Reading Week

This week is Reading Week at school. Today is dress-up-as-a-character-from-book day, so here is cute Megan dressed up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (my favorite childhood fantasy series--I still have all of my books!). She even had a beanie baby to use for Toto.

Funny Things Kids Say

From one of the teachers at the school who recently gave birth:

I walked into my classroom today just as one of my little first graders was coming in from recess. She looked at me and said, "Wow Mrs T. your tummy is tiny now that you threw up your baby."

It was a teeny moment that reminded me of why I love my job.

That made me smile.

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is how much I miss February in Las Vegas. Two of my dearest friends, Kim (front left) and Linda (front right), both share their birthday month with me (maybe that's why we get along so well). We used to have a luncheon every February to celebrate our birthdays and invite a bunch of our girlfriends. It was always something fun to look forward to, and it is probably the thing I miss most about Vegas. All these gals were in my book club too. Great friends, good food, lots of laughs.

Knocking on 40

My 39th birthday is right around the corner, and it hit me the other day that I am almost to a major turning point in my life: the magical, dreaded 4-0. I soon will be crossing over into middle-age wasteland, which I find terribly amusing since I don't feel like I have any wisdom to show for it. I have been reading French Women Don't Get Fat, and was horrified to learn that within 3 years I will be in the "menopausal" age category! Is this really happening?! I feel like someone has hijacked my body and left my psyche back in the 90's. Perhaps writing down my musings on this topic will help me come to grips with it.

While I tease my kids that I was "born a grandma" because I have never been very playful or silly, I still view myself as an emotional ingenue, painfully lacking in maturity. It's depressing to me that while I am greying, wrinkling, and padding my waistline, I haven't made many strides toward garnering meaningful life experience that would bolster my credibility as an "Adult." This incongruity smacked me upside the head a while back when a young mom said to me: "I think you are so classy. I hope I can be like you when I grow up." Ha, ha, ha. She meant it as a compliment, but inside I was dying. This person has three children just like I do. Granted, they are younger than mine by about 10 years, but I didn't view her as being any less knowledgeable as a mother than I. I have continued to lump myself into the "younger mom" category, but evidently, that is no longer my place. Somewhere along the way I have mutated into my mother. That's frightening, but inevitable I suppose.

When I decided to embrace my grey hair and stop dying it a few years ago, I thought I was ready for this. But it is one thing to accept you are old, and quite a different animal to have a cute, perky, post-pubescent 20-something tell you (not in so many words) that you are. In my mind I played out the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes where Evelyn snaps after some teenaged girls had stolen her parking space and smashes her car into their little red VW about six times: “Face it, girls, I’m older and I have more insurance.” I thought I had laid my vanity aside, and yet it has reared its ugly head once again. So much for sophistication.

I'm not sure where I'll go from here. I suspect it is going to take some time to work through these emotions and come to grips with my station in life. I'm glad in many ways to be done with young mothering (especially crying babies, spit-up, and diapers), and hope that this new chapter will have many rewarding experiences to aid in my "ripening." It better, or I'm going to demand a refund. TOWANDA!