Decorate Your Soul

Sarah came home yesterday with very exciting news. See, Thursday is library day for her first grade class.

“Mommy, guess what? I checked out the dictionary to read!”

Yes, you read that right: THE dictionary.

The girl’s excitement could not be described! She pulled that monster of a book out from the monster of a backpack her dad bought her and happily skipped on over to the floor where she could spread it out and pore over the words, their definitions and the small pictures here and there to help with meaning.

Of course I did what any supportive mom would do: I laughed.

Then, quickly tried to cover it up by generating some encouragement and woo! woo’s! because after all, her dad is sort of on the other side of the fence with the whole nerd title and I’m the happy cheerleader.

Today, she took that oversized hardback in the car with us while we ran some errands and happened across the section toward the back where it lists each state with its nickname. She  proceeded to quiz me on them by saying first, the state, “Ohio” to which of course I was expected to respond with the assigned nickname,  ”The Buckeye State.”  Let’s just say, I know about five out of fifty off the top of my head and the ones I THOUGHT were gimmes, were seriously missed.

For example, Idaho is not “The Potato State.” She did get a good laugh out of that one, though.

And if you think she was done seeing if I was smarter than a fifth grader, she wasn’t. And I’m not. She began to read off the list, the last 42 presidents of the United States (G.W. and President Obama were not listed). Maybe the most embarassing conversation that I’ve had to date:

Sarah: Mom, who was the president before Grover Cleveland?

Susie: Hmm… I’m not sure.

(I should point out here that after some investigating, I could have had one of two answers since G. Cleveland was president twice) (but I didn’t have Google on hand while I was driving)

Sarah: C’mon, Mom, you should know this stuff.

Susie (thinking someone that wore a wig): Which century was he president in?

Sarah: Moooo’ooom! Didn’t you have to memorize this when you were little?

Susie (thinking to myself: I’m not sure, did I?)

…

Let’s face it, nerds breed nerds. The girl has Andy’s genes! It makes me laugh that she is so excited about the dictionary, but in all honesty, I’m so proud of her  and she encourages ME to be a better reader, to seek answers to questions and be excited to learn! Love this girlie.

The girls made out in the candy department after some trick-or-treating around the neighborhood on Halloween night. We live in the best neighborhood for this kind of stuff with about 1,200 other families (give or take a few hundred more?). I’ve been done with their costumes for over a week, thankfully they had a costume party to go to last week, so they were finished in time for the big day.

Sarah wanted to be many things, but she settled on a Bumblebee Princess. I wanted to tell her that there was one queen an the rest were workers, but surely that would have burst her bubble. So. Here it is, the too-small costume arrived and she had to wear leggings to make up for wear the dress wasn’t (but was supposed to) cover:

Ashleigh requested to be a red bird in a nest. The only red bird I could think of was a cardinal and if you google so many times certain key words, you’re bound to come up with something that looks like this (although the tutu as nest totally came out of a brainstorm I had with my friend Tracy, tutu extraordinaire!)

I only 12% care that you may not be able to tell that she is sitting in a nest, because you know what? That was one happy little cardinal! I wish I had gotten video of her flying around, it was adorable!

Since Lauren was the only one I could convince to be this darling friendly witch I caught sight of last year while perusing post-Halloween blogs, she flew solo on this idea, even though I very much all wanted them to be matchy-matchy. Alas. Don’t Halloween costumes let us express our freedom of wanting to be whatever we want to be for one day of the year (within reason) (and doesn’t fall into the list of things-my-parents-have-on-the-no-no-list?)? I loved putting this costume together most. Probably because  secretly, I wanted to be the friendly witch, but knew I couldn’t pull it off.

Just before we set out for the hunt, I thought it might be a good idea to get a shot of Andy and myself all bundled up for our moms… after all,  this isn’t a Southern California Halloween by any means… 50 degrees is chilly!

photo by Sarah

I will post pictures from Trick or Treating soon, but thanks to all that inquired about the girls costumes- I was really excited to see the girls wearing the handmade ones. And if a toddler out there needs a Princess Bee costume, Sarah will be happy to pass along hers!