being whirled through space just makes me astoundingly giddy, i guess.
hubster, i soooo wished you could have been there. i wish you could be here for the whole trip. in the words of elsa bun as she was preparing d for the disney experience:
“IT’S TOTALARY MAGICAL AND YOU GET TO BELIEVE IT!”
yes, it totalary was.
and how.
darla found my dynasty clothes = instant dress-up session.
well, ok, semi-sequestered.
the first reason being it was freaking cold.
the second was some much-needed momma reality check time with my daughter.
our first week without dad was a rough one given that darla got sick and required an extreme extra amount of attention at the time when i was now getting used to handling it all by myself again. timing, you are a sneaky snake and i don’t like you’re dirty tricks!
but it turned out to be a good thing for us. it helped me to slow down and spend a lot of time with her. extra time that i’m sure she needed to readjust. i take darla for granted sometimes because she seems to be unfazed by so many things that i assume she will pick up on our life shifts and adapt. for the most part she does and when she doesn’t i tend to be hard on her. i know that i need to give her some room to be a child and adjust at her own pace. it can just be really hard for me to remember when i’m trying to juggle the single-parent thing. it’s one of the many areas of my parenting with which i’m struggling.
so darla’s sickness was a blessing in disguise. it slowed us down. it led to more games, books, movies, cuddles. we had more conversations than we’ve had in a while. it’s nice that she and i can gab back and forth now.
it also showed me that if i can learn to let my expectations go she can be so very good. sometimes it can be frustrating because she seems to be really good for me at home and then with an audience she acts out. i want her to be able to behave even when she has the excitement of others around. but that’s just how she is.
and last week i came to a realization: i don’t base my child’s value as a human being on how well-behaved or well-mannered she is. i need to stop worrying and caring if other people are going to base their evaluation of her on just that. there are many that do. sometimes it’s strangers and sometimes it is people closer but in my opinion they are the ones that just don’t get it.
darla is wildly imaginative, playful, happy, loving and engaging. she will march up and talk to anyone. most of the time it’s inappropriate things like telling every table in the french restaurant about her sores that turned into scabs and fell off. but she’s not afraid to put herself out there and i love that about her so much. i love that she’s not scared. i want to foster these qualities because i think the fear of being who you are is one of the worst afflictions to our society.
so i’m hoping to take more time for the remainder of this winter for quiet days in the house, just she and i. when we can. there’s a lot of growing that she and i have to do together.
and…then again…this might just be a big rationalization of why it was awesome to stay in my pajamas all day for 5 days straight…
how was your weekend? here’s a little bit of ours:
1. bundling 2. imma readem 3. chalkboard walls 4. ready for california 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9. valentine’s sticker fun 10 & 11. peanut butter + nutella bagel 12. drawings of “the straight and narrow path” 13. girls night in 14, 15, 16, & 17. painting pottery with cousin clare and aunt colleen at clay cafe 18. valentine’s and tokyo post card 19. pink lips 20. laundry day 21. try this on for size 22. she says she’s an ice princess.
a sick girl can still go out and enjoy the snow.
i was so thankful to wake up and see the snow this morning. for one, it meant i had a good excuse to make a baked good for breakfast. two, i haven’t been able to take darla out to play in the snow all winter. why? because we’ve had none. we had a good time watching the big kids run around for recess.
darla’s favorite activity:
being pushed in the swing while yelling “snowball” repeatedly. yep. love it.
one of our coincidental D activities for last weekend was Disney on Ice.
holy hell.
i knew what i was getting into a little bit due to a friend’s similar experience but i definitely wasn’t prepared for the whirlwind of emotions that is Disney on Ice.
i don’t really know where to begin. i won’t waste time on the annoying parking situation because that was a given. so, i’ll jump straight to the fact that before we could even sit down i shelled out $30 on a plush ariel doll for darla. in all fairness, i chose the doll because i thought she’d be able to hug it throughout the performance and that it would offer up some form of distraction when she got antsy. this plan worked. plus i had to make good on my promise that i’d buy her something special to get her past those guys hawking annoying light up wands outside. gawd, i felt like a sucker.
we got seated late. so after stumbling down dark stairs and bothering the overweight family to haul themselves out of their seats so we could squeeze past, we had to make a hasty arrangement of who was going to sit where, passing out popcorn and making sure that effing overpriced plushie had an ok seat on darla’s lap.
the first 20 minutes of the show was pure bliss. girls were happy. entranced. delighted. popcorn-fed. disney-fied zombies. i even got into the excitement of seeing the magic reflected on darla’s face.
then the spell broke. darla lost interest, started looking around and realized people had refreshments other than popcorn. she was hungry. she was starving. she said she needed food right away. luckily, intermission was upon us.
i took her to get food but under the condition that she go to the bathroom while we were out so we wouldn’t have to cause the happy-meal family any more trouble. then we forged through the crowds to concessions.
oh the crowds. 4-year-olds with pacifiers. 5-year-olds in strollers. my brother-in-law sat next to a middle-aged couple with no kids in tow. wtf?
we arrived at concessions and i checked just once to see if the beer taps were open that day. i wouldn’t have, but i was thinking about it. alas, they were not up and running. darla declared she wanted only peanuts. i tried to reason that if she was so starving she needed something more substantial than peanuts. NO. PEANUTS.
we got peanuts. i didn’t dispute because they were the cheapest option.
back to our seats we filed, late again. i sat in a bath of cynicism as i watched ice dancers with FML written all across their faces. you could tell they all abhorred their existence on the ice. i think every time someone attempted a lutz or salchow they ended on their ass, furthering my suspicion that they were all drunk.
my critical state-of-mind was reaching an all time high when the entire cast came out to perform “it’s a small world after all” and there was a noticeable lack of any black or jewish representation. everyone knows walt was a raging anti-semite and xenophobe but this is 2012, people. if you’re going to include holland then you got to put at least one country from the continent of africa in there and representation from one of the oldest cultures in the world.
but then those bastards put mickey in an emblazoned hot air balloon to float above me and i had to give in. all my cynicism broke down as they started to play “when you wish upon a star.”
a tear sprang to my eye as i watched darla’s face lit by the indoor fireworks. for, no matter how corny and over-the-top it was, disney remains the ever positive voice urging us:
when you wish upon a star,
makes no difference who you are,
anything your heart desires,
will come to you
momjeanz 