Finding Her Star

We put up the Christmas tree on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Olivia was beside herself with excitement over getting to put on the first ornament.

Alyssa was too busy playing a game on the computer to get too excited but once I pulled her away from electronic devices, she participated pretty well.

All was well as we strung lights, hung bulbs and snowflakes but toward the end of the evening, we still hadn’t found our star.

Olivia couldn’t stand it. Where was the star? What about the star? Why hadn’t we found the star yet and put it on the tree?

I have five boxes of Christmas decorations. FIVE. I know, it’s ridiculous. I was lucky that the first one I opened contained the ornaments for the tree.

But it took me several days (you know, what with having to leave the house for work and all) to go through the rest of the boxes.

And of course the star was in the fifth box. Of course it was.

But all is well in Miss Olivia’s world. The star has been placed on top of the tree and Christmas can commence.

Yawn

Olivia had her Christmas program last night at school. Tom had to be away from home around the time the girls would have gotten off the bus, so they got off at my mom’s instead.

When I arrived to pick up the girls, my mom informed Olivia, “Livie, if I thought you’d actually sing at your program, I’d come and watch you.”

Olivia smiled at her and said, “I’m not going to sing, Gram.”

And she didn’t. She stood there on the risers, a fellow first-grader on her right and a second-grader on her left. She didn’t make a single movement to any of the songs, her lips didn’t even pretend to move along with the lyrics. She stood there and I think she might have even yawned once.

It was sort of hilarious.

But then it got kind of sad when we got home. See, several kids in each of the grades (grades one through four performed) were selected to come down from the risers to sing into the microphone.

When we got home, Olivia asked if we still had an old microphone Tom picked up at an auction (seriously, I think almost everything in our house is something Tom picked up at an auction…)

She wanted it brought up from the basement so she could sing into it.

My girl wants to be more outgoing. She wants to be the kid picked to do a solo but we all know that even if the music teacher had chosen her, she wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to actually sing in front of all those people.

I was that shy kid too. Granted, I didn’t also have 5p- syndrome hampering my goals to be a star but I wanted to be noticed without having to do the actual work it takes to get noticed.

She wants to stand out, she wants to sing into a microphone but only on her terms. And in the end, that’s okay. She’ll work it out, one way or another.

But hey, she rocked her blue dress as she stood on that riser and yawned while all the other kids sang and danced their hearts out.

The Dress

Olivia has a program tonight. She asked me last weekend what she was going to wear to her program. I know. It appears this child is all about fashion. I honestly don’t know where she gets this.

Seriously. I’m not so much about fashion. I just want to wear clothes that don’t pinch or dig or look stupid. You know?

So we went to Kohl’s on Saturday to look at their dresses.

Olivia was trying to describe what she wanted in a dress.

She told me, “I want something with sparkle. What is that thing that hangs from the ceiling and spins and the lights shine on it?”

“A disco ball?” I suggested.

“Yes! I want to look like a disco ball,” she clapped her hands in glee at the idea of finding a dress that resembled a disco ball.

Huh. Okay, then. We looked.

She found a blue dress with a short-sleeved fur-type jacket that is worn over it.

Not quite sparkly like a disco ball, but beautiful enough for my girl.

She decided that the blue dress was IT.

Alyssa tried to talk O into a red dress, you know, since this is a Christmas program. Olivia would hear nothing of it. No. She wanted the blue dress. She also declared that she would wear it with white tights, thank you so much.

Alyssa rolled her eyes and Olivia clapped again when I agreed to buy her the blue dress.

I don’t think the fact that the color of the dress was sort of an “Elsa blue” had anything to do with her wanting that dress, do you?

When It's Not One Thing, It's the Other

Is there some law of nature that says when a child is doing one thing well, they have to do another thing badly?

Seriously, I want to know.

See, here’s the thing…I hesitate to even put this in writing because I know there is something out there just waiting for me to write this out so they can cackle with evil glee and flip a switch that will make things horrible again. But…here goes…Olivia has been sleeping well lately.

Yes, I said it. I wrote it. She has slept through the night, in her own bed, for the last three nights and it has been glorious. Then angels have been singing, the birds chirping and the sun shining brightly every single day that this has happened.

But, perhaps because of that wonderful sleep, her eating habits have gone to hell.

For reals. She’s horrible at breakfast, her lunch comes home half eaten and I have to tie her to her chair in the evenings and force-feed her the dinner I slave over.

Tom is at the end of his rope where breakfast is concerned. He’s just about had it with her. He keeps threatening to make me feed her breakfast, which, no. How is that punishment for her? It’s not, it’s punishment for me because it means I’d have to get up at least twenty minutes earlier so that I could fit everything in if I’m feeding her breakfast as well as showering, getting her dressed, doing her hair, packing her lunch, making sure her backpack is ready, blah blah blah.

No. I’m not doing that and he can’t make me. Even his taunting little comment about, “So you don’t want to feed your daughter?” isn’t going to work. I feed that child every single night. I pack her lunch every single day. I FEED my child. He can feed her too.

So yes, things are tough right now when it comes to Olivia and food.

Basically, she’s being a brat. As soon as we relent and let her be done with whatever meal she’s supposed to be eating, she’ll ask if she can have chocolate.

I know! Obnoxious much? Of course we don’t give her chocolate but that doesn’t motivate her to eat the toast we put in front of her at breakfast, or the grapes I packed for lunch or even the mashed potatoes swimming in butter and gravy for dinner.

I know this is partially due to her age. At eight, she wants more autonomy, she’s pushing the rules and trying to figure out what she can get away with. It’s driving us all crazy.

But hey, she’s sleeping great! If I’m being perfectly honest, I’ll admit that I’ll take the good sleep over the eating any day. Why? Because when she’s sleeping badly, it’s all on me. But the bad eating? That stress is spread out over both me and Tom. And I’m all about equality in a marriage.

Light and Fluffy

I’m not feeling all that light and fluffy today but I’m going to try and fake it until I make it (tm Lauren.)

On the note of light and fluffy, the girls’ school is hosting grandparents/friends days tomorrow and grandparents or friends are invited to the school in the morning to watch some programs, listen to the bands and eat lunch with their hosts.

Olivia can barely contain her excitement over this.

Each evening this week she’s asked if Grandparents Day is the day after the day after tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow or yes, even this morning, she woke up with the words, “Is Grandparents Day tomorrow?”

She’s reminded me at least three times this week to call Gram to remind her about Grandparents Day.

Last night just before she fell asleep, Olivia asked me if she was wearing a dress to school on Friday. “It’s Grandparents Day,” she reminded me.

I told her that I’d laid out an outfit she got from her Auntie Janet for her birthday, the one Olivia insisted on changing into during her birthday party because she loved it so much. She grinned and rolled over to go to sleep.

She so very much into clothes these days. I lay out clothes for the week on Sunday afternoon but at least twice a week, she’ll look at the clothes I’ve put out for her, grimace and ask why I picked such boring clothes. I was still laying out Alyssa’s clothes last year, I kind of thought I had a few more years before I was dealing with two picky fashionistas.

Three Strikes

So this morning I was brushing Olivia’s hair, as I do every morning because and she was telling me that I was killing her, killing her DEAD with all the brushing.

Tom admonished her, “Stop whining!”

I told him, “She can’t. The poor child has three strikes against her. One, she’s a girl. Two, she’s eight years old and three, she’s my child. Whining is just part of her DNA.”

Then I gave him an apologetic smile and continued to kill my child dead with a hairbrush. Then, when her hair was as dead as I could make it, I braided it in the hopes of stalling future killer tangles. I braid it almost every day, though, and so far we haven’t really managed to figure out just the right braid to keep the tangles at bay. Poor kid.

I’ve offered to cut her hair off but she never takes me up on it. Honestly, if she did, I’d hesitate to do it anyway because, well, girls in our family have long hair until they’re old enough to actually take care of their hair themselves, at which point they get to decide what style they want. And that’s that.

So for now, we deal with whining and ‘killing’ each and every morning. You’d think Tom would be used it after all these years. Alas, he’s not and I’m beginning to think he’ll never build up a higher threshold for the whining. I think sometimes it must suck to be him.

Holding Her Back

I occurred to me today that we have not once attempted to teach Olivia to tie her shoes.

She’s eight years old.

Are we holding her back?

Do we, subconsciously, want to keep her helpless and dependent on us?

I want to scream, “No!” in answer to that question but I’m not so sure.

She’s our baby. She likes being the baby and we like having her as the baby.

But are we being fair to her? To us? Probably not.

That makes me sad. I want so much for Olivia. Most of all, I want her to be and do all that she’s capable of being and doing.

And I firmly believe she’s perfectly capable of tying her shoes. Which means we’re holding her back because we haven’t bothered to even try to teach her.

And let’s not even talk about her feeding herself. She’s able to do this. She even actually does it on occasion. But it can take forever for her to eat a meal when she feeds herself and so for the sake of time and less mess, Tom or I tend to feed her more often than not.

This is not helping Olivia develop life skills. It’s not leading to independence. She needs for us to let go, even just a little and let her be eight. Yes, I’m preaching to myself here.

I’m going to try. Tonight we’ll have our first lesson of shoe-tying. It ought to be great fun for all.