Continual State of Becoming

It's been in the high 90s and low 100s nearly everyday this summer. Which has made me slightly miserable. I'm not a huge fan of summer to begin with, so going through an even hotter summer is not fun at all. We finally have a break in the hot humid weather, which I'm happy about. Yesterday was a beautiful day, in the 70s for the most part. Today it's even cooler out. Dylan and I are both wearing pants with no sweating in sight. I should be really really excited. Except this is one of the rare days that I had outdoor plans, so I'm kinda bummed. But on this rainy, dreary day I figured I'd take a moment to jot down some of my random thoughts... First of all I think I need to admit that I have absolutely no ability to be spontaneous. In fact, the idea of not having every detail planned out way in advanced causes me to panic quite a bit. Today, for instance, I was ready to start calling my friends at like 7am to come up with a Plan B since it looked like o...

I was reading through some of my first blog entries last night when I came across this excerpt that made me chuckle (July 2005 I believe): I just got back from grocery shopping. Which is one of my least favorite things to do. But I'm convinced, especially now that it's summer break and there are more kids being dragged to the store with their mother, that grocery stores must produce some kind of painful ultra-high frequency that only kids can hear. And it must be so painful to have to listen to it that all a kid can do is scream. Not just cry... scream... at the top of their lungs... the entire time they are in the store. Those poor kids, why do parents force them to go through such torture. I read this after taking Dylan for a quick trip to Wegman's. He was so miserable I gave him a lollipop just to keep him quiet and happy for the 10 minutes we were there. If I had only remembered that the source of his discomfort was that high pitch frequency I would have given ...

I wrote a while ago that Dylan didn't like the library. In fact, he screamed whenever we spent more 5 minutes in one. I tried showing him how fun it was to get a stack of books and read them at the library, I also tried taking him to story time a few times, but that NEVER went well once he got old enough to know where he was. It took me a while (longer than I should admit to), but I finally remember something I heard in grad school about how boys typically like nonfiction books more than story books. So a couple weeks ago I tested the theory. I told Dylan we were going to the library to get truck books... he couldn't wait to go. It worked, we got there and he was so excited about getting some books about trucks, that he didn't seem to mind the fact that we were in the library at all. We went back yesterday and got some boat books... I think I hit the jackpot by finding one about aircraft carriers, planes and boats at the same time, work in a few trains and constructi...

I've made it up to the term "cadence" in my dictionary, which means I have conquered the B's! Wahoo! In an attempt to make this task seem more attainable, I've come up with a plan... I'm figuring that if I read 100 pages a month, I can finish in 8 more months. Which means that if I read 10 pages a day at the beginning of the month, I'll make enough of a dent after 10 days that if I feel a need to read something else, I can do it without feeling guilty. And then when the next month comes around, I'm all set to go back to the dictionary. I can do that, 10 pages a day for 10 days is hardly a challenge. Anyway, here are some of my thoughts as I made my way through the B's. One of the longest entries in the B's was for bibliography. I was a little surprised to even see it in there, let alone that it was 4 pages long (the entire continent of Africa had 7 pages). It was mostly just lists of important historical musical bibliographies. I'...

Dylan is potty training. We spent the whole weekend at home so that he'd have easy access to the potty, and he did surprisingly well. I say "surprisingly" only because I was fully dreading the whole experience, so the fact that I only had to clean up a few very small accidents was like a dream in comparison to the nightmare of clean ups I was mentally prepared for. I was in no way planning on potty training at this point. In fact I had decided that I would wait to potty train until Dylan was really ready. In my mind that moment would be when Dylan came up to me and said something along the lines of "mother dearest, I wish to use the toilet now." Well, he didn't quite phrase it that way, but he did tell us a few times that he needed to pee, and then he started asking for diaper changes pretty frequently. So I took that as our cue. He must have been really ready, because aside from a few incidents on day one, he's been mostly accident free. Piece o...