A tale of a frozen family

So… the offspring was officially accepted into the private Tang Soo do academy.   She’s pretty dang excited about it.   One lesson and she’s already prepared to show me all of the moves.  

 I am vastly aware that I will likely misspell every single one of my attempts at the “correct name” for some of these moves.  But what can I say… I’m a brand new “little dragon” mom!   So… here we go!

 JUNEBEE!

Fighting Stance!

FRONT KICK!

PUNCH!

and I have no idea what this move is… but she ended it with a very authoritative sounding shreek.

And blocking the master…. she is grasshopper!

So there you have it.   The birth of a little dragon.      She is so over the moon in love with Tang Soo Do!

For all that know the offspring… bless her heart… sports is not her thing.   She loves them, but she really lacks the concentration to truly *play* the game.   She DOES have a blast, and that is all that matters!   They just finished their season this last week and she won the “friendship” award.   She consistently was the player that spoke to everyone on the other team (and our team) and the sidelines and the coaches and the butterflies and the clouds! :)   All during the game of course!

Here are some highlights from her last game.

“okay kiddo… see this big white ball… keep your eye on it… umkay???”

Remember?????   Watch the ball…. ummkay????

Ohhhhh… you mean THAT ball?????? OKAY!

HOLY SMOKES!!!!   SHE KICKED IT!!!!

And they’re off!  Notice the facial expression… LOL

And they SCORE!!!!  The cheerleader emerges.

She fights for the ball…

but decides that she’d rather be an airplane….

Still wants to be an airplane… afterall, soccer is over rated.

and still……. an airplane.   “What was it that I was suppose to watch again??”

Of course, you can’t have a soccer game, without sharing the love with your team mates!

And of course, you must do the “good job”

So… that ends our soccer season.   I have to say… there is nothing cuter than 4 year old soccer.   Well… I shouldn’t say that, because we are on to karate and hockey next

I don’t want to say it too loudly, for fear of jinxing myself, but holy moly…. it’s GORGEOUS today!!!!  For the last month or so it hasn’t been warmer than 60, at the very most.   I am discovering, since moving to south central Alaska that the summers just don’t get warm like they did in Fairbanks.   While Fairbanks may have -60 in the winter, it always had a spell of 90 or so in the summer as well.  I MISS THE HEAT!   But I digress.

Today is beautifully sunny and at 10am it was already 62 degrees!  I bet we might see 70 today (crossing fingers).

I begged the offspring to get up, get dressed and GET OUTSIDE!!!!   Of course, she can’t do anything without me taking pictures… so here we go:

I am astutely aware that it’s a good thing that we’ve got a new health insurance plan.  I have a feeling it may come in handy.  You see, she has the guts to be a dare devil, she just doesn’t necessarily have the skill that is required.   I see many ER visits in our future.

And I will say, that soccer has really helped with her ability run and not fall down every other step LOL

She runs like the WILD!  Breaking the speed of sound!

Mooooooommmmmmmmmmmmm are you taking my picture??????

In that case…. here…. let me cheese for you!

Okay, enough with the cheese… back to warrior rockwall princess!

It’s such a nice day that even the Franklin… who is painfully acclimated to antarctic temperatures thinks it’s TOO HOT!

I giggle at this picture because he reminds me of those cartoon animals that have the enormous heads and tiny body.   But then again, he does have a giant head. LOL!

Well, as boring as this entry may be…. it is entirely too gorgeous to spend another moment at this keyboard (although it does rock that I can sit on the deck as I type this!) I’m outta here to go endure a soccer tournament with the offspring, in which I’m sure she will kick my butt!  

Everyone enjoy your day!!!!

Yes, yes, I know… for those of you ready to lecture me.  I’m insanely behind in my blogging.   Since quitting work, and trying to readjust my daily schedule to help hubster as much as I can with the business, and keep the offspring from burning down the house, and trying to keep the house from being at condemned status, I find I’m not here much.  I AM working on that!

At any rate…..

The offspring graduated from preschool *sniff* but not in the normal sense.  You see, she misses the age cut off to start kindergarten.  She also misses the age cutoff for testing in (by 20 days) but because she’s a bit ahead of the curve adademically, she also can’t return to preschool next year.   She’s already bored to tears with the content…. but I digress.  Where was I???

Oh yeah, so she didn’t graduate in the traditional sense, like her classmates.  They will be going to kindergarten next year, and she will be home schooled.

Here she is with her best friend, before the ceremony.

And the entire graduating class.

The whole class sang the “graduation song”  which translates to “I’m not sure WHAT that song was… but it was so stinking CUTE!”

And finally… her walk… to get her bag of graduation goodies.   *sniff* my baby is growing up!

psssst…. did anyone notice she’s wearing a DRESS??????

As many of you know, Em is a hockey freak.   She is OBSESSED with all things hockey.   I’m going to assume that not all four year olds can tell you every single NHL team in existence, which city and state they play in and for many teams, she also knows the goalies.   Which quantifies my “OBSESSED” comment!

Well, yesterday it was a beautiful spring day and she was outside playing hockey with her playset.   The neighbor kids joined her.  Both of the kids play hockey, so Em was in heaven.   The neighbor girl plays goalie, so she decided that Em should wear some of her gear.   First she brings the helmet.  Em shrieks in delight.

Next they decide she needs to be better protected.  I mean, you never know how hard you can be hit with a tennis ball puck, so they go for the leg pads (they forget the height difference between the girls is a foot or so!).

Em is a FIERCE goalie though… she protects her storage bin goal with all her might!

But I guess they felt she wasn’t protected enough… so they brought MORE pads.

and of course, you can’t have THIS much padding and not have a JERSEY!!!  (I try very hard not to pee my pants every time I see this picture).

But wearing this much gear and so fiercely defending your goal makes you very hot.  So she had to lose the helmet…. she was “too hot”

Back to defending her net till the death.

UH OH…. she starts to topple….

HEEEEELLLLLPPPPPPPPP!!!!!  I’ve fallen and I LITERALLY can’t get up!

It was at this point that she decided that leg pads are completely over rated and she decided she would rather play defenseman.  

The demise of a goalie career…. at least for this afternoon.

This is the first year that the spawn showed remotely any interest in all things “Easter Bunny”. So I figured it was time to pull out all the stops and let her have a blast.

They had a huge egg coloring event at the Elks Lodge. I figured…. “food coloring… being spilled all over… at someplace other than my house???? HECK YEAH!!!!”

The lady at the lodge was soooo awesome with Em. She instructed her how to color them, what to do with the wax pencils, how to mix them, etc.

I’ll admit… at first Em was completely perplexed about what needed to be done. “you want me to do WHAT with the egg???? ”

OHHHHHH okay! I can handle that!

Look mom… I’ve totally got this figured out!

Easter morning arrived and we had to have our own easter egg hunt. Living in Alaska can be a bit of challenge when it comes to easter egg hunts. It’s still a bit chilly, there is still a lot of snow. She was a champ though, and she had a blast!

And then it was back to the Elks lodge for the big Easter egg hunt and the meeting with the Easter bunny!!!!!

Now WHY won’t this child ever look at me when I take a picture of her????

She’s really good at looking straight into the camera when she THINKS you aren’t taking a picture. That is one of the really great things about the new bad boy camera… it takes like a gazillion shots a second, so I can actually CATCH HER looking at the camera

She made a few friends before the big hunt. They formulated their game plan. They were ready to attack! One thing I want to note… you see the girl in the green dress. She’s a full month OLDER than Em. It’s official… my child is a GIANT!

Then they were off. They desecrated the egg field in like TWO SECONDS flat! They all had a fantastic time and Em is now officially (finally) HOOKED on the Easter Bunny!

You learn how creative a 4 year old can get with paint, markers, moon sand and play foam. Don’t ask….

You also learn that your child has an untouched sense of fashion… that may take her places in this lifetime.

You see… I was far too sick to care what she wore during the day. So, I left those choices to her. I was so amazed at what a great clothing choice she made…. I HAD to crawl my sick body from my bed to take a picture. Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang… look out… you have SERIOUS competition!

Do you think I should start composing the application letters for design school now????

Most parents of 4 year old girls are far too aware of all things barbie, or princess or ballerina. These are things of which we’ve not a clue. Our girl loves Power Rangers, and bull riding, and Hockey. She LOVES her some Hockey!

We made a very big mistake originally. Her very first hockey game was an NHL game, between the Montreal Canadians and the Ottawa Senators. AMAZING game… on Montreal’s home turf. The crowd was electric. The game was fantastic. She was HOOKED!

We have a minor league team here in our area, which is owned by the St. Louis Blues. We always talk about going, but the stadium is 60 miles from our house and they are always in the evenings and it just never works out.

Saturday night however…. the stars aligned. Our errands ran late, we were already in town… they had a game that night, so we went.

Em had the time of her life! It really does warm your heart to watch a child absorb the world around them. I love just watching her light up. She had such an amazing time. And of course, I can’t give you a story without a photo montage…. from that bad boy camera that I’m still trying to figure out.

Soooooooo… without further ado!

When we first arrived, the players were warming up. She was immediately infatuated and ran to the closest area to the ice she could get. She stayed there until they left the ice to get ready for the game.

Hmmmm… that big screen up there is really interesting!

I have no idea what she was doing when I snapped this picture, but it still makes me giggle!

OOOOHHHH MAN! The game is getting ready to start! Wow… these guys go all out for a pre-game production!

Pure craziness I tell you!

Now… we had REALLY good seats. But they just weren’t good enough. You see…. we couldn’t physically touch the glass where we were sitting. Thankfully it was a very slow night for attendance (well, that and we were on the dry side of the arena…. and evidently not many people want to watch hockey sober) so Em was able to con daddy into joining her down in the front so she could get a better look.

She was even able to go over to the side lines and get a few high fives from the guys as they left the ice. She was over the moon!

The game was neck and neck all night.

It ended up going into over time and THEN a shoot out. Our team won! WOO HOO

And at the end of the evening, she got to meet #24, Ed Hill. He was a very sweet guy, who humored her with a hug. There were many “grown up” girls that were VERY jealous of the lovin my kiddo was getting LOL.

It’s been three days since the hockey game and she’s STILL talking about every aspect of it. All I can hope is that she doesn’t actually still want to PLAY hockey when she comes of age, because I have no desire to be up at 6am on weekends so my kiddo can get ice time. Nor is she a morning person. I will hope she will keep her enthusiasm at a spectator level

I am sick….

First thing yesterday morning, Em barfed :(  Bless her heart… the first explosion was all over the living room carpet.  She ran with me to the bathroom and I tried to teach her the art of praying to the porcelain god.  She got *most* of it in the toilet LOL   It felt very strange to hold my daughters hair back so she could vomit.  Brings back WAYYYY to many college party memories LOL.

Needless to say… I started feeling horrible yesterday afternoon.  My stomach gurgled all day and I thought for sure I was next.  KNOCK ON WOOD that hasn’t happened, but I do feel like I’ve been run over by a truck and my head is POUNDING.   With a stroke of luck, that new doctor that I made an appointment with to interview… that appointment is tomorrow.  Looks like she can treat me while I get to know her. LOL

Anyway, I’m going to bed!

As you all know, Em’s food allergy list has been cut in half in the last year.    WOOOO FREAKING HOOOOOO!!!! BUT… today, we found something we’d never experienced before.

 As you know.  Today was Valentines day.  So I thought I’d do something special for us (even though we don’t NEED that crap) and I got a cookie decorating kit… it had 4 cookies, with some hearts and sprinkles and frosting to decorate with.  We all decorated our cookies and then we had the 1 left over… so we threw some icing and sprinkles on it and we split it into thirds and ate it.

Everything was fine for about 20 minutes.  In that time I noticed her eczema was flaring and before we knew it, she was LOSING HER MIND.  An emotional outburst I’ve never seen in my life, followed by uncontrollable sobbing.  Crying so hard that she couldn’t control her breathing.  At first in the infantile stages, I thought it was a temper tantrum, but it didn’t take me long to realize this was much more than that.

Hubby and I started scouring the ingredients label trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL was going wrong.  The only thing we could find that she’s not had before (even though she’s had this before) was Red Dye.  She’s had red dye before, but never this heavily concentrated.  I’m not kidding when I say our kiddo freaked the hell out!  I gave her a half dose of benadryl and within 20 minutes she was her old self.

So… from this day forward, it is on the do not feed list.  I’m not rushing her back to the allergist… because bless Em’s heart… she’s a trooper, but her annual testing sucks the life out her and I both.  I refuse to submit her to that hell more than once a year.  So… we’ll avoid it till next go round and then we’ll test for it. 

I just really thought we were on an upward trend.  I’ve read though, it’s not uncommon for allergic kiddos to take some steps backwards through their journey.  It’s not like that crap is any good for us anyway!  If we could just trade that for the carrot allergy… that would be cool.