Tackle It Tuesday #22 - laundry on the line

My favorite part of spring & summer (and a little bit of fall) is hanging clothes on the line. And, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather we've had here on the East coast, that's what I did today.

See, clothes on the line. I love that smell, but of course now I'm sneezing all over the place.

This is what I'm tackling this Tuesday, let's hear what you're tackling, then head on over to 5 Minutes for Mom and see what other Mom's are tackling.

Back to Weight Watchers

Well, I tried to get back on track at the beginning of the year, then I got sick, then my son needed a tonsillectomy, then we had a ton of behavior issues with him at school. Well, now it's my time. I went to WW yesterday, I was up 6 pounds from when I stopped in October. Today is my first day on program, and it's going to be a tough one, we are going out to dinner, which is made even more difficult being a vegetarian. We are heading to Carraba's after taking the little guy to see Monster's vs. Aliens. I already looked up the points for everything, decided on the Taglirini Picchi Pachiu, but at 12 points, I'm only eating half, the other half will give me a day during the week that I don't have to cook!

It's hard for me to focus on me, it always has been, but as a Mom, it's even harder, but if I don't focus on me, I won't be here for my family. It makes me sad that my son even sees me as fat, well having a big belly anyway, and he's only 5. I know he loves me and fat vs thin isn't a big deal, but it made me realize that I'm not being a good example for him, so today, I start. Today I work on me so I can help him.

Celebrate our Earth

Today is Earth Day, it was first celebrated as a national "holiday" in 1970. It's a good day to refocus on what we can do to be good stewards of the Earth. There are simple things like recycle, switch to reusable bags for shopping, recycle, buy organic (or at least local), recycle, buy a reusable drinking bottle, recycle. I know I am kind of a stickler about recycling. I recycle pretty much anything I can, as a household, we always have more recyclables than trash, though I'd really like to cut back on all of that.

This year in honor of Earth Day, we will be, weather permitting, working in our garden. We usually plant a tree or a nice bush, this year we will be putting in a euonymous but I don't know if it will be today. In further effort to be good stewards, we are making a compost pile and a raised garden for vegetables. Inside, we are slowly converting to green cleaners, right now we are using Green Works, Seventh Generation and Method products, but I would like to switch to homemade products which are even better for the environment because of less packaging and shipping costs.

Happy Earth Day! Enjoy the wonderful planet that God gave us to take care of.

Tacke it Tuesday #21 - Prayers for a little boy

Today, my tackle is dedicated to Stellan, a little boy who is undergoing heart surgery today. You can check out http://www.mycharmingkids.net/ to see his story. He was found to have a heart defect in utero, but when he was born, the defect was gone. A couple of weeks ago, he started having SVT attacks, they are performing surgery today.

Today, I tackle prayers, and lots of them for a little boy, his family and his doctors and nurses. God is good!

This is my tackle, head on over to 5 Minutes for Mom to see what other Moms are tackling.

Thank you to my parents

I owe my parents a big apology and a big thank you. I've actually been saying this to them a lot since kid Jedi started preschool. My son is bright, anyone who meets him will tell you that, he loves learning things, he started reading at 4, nothing big, but, well he's observant too, loves to push people to see how far he can go, and this is most apparent in school. While he tests me and his father like any other 5 year old, at preschool, he seems to feel that he only really has to play. I do understand that since he already knows what they are learning (letters, numbers, colors, basic skills), it is a little more difficult for him to be interested in what they are teaching, but why does he insist upon not sitting down for circle time, or any other time where there is down time? I had to pick him up early from school today because he wouldn't sit and do his project, a walrus puppet for the letter "w". Apparently he also took another little boy's fish and crumpled it too, according to him, the other little boy crumpled kid Jedi's nose and tongue, but the teacher didn't see that and he didn't tell her because she was on the phone with me and he didn't want to interrupt. Now, keep in mind I get this call at 11:10 and he's done school at 11:30. What's up with that? Why can't his teachers keep control of one child. I know he can be a handful, but come on, he's been in the same class with the same teachers since September why can't they exert control over him? I never really have any issues with him when anyone else watches him so what is the deal with him and preschool?

I got so upset with his behavior today that I wound up calling his pediatrician to see what I should do. Basically she said that since his behavior is fine at home it's probably not behavioral, but rather a maturity thing for school. He's being evaluated by Child Study Team because of his preschool teacher wanting him to be evaluated and the pediatrician said that that's the best bet for school behavior. She also recommended a sleep study since he wakes up tired even after the 11 - 11.5 hours sleep he gets each night.

So, once again to my parents. Thank you for always loving me and supporting me no matter how unbearable I was and I'm sorry for all the times I was difficult.

Cleaning House, moving on

Well, it's finally starting to get warm this South Jersey Spring and with it comes my desire to clean house, clean out the house and garden. OK, so the last one will have to be another post, really so will the first one. Today I'm talking about cleaning out the house, purging, decluttering, whatever you want to call it. Today I'm talking about a sad rite of passage for a Mom, or at least this Mom. I am cleaning out my maternity clothes and my son's outgrown clothes, and when I say cleaning out, I mean getting rid of anything that I absolutely can't get rid of.

When we had our kid Jedi as he calls himself, we intended to have 2 children, but with me being a SAHM and finances being what they are and the economy basically taking a downturn from the moment I stopped working, gas prices jumped over $0.50 per gallon the week my son was born and continued to escalate from there, well it became apparent that we couldn't afford a second child. Oh, I fought it, I packed away his clothes to hold onto for another one in case we had another boy. Last year I started to slowly, very slowly, release the hold these things had on me. I started to lend the clothes to a friend of mine. As we all know when you lend, you may not get back, or at least not get back in wearable condition. I have to say she did OK with them.

Well, now I'm giving them away. I've been slowly going through the totes to get rid of all the clothes I don't have some bizarre emotional attachment to, and I'm going to finish that up this spring. Today, I was going through my maternity clothes, and this was just as difficult as going through kid Jedi's clothes if not more so since I haven't tackled anything under 18-24 months of his clothes. The church I go to MOPS at, and I've recently started attending services there too, has a maternity closet. Well I have maternity clothes so I was going to give them my tote and 1/2 of maternity clothes, I say going to for 2 reasons, 1 - sad to say there were a couple of outfits I loved so much that I am holding on to for about another year or so just in case God's plans aren't our plans and 2 - we aren't going to MOPS today since my son has a cold. The clothes are packed up to go, I set a couple things aside for one of my friends who is pregnant with her second child, but most of it's going, I kept 3 outfits, a dress, a pair of jeans that I loved, a sweater and a cardigan, and those things I didn't feel right donating, you know lingerie.

It is still going to be a slow, emotional process for me, because I'm still not really ready to admit that kid Jedi will be an only child and, well, it's difficult for me to let go of anything. But the process has started, and like the lady who runs the maternity closet said, my clothes will be in the maternity closet if I ever need to borrow them back.

Wordless Wednesday - I did it all by myself!

Head on over to 5 Minutes for Mom to see more Wordless Wednesday.

Tackle it Tuesday #20 - Photo organization and ordering

Ok, so I finally went scrapbooking for the first time in about 6 months a couple of weeks ago. I am going to an 18 hour, 2 day crop the Friday (6-midnight) and Saturday (10-10) after Mother's Day. Well as such, I need to order some pictures so this week, I will be looking through my tons of pictures from 2007, yes I am 2 years behind and ordering some. I will also be renaming the hundreds of pictures I took from February until now so that I can upload them to Winkflash and save them to a DVD-R for back up.

Spring cleaning is coming too, it would have been this week, but rain kind of makes cleaning windows difficult.

This is what I'm tackling this week, let us know what you are tackling and check out other Mom's tackles at 5 Minutes for Mom.

HELP!! My life is not mine

Ok, so I knew that about 6 years ago when I got pregnant that my life was no longer mine, but the past few weeks have been insane around here. I have had to meet with our school district's Child Study team because my son's preschool teacher doesn't know how to handle him, there's nothing wrong with him, but in doing this, it's making his life easier at preschool. He's above where he should be academically and his preschool teacher admits that, she just doesn't understand why he can't sit during down time. She wanted to tell me that he had ADHD at one point but knows that he can sit and pay attention. It couldn't be that she's teaching these pre-k4's the alphabet and my son is a beginning reader and he's bored with what they are doing. I will admit that my son has an overactive imagination, he has "disappeared friends" and has all sorts of adventures where he's fighting the bad guys or saving someone, but I can control him, he doesn't seem to have a real issue anywhere else, not that he doesn't misbehave elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to be to this extent. We're on vacation this week, next week he has all kinds of activities in school going on, so I will go in and observe him the following week when they have a normal week, but until recently I didn't even feel like I was able to do that.

Anyway, we also spent most of last week making an Easter bonnet for my son, yes an Easter bonnet for a boy. They had an Easter Parade at school on Friday. You can see here what we did for his bonnet.

This week we are cleaning and baking. My sister gave me an Amish Friendship Bread starter which is great but I have no one to give the starters to because there is no school this week and chances are I won't see anyone, so my sister is getting 2 back, one for her and one for her friend that gave it to her and then I have to figure out what to do with the other starter and bread baking day is tomorrow.

Hopefully when we go back to school next week, maybe even by the end of this week, things will calm down and I won't want to pull my hair out every day, oh and maybe my insomnia will go away too.

I so can't wait for summer vacation!

Tackle It Tuesday #19 - Easter Parade

This past Friday, my son had an Easter Parade at his preschool. For this parade, all the children needed to make Easter bonnets out of paper plates. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a non-girly Easter Bonnet? Well, we came up with a boy theme, dinosaurs. It has dinosaurs in plastic Easter eggs and a paper volcano.

Here's my son in his hat:


This is what I tackled this week. Let us know what you've tackled this week and head on over to 5 Minutes for Moms to see what other Mom's are tackling.