Hello, Kitty!

And Pony.

And Humaniform Pony. Yeah, she was pretty much a testament to marketing aimed at young kids this weekend. At one point she was wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and Minnie Mouse socks, with a Hello Kitty bow in her hair. For the party itself at least we stuck to Kitty attire, though many of the gifts were other licenses.

We've done Lizzy's birthday at the park before - that's the advantage of a summer birthday - but this time it was at a much better park for our purposes, because there are a lot of trees and therefore shade.

We played pin-the-bow-on-the-kitty, and ate Hello Kitty themed cupcakes made by the Happy Little Cake Company (aka my friend Carrie, aka Lizzy's BFF Natalie's mom). We had kids ranging from two-and-a-half (Natalie's little sister) to ten-and-a-half (Abby). Speaking of whom, she and her friend did face painting for all the kids who wanted to have it done. We played on the playground.

Lizzy got to have most of her favorite friends, including a couple from preschool, and of course she made out like a bandit. When she went to bed last night, she was replete with cupcakes and a new DVD, toys and a new water bottle from the Hello Kitty lunch kit her aunt and uncle and cousin got her. And more than a little tired and excited and spoon-droppy.

And that was before we discovered that their bed is broken. Slats have broken before; this is no big deal. But when a side support for Abby's top bunk mattress goes kablooey, it's not safe. So they both slept on the floor. We're moving in a couple months, so for now we will remove the top bunk and the three girls will just have to share the lower bunk and the trundle for a few weeks until we can move and get them new furniture. It should have lasted longer than that.

The point being that at the moment we can't find a couple of the gifts, presumably because all the birthday stuff and all the bedding is on the floor in the girls' room. Sigh. We'll get it done. But it adds another layer of stuff, both literally and figuratively, to Life.

Today I Learned...

...Lizzy's favorite punctuation mark is the "explanation mark because it's kinda like crazy." I am unsurprised by this, both the favorite mark and the mispronunciation of it; this is the child who - even with her huge vocabulary - she still says "restauronk" and "conculator".

...The people who want to hire me are the same people at whose job I suck large. Trust me; I've tried selling insurance and I'm really really bad at it. Customer service or claims, I'm your gal, but sales of same? Notsomuch. So much notsomuch.

...Tad of LeapFrog fame (in the cartoon) looks remarkably like the Honey Smacks Frog (at least from a few years ago; the current Dig 'Em looks rather older than Tad Pole and Lily Pad). This one was pointed out by +Laston Kirkland.

...I only get enough sleep on weekends, even when not working, because I stay up too late reading and watching old favorites on TV. I'm not yet as far as re-reading this series though, so although stressed from joblessness and so forth, I'm pretty much okay. And the Hubs kept Lizzy out of my hair so I could sleep in, for which he is commended.

...WebMD now covers non-humans (at least cats and dogs). And there is another site - PetMD - with even more complete information. Using their symptom checker regarding Tiger, I'd say she's just old, hot, and cranky. Moving more stiffly than usual, hair loss (summertime shedding) and therefore hairballs in spite of her special food, sleeping a lot even for her. She is over fifteen, and while most cats in my life have lived a lot longer, Tiger has always been a little delicate.

...Summertime colds are teh suck.

...After reading the first two Oz books to Lizzy (Abby and I read them together when Lizzy was a baby) we can now make the "Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my," chant out of anything. My personal favorite of late is "Broccoli and Bacon and Cheese," used for Potato Bar Dinner Day.

...Some of the best jobs on the boards can be found on the weekends. Now if they'd just call me back we'd be in great shape!

And There's The Difference

Between our girls.

They're bright little things, and Lizzy's a good reader for her age, where Abby is good with math (she must've gotten it from her dad). Lizzy's pretty good with math too, but I think that has more to do with 'playing school' with her big sisters; she's already been drilled in her times tables up to threes for instance.

They're list makers, too. Abby prefers grids, and finds a lot of satisfaction in simple spreadsheets or bulleted list, where Lizzy wants to write it down in words. Again, literacy versus mathematics.

But Lizzy grew up with more tech than Abby or Leanna did, and big sisters to boot, and she is in some ways much more self-sufficient. Leanna is the nature girl, Abby is the socially adept girl, and Lizzy is the practical girl. So when she sets out to make a list of TV she wants to watch this weekend, and she asks an adult to help her spell, and the adult says, "sound it out," she goes one better.

She asks for the TV remote so she can use the Netflix and Amazon Prime queues to learn how to spell the names of the shows. She did the same last spring when she wanted to make a poster like the big girl scouts, and needed to spell Samoas; she dug out the box.

As for the other two, Leanna gets more nature loving by the day; whenever she's here and the girls play a game together they're migrating wolves, or birds building a nest, or flower fairies or something. Abby is so adept with the younger kids - and Google knows that with Lizzy she's had practice - that she has been put in charge of walking morning kindergartners from the bus to the gym where they all meet.

There are our girls, nutshelled.

Now We Are Six

Hello Kitty!

Lizzy and Mrs. M

 Yeah, yeah, not my favorite either, but you kind of have to use it.

Six years ago today, I had Lizzy (surgically, because Abby's birth was both difficult and emergency surgery, and why go through that again when the same outcome is likely?). There was a spike in the local birth rate then (Lizzy was not the only child born nine months after that loooooong power outage in December of 2006) and our kindergarten population shows it. But Mrs. M, her kindergarten teacher, used Lizzy's birthday (as good teachers do) as a object lesson. "This is how we do the birthday routine here in our Dazzling Dolphin afternoon kindergarten class," she says, and leads twenty lisping five- and six-year-olds in a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday (shut up, they aren't performing it for anyone). She also gave Lil' Liz a birthday sticker, a couple of cards (one from her and one from the principal), a couple of pencils ditto, and a handmade birthday crown in pink and blue.

It just doesn't get better than that when you're six.

And a sleeping bag!

Twilight Sparkle and
Rainbow Dash?

And then Grandma took us out for the Girls Only Birthday Dinner (at Red Robin, natch; it's Lizzy's favorite) with Auntie and little four-year-old cousin, where Lizzy got some of the things her little heart desired (and a free sundae and a song with lots of clapping), and we came home to Daddy's gift (she'll get gifts from me at her party on Sunday). Daddy got her a set of four enormous floor puzzles, with a Jake and the Neverland Pirates theme.

Again, it just doesn't get better than that.

Mmmmmmm

And yet it does, because Herself is having a party (nothing fancy, cupcakes and pin-the-bow-on-the-Hello-Kitty and park play and face painting) on Sunday afternoon. A couple of kids from the neighborhood, a couple from her preschool (she doesn't really know her classmates yet), her bestie Natalie and her baby sister, some family. Should be fun.

Here's hoping the weather improves after the rumored thunderstorms and flooding tomorrow and Friday.

Of Dolphins and Invitations

Fifth Grade!

Ah, back to school...

Busy afternoon. Abby off to first day of fifth grade in the morning, and Lizzy in the afternoon, then me off to a job interview, then to the bus stop to wait on their bus. And wait and wait and...

Kindergarten!

...the first day of school is hard on the transportation department. The bus was about a half hour later than they claimed it would be, and about twenty minutes later than I actually expected it. You see, Lizzy is not the only child beginning kindergarten today; there are so many kindergartners in our school this year that the bigger kids overflowed into the five portables... and five new ones as well. All those little ones in new situations, overwhelmed with information and new experiences, all that makes for a very slow transportation day.

And all Lizzy noticed about the bus is that there are no seatbelts. She was very impressed. But of course she was in Pre-K for two years, so it's not like she doesn't have experience in school; the bus is a whole different thing.

She really likes her teacher though, and so far I do too. Kindergarten teachers are a special breed. And Lizzy's looks like a good one. For instance, she has already worked out how to deal with Lizzy's birthday tomorrow, explained that there are no known allergens in her class this year (always a concern for me) and somehow managed not only a little treasure hunt for the kids today (their class mascot, a plush toy called Dazzle the Dolphin, went missing, and in their quest to find him they took a school tour, only to find him in their classroom, where he had apparently been procuring goldfish crackers for a snack), but also wrote up a newsletter and a separate postcard for each child about their first day (I compared Lizzy's to another child's, so I know they're not boilerplate, though they may have been mostly pre-written. But still).

Abby's teacher, as indicated previously, is a Shel Silverstein fan (and besides, her name is Liz, which my Miz Liz finds to be almost as impressive as beltless school buses). We like her.

No homework tonight, except that there is a "My first day" paper for Abby and a "what I did this summer" poster for Lizzy, both due Monday.

As for my school, my class is done, and I know I passed. I got a high score on my individual paper, so all that's left is the team assignment. That week break between classes was seriously helpful.

A Break From Homework

'Lil Lizzy can't win for losing. We want her to help her sisters clean their shared room, but a) she drags her feet and b) they don't want her in there; they want to play Big Kid Games while they clean, and they kick her out. Not a problem with just Abby and Lizzy, or just Leanna and Lizzy, but all three of them (all three of any kids where Lizzy is involved actually; it happens when Abby has friends over, although it's less directly kicking her out of her own room) gets very two against one, with Lizzy odd kid out because of the age difference

And the chore list (which she does generally follow, albeit with whining) kind of went by the wayside while the kids were out of town in mid-August. That'll start up again tomorrow; not fair to Leanna to make her clean up stuff that happened when she wasn't even here. Even if she and Abby both complain that Lizzy never has to do anything, but then set her up to fail. They can't help it; they're adolescent and pre-adolescent, respectively. Anyway, when we move in November or December, Lizzy'll have her own room and it'll cease to be a problem.

But today it required a little judicious tweaking, to preserve the dignity of two older kids (13 and nearly 11 respectively) who are underslept and resisting basics like showering and tidying their room, while still requiring Lizzy to do some cleaning in the room where her sisters don't want her to be. I had her crawl under the bed and clean underneath it (that way when Leanna goes back to her mom's tomorrow morning it'll be just a matter of her shoving the trundle in; when she leaves in morning-time things tend not to get cleaned up unless we do it the day before). So I had Lizzy get all the stuffed toys and books out of there, so she did a job, then dragged her out here to play old SNES games (apparently Mystic Quest is too much reading as of yet (and I can't read it to her while doing homework) but she's enjoying Super Mario World though she's not very good at it yet). 

So the big girls finally come out after tidying their room and Lizzy is only too happy to let them have the controller, because they're far better at this kind of game than she is, and I'm relieved because it gets her out of my hair while I do my homework (a lot less, "Mommy, can you do this level for me?" And I can; I used to sell these things and demonstrate them for a living after all). The hubs tries, really hard, but the kids want me to do this stuff, not Daddy. Especially Liz.

Now, thank goodness, back to homework.