Now I'm that kind of mom

When Liza was little, taking her to the playground was both a relief and a huge hassle. We were out of the house, which was a good thing, but trying to get her to do what "normal" kids did on playgrounds was a nightmare. She didn't want to share the equipment with anyone - ANYONE - so if anyone else was at the park it generally ended up with tears and clingyness. She didn't want to stay on the age-appropriate equipment, so I was forever having to spot her as my 2-yr-old climbed up rope ladders on the middle school playground. She would ignore the playgroup we had gone to the park to see, at least until it was snack time and suddenly all the other kids' snacks were way more interesting than whatever I'd brought.

As she got older, if I sat on the bench by the playground, she'd run over to the sandbox. If I went to the sandbox, she wanted to swing. If I brought nothing to do, she wanted no help and wanted to stay forever, but if I brought my knitting she needed help with everything and wanted to leave after 5 minutes.

I've spent seven years looking enviously at the moms on the benches, the ones whose kids run off and play by themselves and don't constantly need to go to the bathroom or need to have bruises kissed or injured feelings comforted. The ones who bring books to the park - and actually get to read them.

And now, finally, I get to be one of those moms. I get to take my kid to meet a friend at the splashground and not have to do more than throw snacks to her every once in a while. I can sit in a beach chair in the shade and knit, talking to another mom about how to get the sap out of Liza's clothes once she climbs down out of that tree. True, I still have to doctor occasional scrapes, and apparently falling off of a low bar onto your back instead of you feet is so distressing it takes 10 minutes to recover, but I'll take that.

Because I'm that kind of mom.

Social skills are not her forte

We're at McDonald's, and Liza is playing "kitties" on the play equipment with her friend Kiele. Another boy approaches.
Boy: You can play with us if you're the bad guy.
Liza: Meow.
Boy: You can be any bad guy you want! Even a robot!
Liza: Meow.
Boy: You can even be a blue ninja! Or a greeweeewn ninja!
Liza: Meow.
Boy: Come on, be a bad guy!
Liza, to Kiele: How long is it going to take him to figure out that Meow means "Go Away?"

It's a tradition

We visit the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Liza insists on visiting the butterfly release, I have to kill half an hour taking pictures while she communes with nature.

Birthday party

Playground World, I (and fifteen of my closest friends, and some of their siblings) am in you!

Only shot of the day which shows more than two kids on any piece of equipment - they scattered like ball bearings dropped on a concrete floor, and Liza bounced between clumps of school- and non-school-friends all afternoon.

I told all the parents they were allowed to play on the equipment, too, but strangely enough there weren't many takers.

Good thing nobody took me up on the trampoline offer - somebody probably would have fallen and broken a hip.  We may be young at heart, but none of us are actually young anymore!

We had to drag them inside the party room for pizza and cake.

Good thing the cupcakes looked awesome - the kids were impressed for 10 seconds before they ran back out to play.

We gave her the choice between opening the presents at the party or opening them at home and having more time to play.  Greed won.

It was a lot less work to prepare for this party than for last year's Angry Birds Extravaganza.  And despite having three times as many guests, we finished the thank-you notes in a fraction of the time.  So, it was a winning situation all the way around!

Seven years ago today

• I was suffering from the effects of having to drink the equivalent of an entire Big Gulp every hour I was awake for the previous day, in an effort to combat a problem which it turns out I didn't even have.  My bladder would like to thank you for that experience, Ms. Incompetent Sonogram Technician.
• I was worried about the fact that my baby's head was measuring several weeks "younger" than it was supposed to on the sonogram, which probably meant that the 0.25 ounces of bourbon I drank before I realized I was pregnant had seriously stunted my kid's growth and I might as well start looking into group homes for her for later in life.  Thank you again, Ms. Useless Sonogram Technician.
• I was having to decide whether to go ahead and induce delivery early just in case Ms. Incompetent Sonogram Technician was actually correct and the baby was potentially in danger if she stayed in much longer.  Bitch.
• I was calling Jason out of important meetings so we could go have a baby two weeks early.
• I was so petrified I was going to fuck something up that I couldn't eat my lunch before I went to the hospital, even though I knew they wouldn't let me eat once I was admitted.
• I was pissed I had to go on an IV right away - I had planned to work on my cross-stitch sampler project while waiting for the drugs to kick in, but I couldn't hold the needle or the hoop comfortably with the IV hanging out the back of my hand.
• Don't even get me started on the whole "Big Gulps in the morning + insane volumes of IV fluids in the afternoon = 14,000 trips to the bathroom while hugely pregnant and dragging an IV pole and fetal heart monitor around with me" situation.
• Or the fact that they wanted to monitor my output, so I had to pee in a cup.  I did crack the nurse up when I asked her what she wanted me to do once I filled up the liter cup in one sitting - dump and keep measuring, or just record it as 1000+ ml?
• I was pissed that I was missing the premier of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I had planned to go see that evening, and which I had been anticipating for months in advance.  Turns out, when I finally saw it a year later on Netflix, it kinda sucked anyway.
• I was so bored while I was waiting for the drugs to do ANYTHING that I had Jason read the newspaper crossword puzzle clues to me and write my answers in for me, because trying to write with the &$(*$(&$)ing IV in my hand wasn't fun.
• I was trying to be brave for so long that the anesthesiologist was halfway home and had to drive back to the hospital to put in my spinal.
• I was trying (and failing) to remember to roll over every so often so the anesthesia didn't settle on one side of my body.  Whoops.  Took hours to regain any feeling in one of my legs after the delivery.  Seriously - the thing was like having a telephone pole surgically attached to my waist, it was that unresponsive.
• I was shivering uncontrollably no matter how many blankets they put on me, because apparently my body interprets "loss of feeling" as "oh my god we're stuck in a snowdrift and going to freeze to death if I don't vibrate like a tuning fork for hours on end."
• I was inexplicably afraid of getting a catheter put in.  Rip a giant melon-sized head out of my hoohah? No problem!  Shove a tiny tube in my peepee? GAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA.  And then after they put it in, I was all - Wait, I don't have to waddle over to the bathroom and pee in a pitcher anymore?  Bonus!  And the nurse was all - Better get another bag, this one's full already.
• I was bitching about how Nothing Was Happening For Three Hours, other than the peeing and the leg turning into wood and the shivering.  The nursing shift changed, and the new nurses checked on me, and told me to let them know if anything changed, and then went to look in on other patients.  
• It finally occurred to me an hour later that the vague feeling of fullness "down there" might be worth mentioning to the nurses next time they swung through.  Yeah, right, she said, and she took a peek, and her eyes got really wide, and she said, DON'T PUSH, I'll go get the doctor.  Apparently what felt sort of like a tampon that was about to fall out was actually my kid about to fall out.  Who knew?
• Push - Push - Push - there's your kid.  And the last one didn't actually count because I was laughing while I did it.
• I was entertaining the doctor while she stitched me back up, with an impression of the look on the nurse's face when she checked on my progress.
• I was trying not to be disappointed when the baby scored only 9 out of a possible 10 on the APGAR test. Don't get used to underachieving, kiddo.
• Telling Jason that Wendy's was still open, and since I knew he didn't get me a push present he'd damn well better go get me a fruit salad before the closed - seriously, get out the door and get me some food, goddammit.  The baby will still be here when you get back in 20 minutes.
• I was just beginning to experience a seemingly endless parade of nurses and lactation consultants and pediatricians and obstetricians and random people they found in the hallway who wanted to poke around at my boobs and tell me what the baby (or I) was doing wrong with nursing.
• Not yet aware that the nameless nurse who showed me Saturday night that newborns are actually able to drink from a (tiny) cup would be my Personal Savior and Bringer of Hope that the Kid Won't Starve to Death Before Monday.
• Never so happy as when the hospital confirmed that babies aren't allowed to sleep in their mother's rooms at night, they have to go back to the nursery.  Oh, thank you lord, for this 45-minute break between when the nurses are waking me up to check my vital signs, and when the baby wakes up screaming because she's super pissed that we broke her out two weeks ahead of schedule.
• Trying not to notice that the leftover umbilical cord hanging off of the front of my kid looked exactly like a used condom.  Trying not to make jokes about "Gee, I wonder where she picked that up, har har har."
• Admiring what I made.

And today?  Still admiring what I made, and the smart, fearless, funny, interesting, beautiful girl she's becoming.

Happy seventh birthday, Liza Bear.

2012 Lego Olympiad competition

This year Liza decided she wanted to compete in the Lego Olympiad as an individual, rather than a team like last year.  So when she kept putting off working on her project, and putting it off, and putting it off, I wasn't nearly as ticked.  The day before the competition I told her she had to either buckle down and prepare to represent her school well, or I wasn't going to let her go at all.  She thought about it all day, and after school she told me she was ready to work.  Yay.

She took her inspiration from an episode of her favorite show, Mythbusters, in which the team tries to escape from jail using a rope made of toilet paper.  We started with some screen shots of the episode to use as inspiration:

Her initial design wasn't terribly complex, but it still looked pretty similar to the building where the episode was made.  Unfortunately, when we ran the design through the Lego builder software, it spat out 70 pages of directions on how to reproduce it.  Um, probably not going to happen, but we'll bring them along just in case.

Let the building begin!  Liza was happy to see her friend Rachel shared her table.  Even if they weren't working as a team, it's good to have a smiling face nearby.

The judges circulated through the room during the build to make sure none of the grownups were helping and to talk to the kids about their projects.  Liza made good use of the photos and descriptions she made the night before, explaining how she came up with the idea and what it was going to do.

No, that doesn't look like the original model.  After a meltdown early in the build, she decided to scrap the more complicated building design and just go for the basics.  The original looked cooler, but honestly, this one was a lot sturdier, and it got the job done.

Look at how the projects are coming along ... Liza's got most of a building, and Rachel's volcano is done and she's working on the rest of her Hawaiian island.

Liza's finished model, "Mythbusters Toilet Paper Rope Jail Break."  Note that's Tory on the rope (which she made of dental floss so it was to scale), with Grant and Kari watching from below.  The minifigs were painted with wite-out, then she added the convict stripes with a Sharpie pen afterward.

Final judging time - Liza demonstrates that you can actually play with hers, and shows how the safety rope and winch work to keep Tory from falling when his hands slip on the rope.

The judges spent quite a bit of time looking over her project and talking with her about it.  I was good and sat far away, trying to ignore them and not helping her answer anything.  That's the hardest part of the competition, at least for me!

Liza was thrilled that she won a door prize, even if it was a box of Duplo blocks.  Then two of her school's Kindergarten teams won medals ... and then her classmate won a medal ... and then they called her name!

This is Liza's first actual non-pity award where she had to beat out other kids, they didn't just give the same thing to everyone who participated.  She won second place in the First Grade Open division.

Despite the fact that she didn't really prepare until the night before, I think she definitely deserved a medal for her work.  She planned, she built it all by herself and it worked when she was done. she was able to explain things to the judges coherently, and she was able to recover from her early meltdown and refocus on the task at hand.  Sure, it would be nice if I could have used the "See, maybe you would have won something if you'd started practicing more than 24 hours in advance of the competition" line, but hopefully this little taste of victory will leave her wanting to do her best next year.

Now, time to get cracking on the spelling lists for the Bee next Friday ...

A little game

Quick!  Find three things wrong with this picture:

1.  "Hey, let's take up seven prime parking spots by parking the bus where you can see it from the road, rather than parking around back in the logical location."

2.  "He's speaking in Lorain on Thursday, so let's stay in a hotel that's 20 miles away, even though there are plenty of business hotels located closer in Avon and Elyria."

3.  "Let's stay at the Radisson, even though there are at least five less-expensive business hotels within a quarter mile of it."

Nothing says, "I'm not an elitist asshole!" like staying in the Radisson when there's a clean, comfortable hotel ACROSS THE STREET that costs half as much.

Oh, and that campaign appearance he's making in Lorain today?  It's at a drywall factory where President Obama spoke when he was campaigning in 2008, which has since closed due to a downturn in the economy. Sounds great for the Republicans ... except that it closed during the Bush presidency, due to a downturn in the economy that happened during the Bush presidency.  While the outdated plant hasn't reopened since then, Ohio's unemployment rate is currently lower than it was when Obama took office, so it will be interesting to see how Romney's campaign can massage the data to make it look worse than it really is.

Living in a swing state is going to suck for the next few months.  Good thing we don't watch television anyway, and we rarely listen to commercial radio stations, so all we have to avoid are the 14,000 fliers we'll be getting stuffed in our mailbox this summer and fall.

I was all ...

So I was all, "Go clean your room," and she did.  But it still looked messy, and she didn't have places to put stuff.

So I was all, "Let's buy a loft bed," and we did. 

So I was all, "We might as well paint the walls while the furniture is all moved out anyway," and we did.

So I was all, "If you're going to be underfoot anyway, here, be useful," and she was.

So I was all, "Hold up, you're not the only one who gets to graffiti on the walls," and I did.

So I was all, "Dang, that looks pretty good!" and it did.

So I was all, "Wait, you want me to paint the drawer fronts HOW MANY colors?"

And that's what I'm doing today.

I love violets

That is all.

Days 2 and 3 in Chicago

Again, in app-mandated wackado order:
- Shark embryos, sea jellies, and sea dragons (oh my!) at the Shedd
- Goofing off on the Ledge at The Tower Formerly Known As Sears
- Sue, Mr. "Look I Have A Goose," and a kid willingly eating chicken sate.

Chi-Town

Spring Break + Mythbusters exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry = a perfect excuse for a road trip. Photos in an app-mandated wacky order show The Tower Formerly Known as Sears, the view from our swanky hotel room overlooking the river, proof that we survived the Metra trip to the MSI, proof that interleaved phone books really ARE that hard to pull apart, a creepy shot of my kid's future at Clown College, and proof that Jason doesn't drive the Mars Rover any worse than he drives a Nissan.

Next up: "We're going to take the El to the Shedd today, right, Mom?"