Tracking Santa - NORAD

This year we will be tracking Santa with the help of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Comand).
NORAD is a bi-national U.S./Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of North America. NORAD provides warning of impending missile and air attacks, safeguards the air sovereignty of North America, and maintains airborne forces for defense against attack. NORAD performs this important mission 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But on Christmas Eve each year, NORAD has one additional mission: Tracking Santa around the world! To learn more about NORAD, go to http://www.norad.mil/

Super Parenting...and What the Rest of Us Are Doing.

On Here and Now with Robin Young this segment caught my attention: "Bad Parenting - Literary critic Steve Almond joins us to discuss a slew of new memoirs in a hot new genre that some are calling “Bad Parenting.” Authors discussed in the segment: Diana Joseph, Robert Wilder, Rebecca Woolf. Find Steve Almond’s essays in the books, “Blindsided by a Diaper” by Dana Bedford Hilmer and “The Book of Dads” by Ben George."

I find myself laughing, thinking and sympathizing with this segment. Fascinating is the subject matter to me, particularly the discussion on where today's culture of "Super Parenting" comes from. Steve Almond talks about how, 40 years ago, parents were surrounded by extended family and were given advice and help by the experienced. Now, in our culture of high achievers and distanced families, parents project this need to be the best and least vulnerable upon ourselves and hold each other to impossibly high standards that may be tearing the fabric of our communities apart.

I hope that, through my honest and direct blog postings and stories I share with everyone I am single handily helping to change this stigma. I hope that my parenting is portrayed as rocky, but filled with good intentions; clueless, but learning; and filled with many emotions, but ultimately cemented by love and humor. Honest and true, it is what it is, a wild and unexpected ride filled with stomach lurching turns and thrill filled descents and climbs. As crazy as it is I wouldn't trade this part of my life for all the money in the world. But I would like more calmer days and less chocolate on the carpet mornings! :)

Where Does The Time Go I Still Wonder...?

It's been so long since I've wrote, I'm not sure where to start! Here's a stream of conscience list of things that come to mind -

• Kate wakes me up most mornings saying "It's a beautiful day Mommy, wake up." She then locks me out of my own room to keep me from trying to crawl back in bed at 6am.
• Ashton blows me kisses when he leaves to go somewhere when I have to stay home.
• Ashton is VERY excited learning about plants/seeds this week at preschool. He rushes outside every morning in his PJs to check on our strawberries to see how they are coming along. He rushes to school to see how their seeds are sprouting.
• Now that we are finally out of the drought our yard and gardens are turning out beautifully! We are growing carrots, lettuce, strawberries, broccoli, peppers and watermelon in a beautiful raised box planter Paul built me one afternoon.
• Every day Ashton asks if it is December yet, eagerly awaiting his 5th birthday.
• Every day Kate asks if it is Angelique's birthday yet, eagerly awaiting the time when we will give her the inflatable pool we bought for her.
• Ashton is trying out small talk on the phone. He says things like "Hows it doing?" and "So.....what are you going?"
• Ashton got a medal today from his 1st extracurricular activity, soccer. He is VERY proud of it and tells me he will wear it every day for everyone to see.
• Kate is a wonderful helper, empyting the dishwasher and doing the laundry with Daddy's help.
• Kate is a tremendous artist and can draw a nearly perfect face and includes eyes, nose, ears, mouth and hair. It's her signature and appears everywhere - on the walls, on papers on my desk, on her toys.
• Kate enjoys painting and I'm currently searching for a gently used kid's easel to put out in the garage for her. Ashton's BIG time into tools and loves to fix things. I'm looking for a gently used workbench for him.
• Blue's Clue's is out, Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob Square Pants are in on tv.
• Hide and Go Seek is the new favorite game to play inside or out and they are actually counting now and taking turns seeking and hiding.
• Ashton is very much into board games and tried to play "Life" the other day with us, pretending to get money and pay money. Kate just likes driving the pink car around the board across the hills making "vroom-vroom" sounds for now.

There is so much more, but that's all I can think of right now! I wish I could freeze this summer in time for eternity...but knowing I can't...will try to enjoy it as much as possible.

My Little Valentines

Each night before Ashton & Kate take a bath, they set a decorated apple juice container outside our front door for "Cupid". While they take a bath, Cupid comes by and deposits some sort of Valentine's Day fodder (chocolate hearts, tiny snow globes with hearts inside, mini-puzzles, etc) into it, but only if they take a bath/brush teeth/put on pjs.

For 4 years I fought Ashton and for 2 Kate on getting into the tub (they have always loved it once they were in it) and now as soon a the last bite of his dinner is chewed Ashton is naked and running the bath water without even a prompting. He always sounds so excited drying off asking Paul each night "Did Cupid come? Did he??"

I guess I could have continued to carry them/threaten them/punish them into doing what I was telling them, but this way has been so much more pleasant! And they have learned about Valentine's Day and filled the dreary cold and dark winter month of January with the warmth of anticipation and excitement of a holiday that is about L-O-V-E and for L-O-V-E.

Next month I will try my best to delight them into noticing signs of spring - think flower buds, seeds sprouting, daffodils appearing to both instill the wonderment of mother nature's passing of time and begin a lifelong appreciation of nature. I feel in the rush-rush-rush of our daily lives, taking time to stop and notice the flowers is paramount and smelling them is a necessity. Oh yes, and, as the red-haired Kate so clearly demonstrates, we'll be sure to squeeze in some talk of leprechauns to discuss our Irish ancestry too...right around March 17! (My great-grandmother is from the County Cork in Ireland...but were Kate gets her leprechaun-ess is another story for another post!)

Seemed Like a Good Idea!

Tried to teach the little ones to ski over the holidays. Two- and four- year olds with waxed boards strapped to the bottom of their feet pointing down a steep snow-covered slope. Yeah...seemed like a good idea at the time. The good news is noone broke ANYTHING! :) (That's Paul's ski next to Kate's ski!)

Check out Grandma Darlene's photos of the excursion: http://ronanddar.shutterfly.com/58

Here are my photos:http://the704reids.shutterfly.com/2991

Sick, Sick, SICK!

I'm in the midst of a nasty chest congestion cough that is wearing me down to a nub. My blog posts, photo updating and video uploading have come to a basic stand still (this may be the last for a while) and I'm not that great with returning phone calls right now. Hopefully I'll be back on my feet again soon. Until then...Happy New Year! 2009 is going to be simplified and streamlined. :)

Christmas-ville USA

We took the kids to McAddenville, NC http://www.mcadenville-christmastown.com/ Tuesday and they both loved it. We've taken them there before, but this was the 1st year they were both aware and in awe. In all the times I've gone to McAddenville, I've never gotten out of my car and walked the town. We did this time and discovered the following:

1. The church in town plays old instrumental Christmas songs from it's bell tower.
2. In front of the church is a nativity scene made of statues perched high on a hill of sand.
3. Judging from all the footprints in the sand, it's ok to walk up to it.
4. There is no baby Jesus in the nativity, (I guess he appears on Christmas day), but we did find the following note: "If you want to see Jesus again, give us $1,000,000 or he will die."
5. There is a path around the lake with all the lights, but it's behind the trees.
6. The light sculpture of the old north wind blowing snow flakes is perched on a flat bed trailer.
7. When you walk along, 1 out of 3 cars will have a passenger that calls out "Merry Christmas" to you. (You get used to it)
8. You can walk the majority of the town in 30 minutes or less.
9. There is one restaurant in town, "The Village Restaurant".
10. Walking around you get the added bonus of "smelling Christmas", most of the lit trees are some kind of pine (Frasier fir maybe?) and smell amazing.
11. The kids loved picking a small branch of one of the pine trees, so they could take Christmas home.

Loved doing it and looking forward to many more visits around this time of year! MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Leading the Way in Technology...Preschoolers and Senior Citizens?!?!?!

Found this article in the NYTimes quite interesting, thought I would share! My 2 and 3 year old kids "visit" with both Grandma's over a webcam and my daugther has even refused a phone call and demanded a computer visit instead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27minicam.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

"Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use, and two demographic groups not usually thought of as high-tech are among the earliest adopters — the nursery school set and their grandparents. According to the AARP, nearly half of American grandparents live more than 200 miles from at least one of their grandchildren, and about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that. Some veterans of the technology fear that the video cam has started to substitute, rather than supplement, actual time together. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives."

53 Plants and Ouch, My Back!

Well, I planted and planted and planted and planted and, did I mention PLANTED, 53 plants for 4 hours this afternoon. I am so excited! I tried to plant everything so that my beds are going to have that beautiful layered filled in look of an established garden instead of that bare, "three holly bushes out front only, sub-division" look. I will try to take some photos tomorrow when it's light out, but I don't think the real difference will be seen until mid-spring/early summer. How lucky to have gotten all these plants for free too! I made sure to share some with three of my neighbors and can't wait to see the whole street full of beautiful black-eyed-susans next summer!

Everything Is Coming Up Hostas?

A great hobby I've picked up over the last few years has been gardening. I really enjoy getting my hands dirty and watching something grow and flourish that I've tended to and watched over. My mother's kind neighbor just donated an entire trunk full of plants to me which I am very excited to get in the ground and try my luck with. All are perennials and seem pretty hardy. Tons of variety including some really interesting succulents, hostas, black-eyed Susan's, lambs ears, etc. The neighbor also instructed me on how to grow cuttings from my prized Anniversary present tree - our Weeping Japanese Cherry.
Wish me luck and I promise some before and after pictures of the yard!

Currently Reading/Watching/Doing

I think this is the least I can do between times when the writing bug hits:

• Currently Reading:
• Growing a Girl: Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong, Spirited Daughter by Dr. Barbara Mackoff (excellent!)
• Taming the Spirited Child: Strategies for Parenting Challenging Children Without Breaking Their Spirits by Michael Popkin, Ph.D. (recommended by Ashton's old Occupational Therapist who we loved)
• From Difficult to Delightful in Just 30 Days: How to Improve the Behavior of Your Spirited Child by Jacob Azerrad, Ph.D
• The EVERYTHING Parent's Guide to the Strong-Willed Child: An authoritative guide to raising a respectful, cooperative and positivve child by Carl E. Pickhardt, Ph.D
  Currently Watching:
• The Painted Veil (Naomi Watts & Edward Norton) - 2007. Just got it from the library, looking forward to checking it out. {No pun intended}
• Flipping Out (Bravo) - The 2nd season just started and I LOVE this show!!!
• So You Think You Can Dance - Kate and Ashton love watching this too!
• The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Ron Howard) - 1963. I can't stop wondering if people really dressed as formally as this move portrays they did back then. I mean, really, kids wore ties to SCHOOL?????!!???
  Currently Doing:
• Gardening - when we first moved in to our house, we had 4 bushes and a Bradford Pear tree. We've since added a monster deck, a Japanese Weeping Cherry, a bed running the entire side of our house that now wraps around to the deck (the 1st set of bushes and plants were scorched and died by the past drought so we replanted with better weather and knowledge in Sept of last year and it's doing MUCH better), flowers and a Japanese maple to the front bed, a bed around the mailbox, a bed around the old tree, not to be confused with the Ol' G, and herbs to the back bed. GO US!
• Parenting - Working on Ashton's listening and following directions and Kate's new found defiance. Also, still no potty training success with Ashton. And really trying to be "in the moment" with the little ones so that I can just enjoy them and not always focus on what's not going well. THIS IS REALLY HARD LATELY.
• Hanging Out - threw a party for Paul's birthday and had "grown up time". I discovered I really miss my old friends and that I've been seculed and feel kinda lonely. So... my old best friend Angi and I have GREAT plans to get together Monday nights for wine and catch up. Wish me luck with implementing and sticking to it!