Category Archives: montser

Opening day!

We walked in the house hungry, exhausted and covered in a fine layer of dirt mixed with sun block. My once white shirt was no more and my pants were covered in gold fish cracker crumbs. We all got washed up and I rushed to put dinner on the table…only an hour later than normal. But this is our new normal, I suppose. The life of kids playing organized sports.

When the coach called me to tell me her practice schedule I was a little thrown off. I had figured we’d be looking at two days a week tops, for about an hour each time. But no. Oh no how I was mistaken. We practice MWF from 5:30-7.

Wait, is this kindergarten TBall or the major leagues!?

Maybe the practices will lighten up once the games start?

Maybe I’m just ridiculously naïve?

{lie to me ok!?}

We’ll get into a new routine…what matters right now is that Reese is mastering the slide solo, going between said slide and the field I’m getting all sorts of steps in on my fitbit and of course Rylee is loving TBall!

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When I asked her what her favorite part of practice was, she said it was the very end where they were “actually playing TBall.” For the record, she was in center field and saw no action whatsoever. She did manage to pick me a daisy while she was out there.

Boy does this all bring back memories...

P.S. One of these days I’ll take my real camera out there to snap some photos and write a real blog post on something other than my iPad so the photos are bigger than your thumb…but for now? This is as good as it’s going to get.

T-Ball is going to be awesome!

Just enough time for a quick post from my phone but…You guys? Can I just say how excited I am that Ry is playing T-ball? She had a blast at the skills assessment last night.

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Rylee Speak

Every kid has certain words they say funny. It’s one of those things that as a parent, you hope they never outgrow because you know when they do, they’re officially not-so-little anymore. Rylee has a few and I love each and every one of them. So much so, that I’ve found myself saying them her way. {Note: it is not nearly as cute coming from a grown adult}

Fableeus = fabulous
Hanguber = hamburger
Pateren = pattern
Redicleeus = ridiculous

But, other than these funny word mishaps, she’s a lot got something else going on…

The other day at gymnasts, Rylee had a new teacher. The introduction went like this:

Teacher: “I’m miss ___ {I never caught her name}. What’s your name?”
Rylee: Rylee
Teacher: Wylee? Nice to meet you!

The teacher then proceeded to call Rylee “Wylee” for the entire rest of the class until the very end when Rylee eventually got so irritated with the teacher she finally spelled it for her.

On the drive home, Rylee expressed her frustration with me about how the teacher kept getting it wrong. Then she said something that simultaneously made me proud and broke my heart.

“Can you teach me how to say my name right?”

Proud in the sense that she realizes she needs to work on something and is willing to do the work to make it happen. Heart broken because no parent wants to hear from their kids about their feelings being hurt particularly because of something related to their development. It really bothers Rylee that she has a hard time saying her “Rs”. Rylee is Wylee. Red is wed.

It’s not as bad as that annoying bear from sesame street, but it’s obviously bad enough that people don’t even understand what her name is.

When I was her age I had a hard time pronouncing my R’s as well. I remember being called into my school’s speech therapist’s office for a speech evaluation. I distinctly remember them asking me to say the word red. It was awful. But I also remember the follow up a couple of years later. I was fine. No intervention, or even “r” practice was needed.

So speaking from personal experience, I am confident that Rylee will grow out of it. That doesn’t mean I just want to ignore it…especially because she is so aware of it herself. Overall, Ry is a pretty confident little girl but I don’t want this to be her hang-up. I don’t want her self esteem effected because of it. It weighed on my heart and mind for the rest of the day.

That same evening she came out of her bedroom holding a pencil and a spiral notebook. She asked me how to spell “fantastic”. Not thinking much of it, I spelled the word for her without ever looking up from my dinner prep. Later when I was putting her to bed I saw the spiral notebook lying on her desk bench…

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In case you can’t read it, please allow me to translate: “I am fantastic as can be. The way I am they sure do love me. I am so happy. But do you know why?”

Ha, guess I don’t need to worry too much about her confidence.

She’s going to be just fine.

To this day though I hate saying words like rural.

Christmas Magic

The moment of Christmas Magic officially hit me this year. It came at about 10:30 PM on Christmas Eve as I flopped myself down on the couch after the last gift was assembled…completely exhausted. I pictured the look on Rylee’s face when she saw the pile of gifts under {and around} the tree. How she might react when she realized Santa had come. How excited she would be when she opened her “big gift” from Santa. I imagined how much Reese would enjoy playing with her gifts.

I thought back to all my years of childhood and how much I loved Christmas growing up. Right then is when it hit me.

My parents created this magic for me every year. And not just for me, but for my 3 siblings as well. I never once thought about it before that moment. But right then, I could picture my parents staying up late on Christmas Eve…filling our stockings, pulling gifts from hiding places, finishing last minute wrapping.

Now here I am, getting to create the Magic of Christmas for my kids.

Parenthood is truly a trip. And you better believe the very next day I made sure to thank my parents for all of their hard work over the years keeping that Christmas Magic alive.

*****

We scaled back our typical Christmas decorations this year because of a certain mischievous almost one and a half year old. I put up the Advent calendar for the second year in a row, though Rylee didn’t seem particularly interested in too many of the activities. I didn’t push it. We didn’t have our annual “Sisters Baking Night”. When it came to opening gifts, Reese wanted nothing to do with any of it. I think it was sensory overload for her.

Rylee, on the other hand is right at the perfect age for the Magic of Christmas. This is the first year she truly got it. She colored Santa a picture and rolled it up in her stocking for him to find. She left Rudolf and the other reindeer celery {we were out of carrots} and was thrilled to see that they were gone when she woke up Christmas morning. When she visited Santa earlier in November, she told Santa she wanted an iPod touch. At first, I thought there was no way in hell Santa would bring her one of those…then somewhere along the way, Santa had a change of heart and ended up reformatting my old iPhone; loading it with {free} games and some of her favorite music. Santa even left a little note typed out to read when she turned it on. We hardly took any photos, and we didn’t take any video but her reaction to all that is something I will remember forever.

Christmas this year was exactly what I was expecting, yet nothing like what I was expecting all at the same time.

Overall? The magic was there, and it was perfect.

*****

Our Nativity had a couple extras this year…apparently there was no room at the Inn for Mickey or Minnie either.

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Our tree after Santa came…one of 4 total photos I took the entire day with my “good camera”.

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Reese checking out her car…pretty much the only thing she wanted to play with…and ironically enough, the only gift that didn’t involve unwrapping something.

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Rylee showing her sister her new iPod!

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Us.

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Snow Day

Back in December we got a bunch of snow here. It was a Friday and I don’t particularly love driving in the snow/ice if I don’t have to plus we had a busted pipe from the night before so I ended up taking a Snow Day.

Andy and Rylee were stoked to be able to get out and play. Just like driving, I don’t particularly love playing in the snow either, but I do love watching Andy and Ry have a blast and I couldn’t wait to see what Reese would think of her first snow experience.

Our buddy that’s a plumber came out that morning to help fix our broken pipe and he brought his kids so they could all play together after the pipe was fixed. The big kids had a blast…and yes, I’m including Andy and our buddy Jim in that group. Reese? Well that was a whole different story. Homegirl wanted nothing to do with the snow. She had more fun watching the big kids from the window.

Oh well, Maybe next year.

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Then the entire next week was super cold and all schools in the area were cancelled…for the entire week.