New Year

After a wonderful Christmas (though a holiday I have to say I'm a bit happy to see the backside of - it's always a bit stressful to get everything and everyone together) it's that time I simply cannot avoid, being the goal maker (though I haven't yet quite hit "keeper") that I am.

New Year Goals (Can I ever NOT do this?):

Eat less (and better) and move more

• Try to introduce daily exercise into my life once more
• Try to eat "clean" and have a lot less sugar in my house in and in my body
• Try to work on planning ahead and prepping meals to make our eating a bit easier
• Maybe take up a new "sport" like snowshoeing or cross-country skiing

Organize and purge the ridiculous amount of kids' toys and baby clothes I have in our basement closet and attic

• Wash and properly store all of E.'s old baby clothes
• Properly store all of M.'s outgrown clothing, give away/return some that we were given on loan
• Make a final purge of the toys upstairs and donate/throw away what we don't want/need
• Properly store the toys we're going to hang on to
• Start a toy rotation program and create some "rainy day" bags and busy bags for the kids

 Write more!

• I would like to blog more...
• But more than that I'd like to write more fiction (many moons ago that is all I did, and I miss it quite a lot)

Read more!

• This is the easiest - crack open some more books!
• I want more poetry in my life, but I somehow have a huge problem picking up a book of poetry; maybe I need to find a website or something that will send a poem to my inbox on a daily basis? (Update: poets.org does this, so yay!)

What are your goals (or resolutions) this year?

Things I Learned in Kindergarten

The months before Kindergarten were a struggle for me and my daughter. It's easy to be deceived by her similar appearance to me and penchant for big words and dramatics. It's easy for me to be tricked into thinking, She's just like me. Oh, but she is not. She is so, so different. And it was in the forgetting of that which caused a great deal of strife in that nerve-wracking and tumultuous time before school started.

Before Kindergarten, I would constantly ask myself (or even aloud), "Why is she doing that?" And the behavior I just couldn't make sense of would frequently be framed in a negative light, no matter how I tried to be positive.

Things are different now, after a few months of school, watching her in her classroom as I volunteer, seeing other children, talking to other parents, newbs like me and old parenting veterans, and speaking with her teacher, someone young, enthusiastic, and with a fresh eye on my kiddo that I don't easily have access to. 

That stubbornness? Independence. She doesn't need anyone's help, not mine, not yours, not that random kid who thinks he knows it all. That callousness? Well, it's not that she doesn't care, because to see her with her classmates, she does. She helps those in need with gentle reminders and doesn't tattle. But she's not beholden to anyone. She's not here to please and she wants to be happy. She hasn't yet, and I hope she never will, fallen into that horrible female trap of needing to please. She'll be nice, she's going to help the needy, but she'll be damned if she's going to change her life to make you  feel better.

We're different, my little girl and I, but we're different in a way to puzzle pieces are. They're differing shapes allow those pieces to snap together to form a connection and a fuller picture. I will help her find her balance, and she'll help me find mine. Raising a child, raising a daughter, is a long journey for any mother, but the more willing I become to see all her differences for the beautiful things that they are, the ever so slightly easier this all becomes.

Because, in the end, opposites attract.