Thursday, December 22, 2005

Oh what a feeling!

I am done! The last gift(s) were picked up last night. The kids gifts are wrapped, the Florida gifts have been sent to Florida, the teachers and bosses gifts are given, and I just have a few odds and ends wrapping to do.

I always feel like I spent a small fortune by the time holiday shopping is done. I'm sure many people spend WAY more money than me but it's just like I feel like all I do is spend money.

Tuition meeting

Yesterday was the daycare tuition meeting. The tuition for daycare went up 5% this year (as it pretty much does every year) and suddenly there was anarchy among parents. DH called me in the beginning of the flying parents e-mails and asked if we should get involved. I said "no way" because even if we did, I've been with this daycare for 5 years and they weren't going to change anything anyway.

So yesterday because of all the e-mails going around, Stacey Gibson, the woman that heads up the daycare centers came down to LV and Hopewell to address the parents. Stacey is from NY and has pretty much this attitude...... if you don't like it, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out..... go find some place else to put your kids.

So I went to the meeting yesterday for the shits and giggles of it all and after all the bitching there were like 15 people in the room and I don't know how many on the phone. It was pretty much Stacey saying, this is what it is and this is what I had to do to keep my budget flat and so be it. She had some flip charts of different companies (J&J, Wyeth, etc) and it seems that from a preschool and Kindergarten standpoint, BMS pays the highest tuition. Then I came back to work and being the nosey person I am, I called into the Hopewell meeting to listen to them bitch. They're the ones that were bitching loudest in the first place so I thought their meeting would be more interesting. From what someone said in the room there were like 40 people in the room and the phone was beeping like crazy. There were a lot of people on the phone. Their meeting went pretty much the same as ours with the same questions and Stacey answering them the same way....... if you don't like it, there's the door.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Conferences

I can remember when I was a kid and my parents left me with a babysitter to go to my parent/teacher conferences. That was always the worst day. It was never IF I'd get it trouble, it was always HOW MUCH trouble would I be in. I was glad that the conferences were at night cause I could pretend I was sleeping when they got home. They knew I was pretending and if the report from the teacher was bad enough, they'd wake me up. I was never a good student. Maybe at first I was.

So now I'm on the other side and I had Ryan's first "real" parent/teacher conference for Kindergarten. His teachers showed me his work and all the stuff they assessed him on. They both said he did really well. He loves math and is a really great artist and I should look into art classes. [Yeah, we'll fit that in between soccer, basketball and baseball which he really loves]. He has great social skills and him and his friend Rikhin are pretty inseparable.

The only negative thing they said was that he has a lot to say but he needs to work on raising his hand before he says it instead of calling out.

So all in all he's doing good. Let's hope it stays that way. :-/

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

A Sad Day

Today was a sad day. My best friend of 20 years lost her baby today. She called me the other day and told me that she was having cramping and bleeding. The Dr. told her to rest and stay off her feet. She did listen but there wasn't anything they could do. She was in her 18th week.
Since she was so far along she acutally had to give birth to the baby and also had to have a D&C because the placenta was not coming out.

I thought of her all day long. I wanted to go to the hospital but she didn't want me to come and see her. I was torn on weather to go or not against her protests but I knew she still had to have the baby and I didn't think it was appropriate for me to be there. The baby was a girl and they named her Emma. Michele is a very emotional person so instead of leaving her baby there she is having a service for her on Friday. She feels that some people may think it's morbid but she gave birth to the baby, she has a birth certificiate and a death certificiate and she was a person so she should have a service and be buried. Knowing Michele for as long as I have, I understand that she has to do this and I support her 100%.

I'm sure Emma was given to Michele for a reason and I know Michele is such a strong person that she will in some way use this experience to make herself and her life better.

Goodbye little Emma, it would have been great to know you.

Monday, December 05, 2005

How did R wind up on the worst basketball team?

R had his first basketball practice/game on Saturday and it looks like he has ended up on the worst team ever!

My first clue should have been that his coach never called. I got in touch with the head of the b-ball league before Thanksgiving and asked when we should be receiving a call. He said by that weekend. Well T-giving weekend came and went and no call. So I wrote back to him on Monday.......If the games are starting this Sat. the 3rd, how come I haven't gotten a call. So he wrote back and said that we're on this guy Juan's team and here's the schedule. We should be getting a call from Juan soon. So Juan calls on Wednesday night and leaves a message. I am not prejudice by any means but the guy barely speaks English. Great. R should have a great season trying to understand this guy.

So Saturday comes and we get to the gym at 8:50 like Juan asked and no Juan. The other team coach is there, very organized and greeting people as they walked in. Our coach wasn't there. Finally our coach strolls in at around 9:00 and has a 15 minute meeting with the parents. Jeff went over and apparantly the guy was giving him his background and stuff. This is the first time he's worked with this age group, yada yada. Great, that's what R needs.

Meanwhile, I'm watching the other coach with his team, he sits them all down in a circle, hands out the shirts, splits them up with the 2 (yes 2) assitant coaches) and they start doing drills.

Our team is sitting around waiting for the coach who is working with one kid to get to the other kids on the team (we don't have any assistant coaches). Ryan is watching the other team. Very sad.

Every kid on Ryan's team is either Indian or Spanish. There is one other white boy who just found out about the league a week ago who lives in Plainsboro. The other team was all white boys and girls with kids around the same age as Ryan. Only 6 kids (apparantly out of 9) showed up for our team. Probably because the coach called so late in the week.

So they're supposed to have a half hour of practice and a half hour game with the other team. That turned into a 10 minute game with the other team because our team wasn't ready. And half of the other 50 minutes Ryan spent sitting and watching the other team practice. He's the best one on his team and the other kids need more instruction than he does.

This is going to be a long season. I pray that next week it gets better or I don't know what I'm going to do.

Friday, December 02, 2005

J's Potty Adventure

December 20
FINALLY progress.......... I HOPE! I got a call from daycare today. Jacob went poopy all by himself on the potty. His teachers were so excited. I spoke to him on the phone and got all excited. His teacher Heather told him that if he went poopy they would have a party and she went out and got him Munchkins so he was excited about that. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of this adventure.

December 16
We're doing good on the pee pee but had nothing for the poopy yet. Today was a good and bad day. We had gone to see Mr. Ray. DH didn't come because he wasn't feeling good so I was on my own with the kids. My girlfriend and her DH were with us with their kids so I wasn't totally alone.

Mr. Ray goes on from 6-7 and the entire time I was in the bathroom. J said he had to go potty so we went to the bathroom and he went pee. Then 2 minutes after we sat down he said he had to go again so we went back to the bathroom. Then about 5 minutes later R said he had to go so J said he had to go to so we went again. R went, J didn't. 5 minutes after we sat down again..........see a pattern here...... J said he had to go poopy. Knowing that J never goes poopy on the potty and only goes in his pants, I entertained him and went again to the bathroom. Surprisingly he went poopy on the potty. We did a dance, I had a big smile on my face and we went back to our seat. 3 minutes later...........you guessed it!......... he said he had to go poopy again. Back to the potty we went. He actually went poopy again. So again, I was happy. We did a dance and I said to myself, as annoyed as I am, every time we went to the bathroom he's done something. I wouldn't have been so annoyed but DH wasn't there to switch off so I had to keep getting up and going back and forth to the bathroom myself.

It's about 6:50 and I've spent the entire hour in the bathroom but it's ok. J says that his stomach hurts but I said, well you just went poopy on the potty so I'm sure your stomach will feel better soon now that it's out. Then about 2 minutes later R says that J is under the table. I know what that USUALLY means but I don't think much of it because we JUST got back from the 2nd poopy on the potty. I look under the table and ask him what he's doing. He says "playing".

I sit up at the table and then have a horrible feeling come over me. So I look back under the table and say to J to come out from under the table. He comes out from under the table and says, mommy I have poopy in my pants. WELL, I saw RED. I dragged him back to the potty and found the biggest, mushiest poopy [sorry if I'm grossing you out] ever! I was so disgusted. All the "progress" he just made and he did this. I was so angry. I had a change of clothes with me back at the table but not with me in the bathroom but I was so mad at him I wanted to punish him for what he did so I got what I could out of his pants, which was most of it, and then I told him that he has to sit in the rest of it (which was just a little on the rim of his underwear) on the way home. He seemed to mind at first but then once his pants were up he didn't seem to care. I put his blanket down for him to sit on in the car seat and we drove home. I basically yelled at him the entire way because I couldn't believe he had just done all of that after spending the whole night in the bathroom. If I hadn't spent the entire night in the bathroom and he had just gone in his pants, I really don't think I would have been as mad as I was.

December 5
This was a bad weekend for the potty. Had so much to do so he mainly wore a pull up or a diaper all day both Saturday and Sunday. I put him back in underwear for school (let them deal with it) and thought for sure he'd have a few accidents. Well it's 2:45 and none yet. I'm convinced it's just me :-(


December 2nd
Last weekend we put J in some underwear to try that out again. I figured it was a long weekend over Thanksgiving so we'd give it a try. It suprisingly went ok. So we started sending him to school in underwear. He was dry for 2 days in a row so I went out and bought him some more underwear. He's been doing really great at school. Not one accident yet.

The problem seems to be at home. I don't know what happends but he can go from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm with no accidents but from 5:45 to 8:30 he always has one. It's just at home. I don't understand why. We ask him a million times. He has plenty of opportunity to go and he either pees or goes poop in his underwear at home. I tell the teachers at daycare about this and they're baffled. They tell me that he even asks them to go potty. I guess I have to look at it as we're 80% there. It could be worse.

Birthday over.....

R's birthday is over. No more stressing...... at least not about that. We had the whole family over last night for dinner (chinese ~ R's pick). I don't like Chinese so I had some soup and a piece of cookie pie that DH got from ShopRite.

Did I mention I was making a cookie cake? Yeah, well that got ruined. I'm not a cook or a baker. I made the whole thing from scratch (with R's help). Then I tried to move the stupid thing into something portable before I decorated it and took it to school the next day and I guess it was still a bit hot so the whole thing fell apart. I felt so bad. I was going to re-do it for him but it was so much work that I didn't really want to. R said I didn't have to make another one. Cupcakes would be fine. He's such a nice boy.

The school party was ok. I went there with the cupcakes, they sang to him and they had the cupcakes (which R didn't eat because he doesn't like sweets very much at all) and then they read a story and went outside for a bit. No one mentioned goodie bags so I was happy about that. I thought maybe one of the kids would say something to R but they didn't.