Thank you, dear, for getting my best side.

No, really, thanks.

(I found this on the camera sometime Saturday evening. He thinks he's pretty slick, doesn't he? Notice what I'm carrying - Anna Marie's hand, my purse, a tote bag full of makeup and hair stuff, and her bag of costumes. What's he carrying? The camera.)

Anna Marie had her dance recital on Saturday, and I'm just stoked we survived the whole weekend. We had Relay for Life on Friday night, and then this took up our whole Saturday.

Whew.

She was, of course, adorable. More than usual, since I'd purchased some ($9!) sponge rollers in an attempt to coax her stick-straight hair into ringlets. So cute, and yet, so temporary. Despite my best efforts, when she appeared on stage the first time (about an hour after her hair was fixed) they were halfway gone, and by the second appearance (an hour after that) they were merely amber waves.



We had a pretty big crowd with us this year - my mom, my aunt Esther, my two cousins, and my cousin's two-year-old daughter Amelia. I wish I could've gotten some shots of that cutie trying to dance along with the girls onstage, but it was dark, and we were reminded repeatedly "No flash photography!"

Like anyone with any sense would expect a regular flash to reach up there on stage! But I digress.

Her first dance, the ballet, was from The Little Mermaid (Part of That World). I can see so much improvement over last year! The second dance, the tap, was from the musical Jersey Boys, which, if you don't know, is about Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons. Mom and Aunt Esther got a big kick out of that segment, because of all the old music. Anna Marie shook her bottom to a medley of "Stay" and something which escapes me at the moment.

We had Newk's afterwards for dinner, and for those of you not living in the Mid-South, let me describe it: they have pizzas, salads, sandwiches, and soups.

And Coke Zero in the fountain machine. Praise be.

Afterwards, Jason and Anna Marie spent entirely too long in Petco, purchasing a thrice of red-eyed fish of some sort. And I walked around other stores as long as my high-heeled-fabulous-sandaled feet would allow.

And when we got home, I let Jason and Anna Marie walk the dogs. And I stayed to home.

(Oh, don't cry for Jason. I'd walked them that morning, and let him sleep in. And then, Lucky nipped Anna Marie on the arm because she'd touched him while he was barking at the cat next door. Actually, it was more like he scraped her with his teeth.)

(She's fine. Tis only a flesh wound!)

I did go walking with them after church yesterday, but again, I bowed out of the evening walk. How else am I supposed to get some alone time, even if it's just 20 or 30 minutes while they walk around the neighborhood?


And that brings me to today. I'm a bit headachy and dizzy, which I'm sure I can chalk up to my sinuses. I'm so glad this weekend is over, but I feel like I need a day off to recover!

Oh well - it's just a few weeks until July 4. And, by the time I get a day off for that holiday, Anna Marie will be on her way to Oklahoma for camp!

Making plans

Good Saturday morning to you all, Bloglanders!

I hope yours is peaceful and productive.

I'm catching up on my blog reading (on which I was WOEFULLY behind), and drinking coffee, and watching the second season of Picket Fences on Hulu.com (hooray that they finally loaded another season!). Multitasking!

Anna Marie has a Nutcracker performance today. This year, as a first grader, she gets to be a soldier - a good guy! I won't get to see today's show, though, because none of the rest of my family can come so we're going to her next performance on November 16.

(That is, IF we can ever get our rears in gear and buy our tickets! Ooops!)

After I drop her off, I'm going to pick up some pictures that Amanda took yesterday and put in at Sam's for developing, and look something like this:



And then, I'm going to go to Starbucks! And I'm taking a book to read! And I'm going to order some coffee and read my book and pass the time until it's time to pick Anna Marie back up from the theater.

And then, we'll be on our own tonight because Peansaps Catering has a job, and I have NOT volunteered to help - I figure that Anna Marie will be pretty exhausted by the time she finishes the ballet, and we'll just come home and watch movies and veg out.

And then, tomorrow (if nothing rips, breaks, or tears) Anna Marie will be getting baptized! As a parent, there is no greater joy than seeing your child progress in their relationship with God. She's been asking about getting baptized for a while, and tomorrow we're having a baptismal service, so tomorrow is the day.

And I get to go into the pool with her, which I think will help her nerves a great deal.


(That, by the way, is what I meant by "rips, breaks, or tears." I think she'll be fine, although a little nervous about getting up in front of the whole congregation.)

In a few minutes I'll have to get my shower done, so that I can get Anna Marie's shower done, so that I can finagle a way to put her hair in a bun. A bun! Aaaah!

Have a great day, everyone - and I hope that all your plans for today go well.

Didja miss me?

Probably not. It's probably like when I was in college, and my dad called me all the time, and my mom told him to stop, because he wasn't giving me a chance to miss him.

Or, it could've been because of the enormous long distance bills we were running up. But, whatever.

I found my camera! It wasn't in the Jeep after all - I'm ashamed to admit, it was hiding 'neath a pair of capris that were drying on the back of a chair. When I took them off to wear them this morning, voila!

Guess I should keep a little cleaner house, huh?

Anywho - here are the long-awaited Anna Marie's Debut as a Dancing Princess pictures.







And here is the (partial) video of her tap performance. Not the best quality, since it was taken from the back of the theater with my digital camera, but really, $32.50 for a video of the whole nearly two-hour performance? No offense to the other parents, but I really don't want to sit through two hours of your kid to see 10 minutes of mine.



Jolly Holiday from turnermel on Vimeo.

I really wish I'd gotten the ballet performance, because it was pretty hilarious. Her tiara kept falling off, and it was a "partner dance" she did with her friend Abbi. Eight girls trying to dance in tandem while dressed as princesses? Hilarity ensues.

And I hope you've already gone to Amanda's blog to see the after pictures. I wish I could do with my $300 camera what she does with a $25 one from a thrift store!

What a ham!

So, as I said before, Jason did take one for the team and ferry Anna Marie to the hockey game on Thursday night. Here, she's "fueling up" for the performance with a Back Yard Burgers chicken strips meal.

(Hey - it was Thursday, when kids eat free. Think we're going to pass up the promise of a free meal? Think again.)

I don't really know if he "enjoyed" it or not - he's so hard to read. They saw about 10 minutes of the game, and came home. But Little AM informed me when she got up on Friday morning that he had promised they could go to another game (one that wasn't on a school night) and stay the whole time.

Bet he's going to make me take her by myself, just for payback. I'll have to remind him of all the Grizzlies games I've taken her to, sans him.

He did, however, take a short video of the performance. And I do mean short. The song is a VERY edited version of Party Like a Rock Star.


Untitled from turnermel on Vimeo.

I was a little unhappy when I came to pick her up one day and heard that song playing, lest she want to hear the unedited version, but I honestly don't think she's paying that much attention.

I do take comfort that, even if my kid doesn't quite look like she's doing it perfectly, neither does anyone else. Hey, misery (or poor performances) loves company!

I will get to see her perform it, though, in a couple of weeks. She has to go to a nursing home and perform the Sunday after Valentine's Day.

Those folks won't know what hit them.

Pictures from Saturday

Oh, and I guess y'all want to know how AM is feeling today, huh?

Well, she only woke up once last night, and then slept until the alarm went off without coughing, so I thought she was improved. And then the coughing started again and I told her that Jason was taking her to the doctor before she went to school.

"Can't I go next Saturday?" she said.

"No. For one, your doctor isn't open on Saturday. And two, I'm not going through another week of this."

(In hindsight, I guess I should've said that she didn't need to go through another week of coughing.)

So, he got up and took her, and came out with a prescription for a stronger medicine for congestion and drainage, and an antibiotic to help ward off an infection.

For the record, I'm not crazy about willy-nilly antibiotic use, but she's only taken them about three times her whole life, so I'm not feeling too badly about this.

Anyway - we went to the Big Box Retailer at lunch to get them filled. Half an hour later, we went back to the pharmacy to pick them up. Of course they had the Amoxicillin - of course they did. What they did not have, however, was the other medicine - the one she probably needed worse. I have to go back tomorrow at lunch to pick it up.

Hmph.

The doctor did say to keep giving her the last kind of cough medicine we'd bought, Delsym, because it worked pretty well.

Of course, she didn't have a coughing fit the entire time she was at the doctor's office, Jason said, but started as soon as they left.

Figures.

This has been

One of the most trying weekends of my life.

(And I have to get this complaining over with, because someone gave me one of those no-complaining bracelets, and I'm starting tomorrow.)

(Honest.)

It really kinda started on Thursday. When Jason asked me to pick AM up from school because he was at the bank. And, since he is in charge of four different checking accounts, I checked to see which one he was having problems with.

Turns out it was ours.

Turns out that the bank had merged with another one last month, and none of the things that we rely on to keep us informed - email alerts if the account balance drops below a certain amount, and a quickly-updated website - were not working.

Turns out, we had about $500 in overdraft charges.

That's five hundred dollars.

And we only found out because Jason was trying to buy a website template, and his credit card was denied. Apparently the company had detected some fraudulent activity and shut down the account. So, he checked our checking account to see if he had enough to buy the template (he'll recoup the cost from the folks he's building the site for) and, um, no.

He went to the bank, and they forgave almost all of the charges. (By the way, know when we got the notice about the checks that started bouncing on Monday? Yesterday!)

We've been running a bit lean this weekend, to say the least.

And did I mention that the cough that Anna Marie had developed earlier in the week has been progressively getting worse? And that we've changed medications about, oh, three times in a week, and nothing is helping?

And she woke up about 3 a.m. Saturday morning, and no matter what I did, we couldn't calm it down. It took over an hour, and a cup of hot chocolate, to get her back to sleep. She slept propped up on the couch, and I slept in the chair next to her, until a bird woke me up about 6 a.m. and I got back into my bed. I slept another hour, and she slept about an hour past that.

We got her through the Nutcracker. I know, I sound like a bad mom, but she wasn't running a fever, and she'd have been devistated if she'd stayed home. And she didn't cough at all while she was on stage being the cutest mouse you've ever seen.

(My BFF Marcia and her fiance Luke came, and he decided that someone needed to invest in some pest control because there were so many mice running around.)

Jason and Mom left the ballet early to get started on the catering job. I took AM home, and we ate chicken noodle soup and watched High School Musical 2. She fell asleep watching The Wizard of Oz, after I (quite possibly) gave her a bit too much medicine.

She was up three times last night. I thought she was an infant again.

I kept her home from church today. I was going to take her to a minor medical clinic, but it didn't open until 9 a.m. By that time, she wasn't coughing! So, we decided to stay in and have a rest day.

I'm still in my PJs.

She's done pretty well today, but tonight it's kicked back up again. We're trying a new medicine, Delsym, but it isn't helping much. About the only thing that does help is a cough drop, and getting her to keep the thing in her mouth is fighting a losing battle.

If she has another night of coughing, I'm having Jason take her to the doctor in the morning. I know she won't like missing school, and I don't know what the doctor can do for her, but I'm at my wit's end.

I realize that, in the grand scheme of things, a cough you can't fix in your kid isn't the worst thing in the world. But, if it's your kid, it doesn't really matter if it's a cough or something worse - you still want to fix it.

And I'm exhausted, because I've been taking care of her by myself for the past two days. Jason didn't get home until late last night, and today he went to church and then praise team practice, and then to the auction kitchen to clean the pans they'd used last night.

And I promise - I'll be doing less complaining starting tomorrow!

I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille

Ok, so maybe this was a little too close, but you get the general idea.

She is, for the record, against mascara, but for foundation.

And I am for her not wearing makeup and looking this grown up for anything except a stage performance.

We have a celebrity in our midst!

Yes, it's the always-fabulous Hannah Montana!



And this get-up cost me a grand total of $1.

She already had the shirt ($4 from The Childrens Place) and skirt ($5 from The Childrens Place) and the boots ($3 from my favorite local resale shop). The scarf is mine, and all the jewelry is hers.

And we contrived this get-up about 7:00 p.m. last night.

She came home from school and I met her and Jason at home to change her into it, because the dance teacher told them they could come dressed up today. Also in her class: a Barbie cheerleader, a 1920's flapper girl, and a harem girl.

And y'all, as we were driving to the studio, I had a flashback of the whole gypsy-in-church episode from my six-year-old Halloween year. I thought, "What if I misheard the teacher?"

But I didn't mishear.

And it was alright.

And my daughter feels like a million bucks.

Yes, this is Thursday. No, this isn't the Weigh-in.

I just couldn't resist posting this picture.

Her dance stuff finally came in yesterday - leotard, tap shoes (she's wearing them in the picture - high heels!), ballet slippers, and two pair of tights.

Everyone in the class ordered their stuff through the school, which I kind of like, because 1. I don't have to run all over town trying to find stuff, and 2. I don't have to worry that her stuff doesn't look as nice as everyone else's.

Because, yes, I have issues. We've discussed this before.

I asked her to pose, and this is her "star" pose. Literally. She was trying to look like an actual star, with the five points and everything.

Amazing how the prospect of looking like an honest-to-goodness dancer can take a teary-eyed, pouty little girl (upset because her ponytail was a little to the side) and turn her into a star.

Guess who is going to be a mouse this Christmas?

No word yet on whether Aunt Manda can be persuaded to come watch.

Anna Marie had her first dance lesson yesterday - poor thing, not only did their gear not come in so she had to do class in her school clothes, but the air was out in the building!

Her class is half ballet/half tap. And the ballet part is tied to the ballet company in the county just north of here.

And they do The Nutcracker every year.

And Anna Marie is going to be a mouse!

We're pretty excited. She's pretty excited.

Apparently they've assigned all the kids in her level of dance to be mice. Which is OK by me, because it means she can be in the production without having to compete for a part right off the bat.

And now, I've got the "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy" running through my head.

At least it's replaced the High School Musical 2 that was there this morning, thanks to AM.

Yes, I'd like an order of guilt with a side of inadequacy

Make that a large, please.

Man, Amanda is so gonna get mad at me when she reads this.

(Much like I did yesterday, when I found out that she'd been hit in the head with a piece of water ski equipment in a freak accident at her friend's dad's luxurious two story lakefront home, and they, of the great means and probably boat insurance, didn't offer to pay for her, of the no steady job and no insurance, to go to the doctor. But I digress.)

(By the way, she's fine. Small gash to the side of her head. Black eye. Sterile strips instead of stitches, because they were in Alabama when it happened and in no hurry to get back home, and it was 12 hours later when she finally went to the ER.)

But enough about my nearly-blinded sister. Let's talk about ME and MY NEUROSIS.

Anna Marie is signing up for ballet tomorrow. Everyone say "Awww!"

This isn't just a sign up. It's a "Fairy Tale Ball." The girls are supposed to dress up as their "favorite fairy tale characters." Games and activities (and I hope food, since it's from 5-7 p.m.) will commence.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

I thought "Fairy tale character! She can be Little Red Riding Hood! I'll get some red fabric, pin it like a hood that's little and red and riding, and put some muffins in her basket."

Jason said, "Or, she could be a princess. WalMart has some tiaras."

"But every little girl there will be a princess. She will be distinctive."

Amanda came to town to get a haircut today, and show me her battle wounds, and we had lunch and went to said Big Box Retailer to get a yard of red felt.

Then, as I was getting into my car to leave work this afternoon, my phone rang. It was the owner of the dance studio. I'd called a couple of days ago to make a reservation for the Fairy Tale Ball and get the "deets" (i.e., how much bank do I need to bring that night?)

I really wish she'd called, say, five hours earlier. Before I bought the fabric and got Amanda all cuted-out thinking about our LRRH. Because what the nice lady said made me feel awful.

"She just needs to dress up. I'm sure she's got some princess clothes around the house!"

That's when it hit me.

Every little girl there will be a princess. She'll stick out like a sore, red thumb. With a basket.

Let me give a bit of background: when I was about six, my next door neighbor invited me to his church's Halloween party. I dressed up like a Gypsy, since all it entailed was some scarves and a few of my mom's Avon samples, and we weren't exactly well-set financially.

The only problem was, only my neighbor's class (a boy) was dressing up. The girls were all in their Missionettes uniforms (like Girl Scouts, but church-affiliated) and WERE MARCHING INTO THE SANCTUARY FOR A SPECIAL PRESENTATION.

There I stood. In scarves and rouge and clip-on earrings. And there they were, in neat little uniforms. And I had to stand there with them, sticking out like a bejeweled thumb.

The were the informed. The in-the-know. I was utterly humiliated.

Having realized how this game works - that "Fairy Tale" really probably just means "Princess," I've determined to avoid a similar situation with my own child.

I've given in. Jason is going to get his way. I got out her pretty white dress with the big crinoline she wore to her Other Aunt Amanda's wedding. And a crown given to her by one of my aunts. And a pair of dress-up heels she got for her birthday last year.

I hate to think I'm passing my neurosis on to Anna Marie. But I hate more the thought that I knew ahead of time that the girls would be dressed as princesses, and I still sent her in red felt.

I don't know if she'd have noticed or not, but I would have, and that would've meant me putting out some bad vibes. And no one needs that.

She's already probably going to be different enough - one of the practice requirements is that the girls put their hair in a bun, and I don't know if you've seen my kid lately, but without a weave that isn't happening.

I discovered tonight that there's a fine line between "distinctive" and "outcast." And, at this stage of the game, when first impressions are being made on both sides, I'm erring on the side of conformity.

Please don't hate me - I'm just trying to do the best I can to help my kid.