Quick 5

Why am I surprised by these blustery, winter days?  I grew up here.  This is what it was like.  But I'm still surprised as I lie awake at night, unable to sleep because of the inconsistent noise.  Blech.

1.  Our heart pizza tradition lives on.  It was Bria's first taste of pizza, and she couldn't get enough.  Who needs fancy flowers and restaurant dinners when you can bake a delicious pizza in the shape of a heart at home?

2.  I think the reason I'm shocked by this wind is because we didn't have it last year, so we don't know how the wind is in this house.  Our bedroom in on the northwest corner, which takes the brunt of the wind's fury.  Also, this is our first yard that we have to clean up after windstorms.  Our fence was damaged in the weirdest way.  Our neighbor had a heavy board leaning up against the fence, and the wind made it punch through the less-than-stellar wood.  The have dogs, so we kept the girls inside until it was fixed.  We did lose a slat, but it's fixed good enough for now.  The dogs won't come through and poop in our yard or bite the girls.  That was the most important thing to me.

3.  During this second semester of school, Alaina has had a writing journal that she is supposed to write in twice a week.  She can write whatever she wants; fiction, non-fiction, whatever.  I haven't been able to convince her to write much fiction. Mostly she just writes something about that day.  This is what she wrote the other day:

The story is, I was timing her to see how many jumping jacks she could do in a minute.  In the middle of the exertion, there was one minor incident.  We of course laughed about it and she finished the task.  Then it was time for her writing journal, and she wanted to write this.  I tried to get her to write something else, telling her that her teacher was going to READ this.  She said, "Oh, it'll crack her up!"  So I left her to write what she wanted to write.  For some reason I thought having girls would exempt us from things like fart jokes, but not in this house.

4.  Bria's birthday was a lovely day, because the girls got a huge surprise: Gramma and Aunt Mindy came to visit!  We had been planning this for weeks, making the girls clean up without telling them why and whatnot.  All went according to plan, and they met us at Chick-fil-a for lunch after school.  The girls were pretty excited about getting to eat inside Chick-fil-a, because we never do that, when we walked in to find Gramma and Aunt Mindy waiting for us.  The girls looked surprised and gave them hugs, but I'm still not convinced they really knew what was going on.  About halfway through lunch I told them that they were staying with us for a few days, and Alaina was surprised all over again.  I'm not sure if she just thought they came all this way for lunch or what.  Joya quickly informed Aunt Mindy that she was going to stay in our basement forever.  It's good to have them here.

5.  Yesterday I took Alaina in for an eye exam.  She had apparently failed one at school and they recommended she be seen. Alaina did great.  And the diagnosis is actually worse than we thought.  She has perfect kid vision in one eye and such poor vision in the other that her brain has learned just to not look through that eye.  Of course she'll get glasses, but the doctor said at this point the glasses will only be able to correct her vision to maybe 20/70.  Anyway, it's a start and then in a few months we'll have to start patching to train her brain to look through the bad eye and to correct the vision.  I wasn't upset by the diagnosis at all.  Mostly fascinated, because I watched her take the tests, and it was amazing to see how great she did with one eye and then to cover up the good eye and hear her say "I don't know" to the HUGE letters they were showing her.  The doctor said we could have caught this earlier and started her on glasses earlier which might have prevented the patching, but I didn't know.  They check her eyes at the pediatricians, but nothing like this.  So my PSA for today is this: Take your little ones to a pediatric eye doctor.  They know what to look for and can catch stuff like this.  If we had taken her in any later they might not have been able to correct it.  The earlier the better.  So Joya AND Bria will be seeing the eye doctor on Tuesday.  The thing I'm the saddest about is just that the glasses are going to change Alaina's look so much.  They are cute, but it'll be a big change.  You know how much I love change.  So I'm soaking up this last week of her being glasses-free.
In other news, I'm switching to soft contacts, and I could not be more excited.  No more hard pieces of plastic in my eyes!

Have a lovely weekend friends!  I'm feeling sentimental, so I miss you all.