Mostly Wordless Wednesday: a mural?

This garage is directly across the alley from our garage. We don't know the neighbor very well. She spent the summer repainting it red...and then last month this appeared over a weekend. I'm not sure of its meaning. There's fines for not painting over grafitti, but I guess if you paint your own garage it counts as art. The raccoons are a tad spooky at night.

Parenting perspective

The other day on Facebook I saw the following status:

If you allow your teens to wear pajama pants out in public in any context other than accidental sleep walking, shame on you!

This friend is very into fashion and I figured the post was part jest, so I didn't comment, but is this really a big deal? It is kind of strange that high schoolers are still sporting pajamas since I was doing it about age 13-15, but I think that shows the kids' reasoning behind it. It's those who want to show a non-conformist attitude, even if a bunch of them are doing it in a pack. For me and my friends it started at the end of middle school because we'd wear boxer shorts or pajama pants over our leotards before our dance and gymnastics classes. Then one or two girls wore them to school and soon it was a large group of the girls in drama class wearing boxer shorts and pajama pants to school.

Recently I heard the argument that allowing kids to wear pajamas to school is disrespectful and teaches children to be lazy. It does not prepare them for presenting themselves in the real world. I actually heard this from an old high school friend who used to wear pajama pants and is now a teacher doing quite well in the real world. My parents were huge sticklers for manners, but I never once remember my parents putting up a fight about me wearing pajama pants at school. Maybe it was because my wardrobe was a mix of cute dresses, salvation army vintage finds, and pajama pants. I wanted to be eccentric, retro, and fun all at the same time. They never had to worry about me going out in revealing clothes. I think that would have definitely brought up a struggle. I actually didn't hear anyone judging the silly style until I was way out of it. In my opinion if your kid is going to rebel, it could be a lot worse than pajama pants. Not to say that there weren't kids in pajama pants smoking behind the building, but there were also extremely well-dressed kids doing underage drinking every weekend. In high school kids are trying to find themselves, and I have a hard time believing that styles point to the good kids and bad kids.

Right now I tend to lean to the "pick your battles" parenting, rather then the New York Guiliani "Stop all minor crimes including jaywalking and you'll stop the major ones". I know in hindsight my parents have many things they would have changed while parenting teenagers. The three of us gave them a run for their money with the piercings, questionable parties, schoolwork, boyfriends, religious quests and all sorts of things. I really doubt if I asked them what they would change they'd look back and say "I really wish I didn't let you wear pajama pants." We'll see how I feel when Penelope reaches that age and wants some quirky teenager style. I'll just have to remind myself of this post and ignore any feelings of other parents judging me.

Sleepy girl

You know how I was so nervous about the big girl bed? After seeing Penelope try to climb out of the crib, I was certain we'd hear her walking around the house at all hours of the night. Well, I had no need to worry. For some reason she automatically assumed she shouldn't get out of bed until Chris or I come to get her. At 5:45 every morning we hear "mama, mama, mama, I get down." If we are playing in her room she has no problem getting in and out of her bed, but during naptime and bedtime she knows to stay in bed until we come in the room. Once it started happening I thought "wow, maybe I should have thought to tell her to stay in bed and wait for mommy and daddy. Good thing she figured that one out on her own!"

Here's how she looked the other day during naptime. Dolly is required at all naps and bedtime now. I love pictures of sleeping kids!
Can I tell you the one thing Chris and I dread the most in terms of sleep? It is napping in the car. I know some parents love when their kids nap in the car, but not us. If she falls asleep for 15 minutes or more, the real nap is shot. She took a 20 minute car nap at 11 am this morning and it completely killed any chance of the 2 hour afternoon nap. Cranky cranky girl by bedtime!

But sometimes she expends so much energy early in the day that she can't wait until that afternoon nap.

This picture was taken a couple a weeks ago. Minutes earlier she was twirling around in her tutu and then everything seemed to annoy her. The fact that Cece was sitting on the couch, the music on the tv, her toys getting in her way. So I pulled her into the chair to give her a hug, and she was out like a light. She napped here for over an hour. It was earlier than her usual nap, but okay since she got a nice long snooze. She woke up in a much better mood!

Mostly Wordless Wednesday: SMILE

These were taken a few weeks ago. Penelope now will smile on command when I say "Smile! Say Cheese!"
This is a sort of manic "CHEESE!" face.
Right now Dolly is her best friend. Dolly does everything Penelope does. It is adorable. (Any tips on how to clean Dolly's very matted hair so Penny can brush it again? There are bits of dried oatmeal stuck in it too)

Flirty by Thirty--5K Diva Dash

Left to right-- Jenny, Carly--First time 5Kers

Kelly--experience runner

Me--First time 5Ker in very obviously soaked sweatpants

Jackie Lee (not pictured missed the race due to a cold)-Returning back to running after doing a marathon a few years ago

All great cheerleaders who kept me going the past 10 weeks!

I completed my first 5K. I'm saying first because I really want to do another one minus the snow conditions! I wish I could say I ran the full thing; however, I will be honest and admit that I walked 30 seconds after my 35 minute playlist ended. I couldn't even see the finish line and was so frustrated. But I turned Beyonce back on and started running again to end with a ridiculously slow pace of 13:15 minute/mile. The week before I completed a practice 5K with a 11:30 mile pace, which is still more of a turtle trot then a diva dash, but the idea of running 35 minutes straight had seemed impossible 10 weeks ago.

If any of you want to start running or jogging or plodding in my case...whatever you want to call it, I highly suggest downloading a Couch to 5K podcast. I've tried to start this program about 6 times since high school and never made it past week 2. The way it works is you run a certain amount of time and then walk, each week increasing the amount of running. Doing it with a stopwatch was near to impossible for me, so this time I looked up some podcasts. I never found one that really matched my music tastes, but I found one that had enough songs I knew that kept me going. http://runningintoshape.com/ She lets you know when to start running and walking. Plus, her story is pretty inspirational. She was morbidly obese and through diet and exercise, mainly running, she is slowly losing all of the weight.

I can't say that I love running. There were days where the best part was just making it to the cool down. Some days it did feel empowering during the run. Of course, I almost always felt better afterwards, but I wouldn't call that a "runner's high." I get that high if I do a cheesy jazzercise tape in my living room. Coming from a family of runners who love to talk about running and compete, this whole 10 weeks was sort of a mental barrier for me. As a kid you could always count on me to be dead last in the PE run, which was a joke in our family since my mom was a PE teacher. How embarrassing on school open house nights when she met my PE teachers! I rarely ran the whole distance in PE because I was last even if I ran the entire time. I definitely never broke the 10- minute-mile mark to earn a B. I'm jealous of my mom's current students who use heart rate monitors. It proves for some students a 12- minute-mile really is getting their heart rate up to 200, and then they can improve with that as the baseline.

Maybe things have changed in the past 15 years since many non-athletic people now run. Finishing in the top only seems to matter to the small group of competitive runners. Especially in a 5K race, it's like most people say "yay for exercise! Let's go run a race and get a t-shirt!" That was inspiring on Saturday. We were all there together being crazy people running in the first snow storm of the season. It didn't matter if I was at the back of the pack. So I'm going to sign up for another one with the goal to run the entire way, and then I'll see where I go from there. There's one on New Year's Day that has a really nice fleece lined windbreaker for all runners....hmmmm...is that worth running in 10 degree weather? I might stick to my indoors aerobics videos for the next couple of months and wait for a June race.

Adult Hat: Attempt #1

. Ever since I made Penelope's hat Chris has been saying "where's my hat?! I want one with ear flaps" Making his hat I learned all sorts of new techniques. I knitted those darn ear flaps 3 times and kept messing up when trying to create the brim. Once I got those done it became easy peasy, and a short 3 hours after creating the brim I was speeding along. That is until I didn't read the pattern correctly when I had to shape the top and it ended a tad short...like 2 inches too short...and I'm not advanced enough to figure out how to rip out a bunch of decreasing stitches for 12 rows.

Doesn't it look sort of like a Renaissance Fair knight's hat or something?
It is even worse in the back. His neck would be very cold.

So even though I didn't want a grey hat, it looks like I've got a cute one that fits :)
It might be a while until I feel like tackling those ear flaps again. Chris will probably get his hat in July. (Don't worry, he has about 5 amazing hats his grandma has made him over the years. He'll get through the winter.)

Mostly Wordless Wednesday: the hat

I got her to wear the hat I made. It fits!!

...kind of...