The "Perfect" Storm

Lately, my perfectionist tendencies have been going gangbusters, which is making the lives of my family absolutely miserable.

Maybe it's a result of the insanely busy schedule we have all been keeping.  As if the start of school and all of its meetings and catch up work on room and curriculum and about 80 bazillion other things aren't enough to try to manage, this year is stacked.  The first couple of weeks of school have coincided with a lot of business trips for Mr. ReddHedd.  When you add that to some extracurricular activities for The Peanut having hyped themselves on steroids just prior to the local Italian Heritage Festival in which she'll be participating this year? 

You end up with one frazzled momma.

Today I'm juggling laundry, class preparations, trying to re-organize my closet area to get better access to my clothes and attempting to somehow come up with a healthy menu plan that isn't too difficult to prepare and that everyone in the family can eat.  Easier said than done if my initial stab is indicative this morning.

Worse, while making breakfast, I kept getting interrupted by The Peanut who was bored and demanding immediate attention and I snapped at her, causing a whole cascade of pouting and discussion about tone and...well, you know how that goes, you feel guilty for losing your temper and that just makes everything worse, doesn't it?

Shake It Out

This song has been stuck in my head since Friday evening.

The Peanut and I survived dance recital week -- the endless driving back and forth to practices, dress rehearsals, costume changes, and painful bobby pins in the bun head because momma just isn't good at hair...all of it.

In the midst of the fray as a dance mom, you lose focus on how potent the impact of the actual performances can be.  But they can be profoundly stirring, and this year's recital was particularly so.

The Peanut has improved dramatically this year.  Her teacher, a wonderful man named Michael Garber, has been fantastic for her in terms of technique and confidence in her own abilities and comfort in her own skin.  It has been a joy to see, as our baby girl is morphing into a more confident little lady before our eyes.  Michael has helped her to see how her own light shines, and she has reveled in that this year.

Where I see the most change, though, is in the girls in the senior level of the dance company.  Their performances were breathtaking, and not just because I knew them a couple of years ago when their performance skills were a little more raw.  Their technique has improved quite a bit, but it is their joy in dancing and their confidence in themselves where things truly open up on the stage this year.

Their performance to Florence and the Machine's "Shake It Out" to open the show the first night made me cry.  I sat there, in my seat, sobbing like a baby.

The piece was choreographed to fully play with their individual gifts as dancers, too, so that you saw their individual and collective joy as they each got a solo bit in and among the ensemble portions, each of them supporting each other so that they all reached higher still.  Knowing each girl as we've watched them grow through the years, it was so wonderfully telling to see how far they have come as dancers in confidence and strength and ability this year.

They were so vibrant and their movements were so alive, it made me long for the days when my limbs had the same ability to lithely leap around the stage.

Those days are long past at this point, but their joy in dancing from the moment you saw them begin onstage was contagious.  You could feel the entire audience sit up straighter and push forward to the edges of their seats as they wanted to get up and dance with them, too.  You could see it in the faces of everyone sitting there.

Including mine, tear tracks down my cheeks and all.

Know Not If It's Dark Outside Or Light

Woke up this morning to a steady, soft rain falling from a gray sky. It is the sort of day that only makes the robins on the lawn happy, while the rest of us try to come up with ways to stay indoors.

My perennials, though, are drinking it in, reaching up toward the heavens with their thirsty roots stretching out below.  If you listen closely, you can almost hear the sound of their "ahhhhhhh" as the liquid life seeps inward and up.

Meanwhile, Roxie, our westie, is laying with her belly toward the heater vent, disgusted by the wetness on her paws and refusing to look at me after her forced trip to the yard this morning.   I am momentarily persona non grata in pooch world.  (Until it is time for lunch, anyway, at which point I'll become the single most exciting person in the history of time.)

The house sits still and silent this morning.  Everyone has gone off into the world and left me sitting here alone with my coffee.

I love Monday mornings for just that reason.  They are an island of silence in an otherwise chaotic, noisy world.

This morning, I can hear the robins calling to one another outside my windows.  And the little song sparrow calling everyone to the morning's feast now that the bird feeder has, mercifully, gotten filled this weekend.  He's perched on the side of the feeder, trilling his little heart out this morning, just on the other side of the glass from me as I sit here typing.

Part of me wants to sit right here for the rest of the day, soaking in the life outside my windows.

More Lessons Learned From Amy

I've been missing Amy a lot lately.  I didn't realize how much until mid-grumpiness over the weekend when it hit me square:  last year, on the 16th of October, we got the devastating news that our sister-in-law had passed away unexpectedly at the age of 38.

Beyond the shock and the grief came the unbearable pain that we would never again get one of her hugs or hear that laugh of hers that warmed you from the inside out.  For a while, it was as though all the light had gone out of our world, and we were left to scuttle along with a flickering candle where our hope had been.

But there were children to tend to and arrangements to manage and, as they say, life goes onward whether we are ready for it to do so or not.

Somehow, somewhere, mercifully the smiles have returned, the days have gotten a little brighter and the memories of Amy no longer carry that knife-sharp pain of loss, but instead are filled with an ever-lessening wistful loss and a whole lot of love and warmth.

We are now a year past that day when we lost her -- that horrible, horrible day -- and I've learned a few more things since my last post on the lessons that Amy taught me in her all-too-brief life. 

Let's start from where we left off:

1) Never go to bed without your spouse knowing how much you love them. Losing Amy was really hard, but knowing that her husband had no doubt in his mind about how solid their love was? Made it ever so slightly easier.

2) Who cares what size you wear, when everyone is really looking at how amazing your heart and mind are.

Little Luxuries

After yesterday's loss of our fifteen-year-old dachshund, P.J., it was a mercy to sink myself into some comfort reading to drown out the sorrow, a few paragraphs at a time.

I turned, as I often do, to an old stand-by, Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

This particular book of essays by Elizabeth David contains some of the finest writing about cooking and life in general that I've ever read, with just the right amount of acerbity to keep it from sinking into some cloying tome about expensive food and beautiful people that far too many other travel and food books become in the wrong hands.

For me, a good book is a necessity when life gets rough:  you can lose yourself and drown out your sorrows in some lovely prose. 

Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there are certain books that I turn to when life gets rocky.  Does everyone else do that, too?

For example, when I'm sick, I will re-read the Harry Potter series, or Julie Andrews' Mandy or Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer (one of my early science fiction favorites, that an uncle of mine lent me when I was about 9 or 10, and it still resonates), or any number of others.

When I'm upset? I tend to turn to Jane Austen. I have probably read her entire collected works a bazillion times during our last three years of loss after loss after loss. Ditto for most of Dickens and a whole lot of detective fiction -- I've been on an Agatha Christie kick of late, but there are so many delicious others, aren't there?

But it isn't just books.

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me

Having one of those days when this particular Linda Ronstadt classic applies.

Case Of The Winter Blahs

It's snowing here...again...this morning, and the landscape matches the gray and dreary sky.

Isn't it amazing how things can get so out of whack so quickly when you get thrown out of your day to day routines?  I know that's true with our house. 

Since I burned my leg, the whole house has gotten out of hand.  Toys and books and magazines are everywhere, and so?

It's a straightening day for me today.

I think I am the only person in the house that really notices, but the clutter has begun to make me bonkers.  It may not be anywhere close to perfect when I get done with whatever I have the energy to do today, but it will at least be better than when I started.

It's the little victories, sometimes, isn't it?

But before I go to tackle the chaos, I wanted to leave all of you with something of beauty.  I loved this picture -- the colors are so vivid and full of life, just the antidote I needed for a case of the winter blahs.  Just gorgeous.

And a nice reminder of the days of sunshine just around the corner...

Addicted

I am completely addicted to What Not To Wear.

And I just needed to type that out loud.  Because, frankly, someone needs to save me from my TiVo today.

It's dreary outside, I have a bazillion things on my "to do" list, and I cannot stop watching this show.  I think I need a life makeover...