Scrambled Thoughts

1. I might regret this... 

I got so tired of summer screens and overall laziness in our home that I went to the hardware store, bought an armful of shovels, marked a perfect 15' circle out in our one, lovely, little patch of grass, and told the kids to dig. 

For every two hours of digging they were allowed to spend one hour on screens. All summer long. It worked beautifully and the hope was that by the end of the summer we'd have a trampoline-sized hole that we could fill with... well... a trampoline. It turns out, however, that there's a lot more dirt in a trampoline-sized hole than I would have imagined, plus I hadn't taken into account that it would be over 100 degrees by 8:00 in the morning every single morning. They worked hard, but when the end of summer came, the pit was only 3/4 of the way dug. At that point, my work force went back to school and I climbed down in the pit myself to finish the job.

But after an hour of work, I was hot and sweaty and tired and remembered, wait a minute, this little project never really was about sinking a trampoline, it was about raising kids! I'm not a kid! So, I hopped out of that pit faster than a cheetah and hired a landscaping company to come finish the job. 

Lazy? Or resourceful?

We still have a lot of work to do in terms of landscaping, but it's coming along. 

2. Daddies who do nails are legit awesome.

Did I use that adverb correctly? I'm pretty sure that's how the kids say it these days. Or maybe that was so three years ago... I can't keep up.

Anyway,

3. I may have discovered why Miles isn't progressing in his piano.

I wish I was joking. I came around the corner to see why his playing sounded like... this. 

4. When Maisy doesn't want to come out of her cage, but Eliza wants to play with her:

I hate to break Eliza's heart, but it's entirely possible that Maisy was sitting in her cage to get away from Eliza...

5. I'm not so sure Eliza had a good time in preschool last year.

At the end-of-year ceremony she spent the whole time with a vacant, detached look on her face while the other kids sang their songs and smiled for their mothers.

She did smile once after I caught her eye and mimicked one myself... but then went right back to that safe place in her head.

Her teacher got up and said a few words about each child and it was clear to me after listening to her take on Eliza that my real Eliza never showed up for a day of preschool. 

It was a rather unnerving realization.

Of course, the child her teacher described was a piece of my Eliza... the quiet and extremely focused piece. And she mentioned that, on a rare occasion, Eliza would light up with an 'out of the blue' excitement when something sparked her interest.

It broke a little piece of my heart. Rare excitement? Out of the blue? That's not who she is in my world, but watching her there at that end-of-year celebration I couldn't say I was surprised.

Anyway, it was one of the first things that actively set me on a new path to study and understand the brilliant little mind inside this beautiful girl.

And, spoiler alert: that study has already proven rich and informative and life-altering. She is happy at her new preschool and progressing in managing her anxiety, and I can't wait to see where she goes next. But I'll leave all those stories for another post...