The first day of the rest of my life...

     It's a good thing that each morning is 'the first day of the rest of my life' or I'd be stuck, like Bill Murray [Phil] in Groundhog Day, repeating yesterday unto ages of ages.
     Now, yesterday had it good points. 

     We had gotten a lot of laundry done on Saturday, and I did Joanne's laundry over night, so that was in good order.  

     My first activity of the day?  Trying out Jana Bouc's directions for painting a Dendrobium orchid.  I was rushed, distracted, and lazy, and the result was still satisfying.  [The scan is too dark, too pink and too blue...  but it gives a clue...]

     I finally got the kids' stuffed animal project underway Saturday night.  

          It took me 2 days to get the sewing part of it started because the kids caught me off-guard with their request.  I had to find and alter a pattern so that they could use it and succeed.  On Friday we spent a lot of time trying to make a pattern for a poodle.  In the end I said, "We have to do a bear first, to practice."  Then I 'fixed' the bear pattern -- the original had a bear with no body!  

     Finally, I had a test model (black watch plaid flannel from an old LLBean nightshirt of mine, cut on the diagonal) to put in Diana's hands before she went to sleep on Saturday.  On Sunday morning, I started preparing the to-be-done-by-kids versions.  Diana's bear uses a pair of dark gray corduroy jeans rejected by Nina 3 years ago, and Vika's uses an old CYC polo shirt that I stopped wearing due to an embarrassing yellow stain front and center.  After some experimentation, I decided to applique the eyes, noses and mouths.  Decorative stitching on my machine did not show up well enough, and all other options include objects that Tango's teeth can remove.

     My new car, a red Mazda5, is lovely, and we tested its carrying capacity yesterday afternoon:  2 adults, 2 kids, 2 dogs, 2 DS's, a boatload of painting gear (being prepared for everyone with opposing thumbs to paint), and Joanne's laundry.   

     We went out for a drive, visited Lake Ontario, exercised the dogs on the beach at Charlotte, visited Grandma (Joanne), ordered a Wegmans pizza, took it home and ate it for dinner... 

OK, this is where life gets tough.  

     Diana was demanding but focused and worked on doing the overcast stitching around the seam of her bear.  

     Vika had several set-backs.  
          She doesn't want to practice or learn clarinet any more.  
          She was annoyed that IXL (an on-line math tutorial) thinks she is doing first grade math when she knows she is in fifth grade.  
          She wanted to go back to Russia, to the школа-интернат.  
          Then, when she finally went to bed, she wept sadly, saying, "I'm forgetting all my friends and I'm afraid they will forget me."  I held her until we both fell asleep.

     We have a hard time remembering the huge transitions, the misery, the stress, the loss, the involuntary changes our kids have undergone.  They look like American kids, more or less ;-), and Diana surely sounds like an American kid.  (Vika is still in transition, perhaps made more difficult and lengthy by her speech problems.)  


We think they know and accept the rules here...

But, this morning, part of the litany from Vika: 
          "Why did you choose this school for me?"  ["We didn't; the government did."]  
          "I'mTIRED!!!"  ["We know.  Everyone at school will be really tired today, even the teachers."]  
          "I can't sleep on the bus.  It's too noisy.  Diana is too noisy on the bus."  [Interesting complaint!]  
     Weeping and gnashing of teeth, ours and Vika's, a trip upstairs for her to regroup (as it turned out) and ultimately some hugs and a kid went off to school with her taxi-driver, Papa aka Chuck.

     We're always alert to the possibility that some behavioral uproar of Vika's is related to the gap between her age and her academic achievement level... and to problems with her age peers (ok, 2 years younger than she) due to this gap.  So far, the problems have been minimal, but the second year of school seems to be bringing the gap more into her consciousness.

     Most Monday mornings -- and today is no exception -- I wake up to a house in some-to-great disarray and a to do list that goes on for miles.  It feels like I need to find the pivot point where applying a lever does the most good, but as I wander from room to room, I get so distracted by the sheer number of things to be done that very little actually gets done.

So, clearly, it's a good thing that every morning is the first day of the rest of my life.  Maybe someday, like Bill Murray, I'll get it right!