The leftovers

Some leftovers are good, like pizza, restaurant, and Thanksgiving.

Some leftovers are not so good. One comes quickly to mind: lunchbox leftovers.

This is a story about leftovers.

So imagine for a moment it is that time of the day, finally 11:45 and time for lunch.

You pretty much know what is in your lunchbox everyday, a peanut butter sandwich, some delicious crackers, a piece of fruit, and your water bottle. You take your little gnome lunchbox to the cafeteria with you wondering which fruit your mom packed you. You sit down with all of your friends, friends, who like yourself, left home for the day trusting they would eat a lunch; friends that also confidently answered the lunch count with home or school lunch answers.

You sit at your table in the lunchroom surrounded by hot lunches and home lunches. You hear the carefree chatter around you as children start to quench their hunger with their well prepared lunch.

You smile at your friends as you happily unzip your lunchbox and as you glance down, ready to join in the lunch eating madness, you slowly flip back your lunchbox lid and to your utter disappointment and dismay, the lunch that you have come to expect is not there, but rather, you open your lunchbox to nothing but..... a pile of crusts. And these are not just any old crusts but yesterday's leftover crusts. And not just yesterday's crusts but due to a little mix-up, yesterday's crusts from a triple decker sandwich or even more crusts than you want to see.

You look at yesterday's leftover crusts and because you are starving, you actually take three bites. They are three bites too many considering they are the same pile of crusts you chose not to eat the day before. They are the same crusts that you hate covered in seeds. It doesn't matter, you try those three bites anyway cause you realize this is your lunch. When it becomes too much to bear, you decide you are done with lunch and you zip up your same crusts again, feeling like you have done this exact thing before (and you have, minus three bites) and you wait. You have to wait cause of course no one else is done and it is still too early to head out to recess (naturally, I mean how long can it take to eat three bites of gross crusts you hated already once). So three seconds after you opened your lunchbox, it is closed and you wait while everyone else eats.

Meanwhile, back at home, as your mom is feeding your sisters a well balanced meal of turkey, garbanzo beans, carrots, oranges, and crackers, and suddenly begins to realize that was the first time she opened the crackers all day, which meant no new lunch was made.

She frantically emails the teacher and finds out the lunch and recess are over and you ate yesterday's leftovers. Your mom thought maybe you would get an emergency lunch or opt for cold lunch, but of course lunch count was done and you said "home".

My poor Owen.

At the direction of his teacher, the girls and I took over some food . As we were walking away we heard her say, "Owen, go ahead and sit and your table and eat, everyone, don't look at Owen, look at me and learn".

I will always feel bad about the day Owen and I now I call "the day you got crusts".

In case you were wondering

In case you were wondering what the perfect night looks like, according to Ivy, here you go.

It doesn't get much better than this.

Lee Lee & Ivy

Ivy told me today that her friend Lee Lee was here to play. She was going to stay inside to ride Ivy's scooter while Ivy was outside, then they were both going to the store with Greg.

I have never met Lee Lee before. Ivy talks about her a lot but today was the first time she came to play.

They left to go to the store together. Ivy buckled her in and then Lee Lee decided to sit on Ivy's lap.

She doesn't have any real friends and there is a part of me that feels so sad, and yet, another part of me that thinks that even if she had some, she wouldn't know what to do with them.

She loves her little world, the one that is safe. She plays endlessly with her brother, she takes care of Autumn, she pretends, she imagines, she shares all my food and makes sure we always share the last bite, she worries tirelessly and has a heart so big.

That girl is wise beyond her years.

Outside her world is hard. She doesn't know how to play, she doesn't relate to little kids, she has social anxiety, she is constantly afraid a dog will be around every corner, she always trying to learn something new, and puts an incredible amount of pressure on herself. All of this and she is only three.

The last remaining anxiety at school was on the playground. I saw her standing there one day and realized how uncomfortable she was during the run and frolic time. I casually mentioned one day that Owen used to look for rocks outside and for four weeks now I have picked up a smiley happy girl with pockets of treasures. She has a purpose, something to do other than run and frolic and be carefree.

I see myself in her and I wish I could set her little soul free to have fun, to run and play with little kids and really just have permission to be three.

I don't know if she will ever truly play and frolic, but I will do what I can to suggest activities to make her a little more comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. I will also welcome Lee Lee, and the friends before and after her, into our house to give Ivy the chance to play with her friends, the ones that are safe and let her be her kind of 3.

Sign me up!

I have so much going on and it is all my fault. You see, when the school sends out an email that they still need someone to teach the Junior Achievement program to Owen's class, I think in my head: well, I don't have any idea what they are talking about but I can't let Owen's class go without, sign me up!

Or, when I get a paper sent home about all of the wonderful PTA volunteer positions and I read they need a yearbook lead, what goes through my head? You guessed it, sign me up!

Or when I see the volunteer sign up sheet at Ivy's school I immediately sign up for the field trip.

I fear I am just an email or two away from PTA president and I am afraid I won't be able to stop myself.

The pressure is mounting tonight: we have to refinance our house by the end of the month and the appraisal is in the morning before we go to school; I have a client who has his own vet business and filed a chapter 11 to save the building and I need to get some work done on it before he loses his business because of me; I am in charge of our books at the office and suck at doing just a little each day, which means I have entries to make since February and it has to be done and reviewed by the accountant by December 10 to decide whether we need to set up 401k plans to reduce our tax liability; and finally, and most importantly, in an effort to have a gmo free, mostly organic Thanksgiving, we are making some changes to the menu and Angie and I really need to figure out what those changes are.

And of course I have the day-to-day, school, clients, music, piano, carpool, gymnastics, speech, eating, balancing our bank account, boot camp, and trying to remember to have fun.

Now don't get me wrong, I am certainly not complaining, I do it to myself. In fact, I now know I have something wrong with me. I have often wondered and my suspicions were realized the day I got an email telling me there were only two other people on my yearbook committee. I think this was a bad thing but I felt relief. What can I say, I like to do things like this my way.

I need therapy to curb my controlling crazy ways, but until then I will keep volunteering and stressing cause that is what I do.

Here's to a crazy week!!

(I should take a hint from this girl)

Ball, Missing Sounds, & $25.00

We have had some big breakthroughs around here lately. 

1. Kristi told Autumn to say ball today, she did.  We thought it was an accident and asked her to say it again and sure enough she said the same thing. 

2. Ivy has been going to speech since about March or so.  During her first assessment, I think we were told she needed to work on everything.  She left off the consonants at the beginning of the words, consonants at the end of words, and mixed up the other ones she said.  I guess she really just spoke in vowels.  We can safely say there wasn’t a lot of understanding going on.  We have made amazing progress throughout speech class and I am so proud of her but as we picked up on some things, we realized what we were missing, we were still left without “s” and “f” sounds in the beginning of words.  For example, swimming suit = imming uit,  silly mom = illy mom, school = cool, fun = un, first = irst.   Our secretary from work asked Angie one day how she understood Ivy, to which Angie correctly responded that you simply take the word you don’t understand put an s or an f on the front and you can figure it out.  Well, she counted to 10 the other day (which used to sound like this – one, two, ee, or, ive, ix, evan, eight, nine, ten) and miraculously used all of her sounds.  Ever since, f and s have found a way into her vocabulary and continue to be more present each day. 

3.  I just donated $25.00 to California’s Proposition 37.  This is the Right to Know Initiative asking to label GMOs (genetically modified organisms).  I have always loved the name brand food and if someone told me 10 years ago I would be where I am today I would have been shocked and full of disbelief.  When Autumn became allergic to corn and I began learning and researching and understanding, I gained so much more knowledge than I thought possible.  As part of that research I learned that almost all of the corn we eat comes from genetically modified corn.  I also learned that since the introduction of genetically modified corn, allergies in children has increased 255%.   As a result of my own continued research and recent articles about GMO products, we have changed the way we eat around here.  At first we made changes to my diet and Autumn’s to prevent her from having a reaction to something but now it is so much more than that.  It is about eating healthy and limiting the number of pesticides and GMO foods we eat.  We are slowly changing to as many organic foods as we can, as to be labeled organic it cannot contain GMOs.  We try to buy mostly organic fruits and vegetables.  We have switched to local honey from a cute little man down the street.  We look for the Verified NonGMO Project labels on the foods we eat.  It is a process.  Now don’t get me wrong, I still let the kids eat Halloween candy, they still get the snack at music class, we go out to dinner and I know it won’t be the end of the world if they eat this stuff, but I am going to continue to do what I can.  Proposition 37 has $41 million raised by big companies to fight it passing.  I don’t live in California, but I donated $25.00 because I want it to pass.  I want companies to be required to tell me what is in the food I eat.  I want to make decisions for my family based on the knowledge and information available to me.  If it passes in California, it will obviously affect labeling everywhere. 

Like I said, breakthroughs.  From a new word, to a new sound, to a new way of thinking, all of which make me very happy. 

And it has nothing to do with anything on this post, but Ivy just went to find her books for bed tonight and told me she wants to read Lady and the Trampoline, that obviously makes me happy too.