A Little Focus

I've somehow become one of those insane parents who does nutty things like drive their kid an hour for a private tumbling lesson. It's a suuuuuuper long story how I ended up there, but Little Miss Won't Do It Unless She is Perfect has tried my patience enough for me to stalk a coach that knows how to deal with her nonsense. ANYWAY, after a break that made no dang sense, there's a kid back to doing arabians and standing tucks and all that.

And then there's the other kid. Mila is generally my sidekick in all things that involve waiting for Alexis. She's my entertainment and the thing that makes me insane. She had been tagging along for those tumbling lessons and then it happened. The Best Coach Ever was all like, "Y'know, she can jump on the trampolines and I can help her learn how to do a cartwheel" and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh. Now there's two of them doing private lessons. (It's worth noting that the drive an hour thing also equates to WAY CHEAPER THAN ANYTHING IN PITTSBURGH. Yay!)

So back when she's was two or three, Mila did the gymanstics things and loved it. There was just one problem - she kept wandering off. She would be an active participant in class one minute and then five miles away the next (that might be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one). The coach didn't notice she had left two weeks in a row and I called it quits. Mila was cool with it because she decided she wanted to dance anyway, so it all worked out.

But then she got to take a private lesson. And then she COMPLETELY PAID ATTENTION THE ENTIRE TIME OMG. Like, super paid attention. The kid was more focused than I've ever seen. The. Entire. Time. And then she jumped on the trampolines during Alexis' lesson and then practiced all the drills she had learned and basically, I think Mila has figured out how to do the same thing for more than 10 minutes straight? I didn't think she would ever master that skill.

She's still really terrible at cartwheels, but it doesn't matter because the whole thing amounts to an hour and a half of her running and jumping and not driving me insane. And that, my friends, is a win.

Balancing Act

There are literally thousands and blog posts about finding balance and blah, blah, BLAAAAAAAH.

I call BS.

There is no balance. Working full time and having kids means sometimes you miss things and sometimes you screw up and that's that. It just does.

I've been screwing up a lot lately.

I very barely made it to Mila's Christmas show on time. Actually, I was a few minutes late, but it was late within reason. Then I completely screwed up taking the poor kid to see Santa, to the point that we dashed to see him on Christmas Eve only to be told we were five minutes too late and TOO BAD. (Seriously. That particular elf can get bashed in the head with a stocking full of coal because she was beyond rude as she refused to let us walk in. ANYWAY.)

There are a whole bunch of fails ... I could list them for hours. I've spread them across both kids, but Mila has gotten the worst of the deal. I've broken promises big and small.

One of the promises I broke was to build a gingerbread house. While I find their construction to be a form of torture whenever kids are around (they're fun BY MYSELF ... it's not like I have control issue or anything), Mila really wanted to build one and I kept saying we would "tomorrow." The good news is that the kid has no sense of time, so "tomorrow" is an abstract concept that might mean 24 hours or 240 hours. She has no idea.

So, like, "tomorrow" never showed up.

Until Sunday. I have a tendency to visit every store in the tri-state reason following Christmas in search of Christmas trees on clearance, but this time I came across an aisle filled with gingerbread house kits on clearance for 75% off. Meaning, they were like $2. So I bought like five of them. I was going to save them all for next year, but then that little face popped into my space and we ended up building a gingerbread house a full week past New Years.

I think that's technically a fail. We went straight from building it to me sliding it into a trash bag when Mila wasn't looking because we're past the season of staring at dried out sugary foods. And I think I should be embarrassed that we made it that late? Probably?

TOO BAD.

The whole time we were building it, Mila was over-the-moon happy. There was no part of her that cared that we were doing a December activity in January. She got exactly what she wanted and the timing was fine.

So I think maybe this turned into a blog post about finding balance and how it is sort of possible. All you have to do is throw away some rules and it all works out.

Old Souls

In retrospect, it was a "small" Christmas. That's a HUGELY subjective term and all things are relative because if I were to compare it to one of my Christmases when I was a kid? HOOBOY. My kids are so freakin' spoiled. So. Spoiled. That said, I spent all of December annoyed at Alexis and her ridiculously specific list soooooo ... she missed out. She got less things because I was annoyed.

I probably need to make it up to her at some point. It's not her fault she started to treat her Christmas list like an order at a fast food restaurant. I was her order taker and was expected to match her requests exactly, but so were her grandparents and other people who wanted and needed her to be very specific. That's what started her crazy. People asked her to send them links, so she started to handle everything with links.

I happen to be the kind of person who gets a ton of joy out of walking around a store and looking for the perfect treasure. I *love* to put a lot of thought into gifts and carefully pick out something people will like. The thing is that Alexis forgot how good I am at it, particularly when she's the recipient, and the whole thing turned into a collision of annoying. She was all, "I want this exact shirt from Pac-Sun" and I was all, "I could have bought you this AMAZING outfit from a different store that you would have loved more" and blah. It was stupid.

In the midst of the stupid, there was a reminder that Alexis was born at the wrong time. The child should have been born decades sooner. Now there's a record player in her room so she can pretend she was. She has mostly been listening to Elvis and The Beatles, which says so much about her and the age of her soul.

And serves as a great reminder. I'm pretty sure that I got a record player (and a CD player!) for Christmas in 8th grade as well. I spent my hours listening to George Michael rather than Elvis, but still. For as much as my kids are spoiled, we do have a few things in common.