Seriously a VERY VERY BIG Deal. Promise.

Sometimes I wonder if we're handling this whole Our Kid is So Shy that She Would Rather Swim in Battery Acid than Talk to a Stranger thing the right way. I see other kids who are equally appalled by the thought of making eye contact with random people and how their parents are handling it and wonder, "Are we doing enough?" or "Are we doing too much?"

Sometimes I see yelling and I know we're on the right side of that fence. The grass over there with the yellers may appear green, but there's doggy land mines all over the place and it's going to get real stinky over there eventually. I know that yelling at Alexis when she refuses to participate in a group activity will just make matters worse. And THANK GOODNESS I know that because when I see people doing it, I wonder if they realize that they look like a douchebag. Um, hello? If you're yelling at your kid for having a real phobia, you're doing it because you are embarrassed. The kid is fine. It's sometimes really, really, really hard to keep the temper contained when all you want is your kid to quit crying and DO SOMETHING, but it's doable.

Anyway.

During Alexis' birthday party, I worried we weren't doing enough when she ran off to hide during the piñata festivities. I thought maybe I should track her down. I thought maybe I should try to convince her to come hang out with everybody else. I thought maybe I should at least make it appear that I cared that she wasn't around. Mr. Husband and I have agreed to ignore it completely when she turns all anti-social, just so long as she seems OK with her retreat. So, we were ignoring that she was in the family room, and I'm sure some people were wondering where the heck the birthday girl was and why we didn't seem to care.

Oh, we cared all right. Trust me. WE CARED.

And then sometimes I think maybe we're on track. Maybe.

My rule with the shy thing has been that the kid can be shy as much as she wants, just so long as she doesn't cross over to rude. That means she is required to reply when asked a question, she has to use basic manners, and then there's a whole gray/fuzzy area that changes depending on my mood. Consistency, FTW! I actually do try to be consistent, but when some old hag without any teeth and scary purple hair shoves her face in my kid's space and starts asking her 41356324 questions, I kind of have to side with the kid and let her run and hide.

It is what it is.

Tonight we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things to make French toast (because that's what you make when more snow is coming, or so Pittsburghers tell me). As we were checking out, one of the customer service peeps came over and asked if Alexis could have a balloon. The last time we were there and got a balloon, it floated away out in the parking lot and I had the special joy of watching my kid's face melt with disappointment, so I was quick to agree that she was due a balloon. A purple one, please and thank you and you will be my hero if you deliver.

The customer service peep returned bearing a purple balloon, and walked towards Alexis. Alexis looked up and instantly beamed as she realized the purple balloon was headed straight for her. She did a little happy hop as a smile spread to her eyes, cautiously reaching out to take the balloon directly from the stranger. As her finger clutched the balloon's ribbon, she looked directly into the customer service peep's eyes and said, "Thank you!"

And I knew we aren't doing all that bad after all.

 

Wisdom in the Midst of War

If you were to stick a paper cup connected to your ear against walls all over Pittsburgh, you would hear things like, "I'm sick of this snow," and "Shoveling sucks," and several variations containing multiple four-letter words that we'll just pretend I don't know. Heck, you probably won't even need the paper cup. Pittsburghers are whining pretty dang loud about how they don't want to shovel another snowflake, about how the roads are lousy, and how winter needs to be over already.

Not so much at our house.

If you had been listening in yesterday as we began to dig out from two feet of snow, you would have heard Mr. Husband and I fighting over shovels, but in a totally different way. I LOVE to shovel snow. Seriously. Mr. Husband loves to complain about shoveling snow, but he sure does jump out of bed early so he can declare himself the Master of the Shovel.

I wandered outside about an hour and a half after Mr. Husband and was SO TICKED that he didn't leave any snow in the driveway for me to shovel. I'm really not kidding. He had to have worked like a fiend, and I'm sure he did it just to deprive me of fluffy white joy. I had to resort to shoveling a sidewalk that won't even get used to get my fill of snow moving and such.

Of course, there's a reason I like to shovel snow. I like to make stuff with the piles.

But . . . but . . . but! AGAIN, Mr. Husband trumped me. Just as I was starting to make a decent-sized snow mountain with my sidewalk treasures, he went and used a snow mountain left by the street plow to do EXACTLY what I was trying to do. He built a snow cave.

Bah humbug.

I continued on with my quest, thinking that maybe -just maybe- I could gather enough snow into a big pile to make a tunnel connected to a room and maybe connected to another room. It is something that we used to do as kids in North Dakota, and I knew there was no way his Hoosier hiney possessed the skills to top me on that.

Sadly, I couldn't get enough snow gathered into one pile. I had to settle for a single tunnel connected to a single room. Blurgh.

At least Alexis was impressed. I had that much going for me.

While all the battling over Master of the Snow Universe was going on, Alexis was busy playing and playing and playing, right up until she figured out that snow tastes kind of like ice. The kid would consider ice one of the four food groups, if only she could find a way to inject some nutrition into it. So she happily sat in one of her snow caves (or as our neighbor supahmommy calls them--bomb shelters) chowing down on snow. Just as I was thinking that maybe it wasn't such a fantastic idea, Alexis caught my concerned look. She looked up and said, "Don't worry, Momma. I won't eat the yellow snow."

Already the four-year old is wiser than half of the human population. I'm so proud.

How I Spent My Weekend

In case you hadn't noticed, I made a couple of "minor" changes around here over the weekend. And by "minor," I mean I blew the whole thing up and started it from scratch. It looks (mostly) the same from where you're sitting, but I switched blogging platforms and made other significant changes on the back end.

A couple of things that might matter from where you're sitting:

1. I probably broke your RSS feed. It wasn't intentional and I'm still not entirely sure how I screwed that part up, but I did. Sorry! I love you! Please re-subscribe if it doesn't start updating on your old subscription automatically!

2. For now, comments are making you type in your information each time you come here. While that is a major pain in the ass (trust me, I know it is), it should be a temporary situation. I need a little more time to install a better comment system, but I'm not sure when that is going to happen. Brain=KABLOOEY when I started looking at it.

I made the switch for a couple of reasons, and none of them are because there is anything wrong with using Blogger. Blogger is/was a great platform, and you can't beat the price (free!). However, it was a pain in the arse that email addresses weren't always passed through with comments (if I never replied to one of your comments, that was why--I couldn't!), and that many people reported having trouble getting comments to post at all. In other words, the things you have to say do matter to me and I didn't like that I couldn't always convey that to you. Problem solved. (Hopefully.)

For what it's worth, I switched to Squarespace. There are some really good reasons I chose it (and I had been looking at it for several months), but I'm still blaming Mr. Lady for convincing me to jump off the cliff.

If you find anything broken, wonky, or just want to whine that you hate it all, please let me know.