Dancing, blankets

Henry is embroiled in PTA-sponsored dance week. Last year, he detested it more by the day, and refused to go to the Thursday evening school dance, only redeemed at the end by the robot/monster dance day on Friday. It still makes me laugh. This year, we only made it one day before he started feeling oppressed by the dance instruction. Kevin tried to illuminate some silver linings, and Henry was not taking it: “You have to do the steps exactly like they show you. There are some parts that I like but, SAD, I know at the end of the week we’ll have to do all of the dance moves together so even the parts I like will be mixed in with all the rest of the dancing.” Poor kid. Dancing = glass utterly half-empty. On the plus side, this year’s dance is on Friday night, and will include glow sticks, which was enough to overcome all of Henry’s skepticism. On the minus side we fly out EARLY for San Francisco on Sat AM and Friday was going to be our team packing time. A pity Kevin showed Henry the PTA mail about the glow sticks, it seems like one of those things that could have passed so well unnoticed… :-/

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Claire is in the middle of some major unnamed ailment that involves staying awake from 10pm-2:30 am each day. She’s said several times that the back of her knees hurt (growing pains??), along with her head, neck, eyes, middle of her head, hands, thumb, etc. Maybe they all do, or (I suspect) maybe she’s facing some existential angst or day-to-day worry that she can’t explain and is driving her nuts. Tylenol didn’t help; hugging her to sleep in my bed did (but then I had a three and a half year old sleeping on top of me in my bed. nongoal.) I’m trying to be patient, but the stakes are stacked against me when she can’t sleep (and wakes me up 5x per hour), and in the morning I’m faced with mutual exhaustion, all the whining, and deep maternal guilt for shipping her off to daycare in such a tired state. My guess is that she’s in the middle of a huge growth spurt (she outgrew her shoes 3 weeks ago, so she might be due) and a brain spurt (one of the 3.5 year ones) simultaneously, and it’s wreaking havoc on her systems/resilient emotions, and she’s also struggling with new ego-unbalancing awareness.

Anyway, she was telling me about her day at school, and mentioned that Ms. Holly let her keep her blanket because her knee was hurting, and she put her blanket on the right way and! –wide eyes– Her knee didn’t hurt!! I had the sort of magic blanket that helped, too. I do love her “laying on of blanket” as a real remedy to fix aches. 🙂 She’s a good kid. We’ll keep her even if it means never sleeping again.

Lemon tree

My parents gave me a gift certificate for a lemon tree and planter for Christmas. Molbaks had a sale (so convenient!!) for 25% off indoor plants and planters this weekend! So off I went, and came home with a meyer lemon and the prettiest pot that both matches and jazzes up our walls.

The pot is a lovely green, with metallic speckles.

It’s very hard to photograph the color, and impossible when it’s so dark out – it looks very different in each kind of light (grey, sun, night/electric) and is very glossy.

Thanks to the sale there was quite a bit extra, so I got new Calathea plants for our bedside tables. They’re supposed to tolerate low light (but maybe not quite so low as our bedroom in January in a rainy spell?) – I have them in the kitchen window for the moment until things are a bit brighter. They’re very pretty and have a lot of personality, raising and lowering their leaves.

The prayer plant from our bathroom is taking a Dec/Jan jaunt into brighter climes as well. It’s so much happier and has started leafing out. It’s so *cheerful* in the corner of the kitchen window, it makes me happy to see it there.